Marion Brown

[ep1str0phy]

Heavy loss.

I sometimes do wonder why a foregoing 40 or so years of free altos often lack so much personality--what a collection of beautiful oddballs in those first steps: Brown, Tchicai, Logan, Marshall Allen, Jimmy Lyons, Charles Tyler, to say nothing of Ornette... although the arc of Brown's career is kind of a testament to how the now-hallowed trappings of energy music were really just incidental to these amazing stores and certainly not the full picture. He essayed some of the very best music of the post-Coltrane mode (Why Not, Porto Novo, etc.) and went on to invent and reinvent his career in a way that is legitimately mindblowing--running parallel to the AACM in an amazing ethno/free mix (Afternoon of A Georgia Faun, the duets with Wadada, some of the Calig stuff), crafting interesting inside/out modal music (Sweet Earth Flying)... I have to confess that I'm not completely enamored with the last 1/4 or so of his recorded legacy, but that tone is true and the sheer, lovely stasis in his tone never left (which I think may have been the emotional core of his sound). Even if he hasn't really produced in the past couple of decades, there was so much music in the past and so much music clearly still in there--as a part of his person--that the loss is so profound.

Heavy loss.

[jeffcrom]

I'm very sorry to hear this. As an Atlantan, I always loved that Brown's Georgia roots informed so much of his music - the blusiness of "Buttermilk Bottom" (his tribute to a now-defunct Atlanta neighborhood, "Afternoon of a Georgia Faun's" ethereal nostalgia, the country-informed "Sweet Earth Flying." He was a deep thinker, an outstanding composer, and he had an original, distinctive playing/improvising style on alto. So long, Marion.

[John L]

RIP

[B. Goren.]

This is very sad news.

Edit: These CDs will find their way to my CD player today.

Edited October 19, 2010 by B. Goren.

[clifford_thornton]

An interview I did with him in 2005 is posted here. It was kind of challenging to draw things out of him (especially as this was among the first interviews I did), but he was very sweet and quite funny.

[brownie]

That's terribly sad news!

Marion was a very good friend.

He confronted his ordeal in his final years with dignity and courage. It was good to learn that he felt happy - and was very well treated - in the Florida assisted living facility where he moved after facing the health problems that changed his life.

I just hope that the packs of Gauloises Bleues cigarettes that he insisted I send him whenever we spoke on the phone brought him some relief and did not contribute to his passing away...

[JohnS]

Very sad news. A totally individual musician and a big influence on my listening in the sixties.

[brownie]

The Marion Brown Quartet in Lugano in 1967

with Beb Guerin on bass, an unidentified drummer...

probably Jean Fresnay on piano.

Edited October 20, 2010 by brownie

[brownie]

Brief mention in a Washington Post blog...

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/clicktrack/2010/10/rip_jazz_great_marion_brown_ki.html

Actually, Marion died early yesterday according to the assisted living facility where he had retired.

[freejazz2020]

WKCR is having a 24-hour tribute to Marion until about 8:30 tomorrow AM. Man, he will be missed - thanks for all the beautiful music.Marion Brown Memorial Broadcast site

Edited October 19, 2010 by freejazz2020

[clifford_thornton]

Very nice. Annabelle is rocking the Juba-Lee LP right now.

[clifford_thornton]

The Marion Brown Quartet in Lugano in 1967

with Beb Guerin on bass, Han Bennink on drums...

probably Jean Fresnay on piano.

Maybe my eyes and ears are going out, but I could have sworn it was Pierre Favre!

[mjazzg]

Very sad news..

.

Georgia Faun and Sweet Earth are two masterpieces that I'll be playing with mixed emotions now

[Claude Schlouch]

Very nice guy!

I recorded him with his permission here in Marseille with Mal Waldron some years ago. Very great souvenir!

RIP

[AllenLowe]

you know, I was thinking recently how it might be nice to do a real study of '60s Free Jazz, and Brown epitomizes, to me, that music's ups and downs (to steal that Bud Powell title). When he was good he was great, but he's the classic example of no second act in certain creative lives. I love the interview, Cliff.

funny thing is, I forgot that Brown used to pass through New Haven, probably in the late '80s or early '90s, and one night he called me wanting to know about gigs in town.

nice guy.

[king ubu]

Very sad news!

[Caravan]

The Marion Brown Quartet in Lugano in 1967

with Beb Guerin on bass, Han Bennink on drums...

probably Jean Fresnay on piano.

Maybe my eyes and ears are going out, but I could have sworn it was Pierre Favre!

I don't know who it is, but it's definitely NOT Han Bennink.

[clifford_thornton]

There were some 1967 gigs with Eddy Gaumont, but my minimal exposure to him was not as a "free" drummer.

[brownie]

Eddy Gaumont was free and so out that I have no idea what became of him. A most promising drummer who bypassed the reputation that would have been coming to him.

He was Dominique Gaumont's brother. The guitar-playing Dominique who was hired by Miles Davis!

Then who was playing drums in Lugano 1967?

[alocispepraluger102]

Eddy Gaumont was free and so out that I have no idea what became of him. A most promising drummer who bypassed the reputation that would have been coming to him.

He was Dominique Gaumont's brother. The guitar-playing Dominique who was hired by Miles Davis!

Then who was playing drums in Lugano 1967?

the duo recording with mal is one of the most intimate and expressive recordings i have. among others, i escpecially love the beautiful solo extended standards of the 'recollections'.

[Kyo]

Just as the recent remaster of Why Not is finally on its way to me.

[Hardbopjazz]

R.I.P. Marion

[Noj]

At the recommendation of a friend I was just listening to this beautiful album:

RIP

[Guest Bill Barton]

Sigh... Very sad news indeed. I never had the chance to hear him play in performance, but he is one of the very few artists whom I have been absolutely fanatical about attempting to collect everything he recorded. What a unique voice he was! Thank you, Marion Brown, for all of the beautiful music over the years.

[ep1str0phy]

you know, I was thinking recently how it might be nice to do a real study of '60s Free Jazz, and Brown epitomizes, to me, that music's ups and downs (to steal that Bud Powell title). When he was good he was great, but he's the classic example of no second act in certain creative lives. I love the interview, Cliff.

Interesting thought. So many peaks and troughs and hands in all manner of important things (Ascension, Archie's band, ESP-disk, the French and German scenes, interactions with the early AACM/very prescient soundscape/ethno collages, Wesleyan teaching, improv/contemporary music interactions with Elliott Schwartz and Harold Budd...) He also fell into the maybe inevitable post-bop reversion that happened to some of the best free players (though I think he did it with a poise and dignity that can't be reserved for some of his peers). When he was finished playing, he was more or less finished playing. I do think that the spottiness of his catalog is a testament to what is maybe (in hindsight) the most appealing feature of early American free jazz for me, which is a definite sense of "working things out"/apparent difficulties reconciling the urge to freedom with an unwillingness to eschew very overt idiomatic conceits.

I was driving to LA for a show last night, and I was bored to death by everything except for "Music from Big Pink" and "Three for Shepp." A weird combo, but it's telling that both albums tap into this seemingly 60's zeitgeist-y thing about working questions of genre out before anyone can tell you exactly what kind of music you're playing. "Three for Shepp" is for me the best of the his albums in this vein (I may like "Sweet Earth Flying," "Afternoon of a Georgia Faun," and maybe one of the Caligs as much or better), mainly because it's both so clearly "60's FREE JAZZ" (caps) and present in this very liminal idiomatic space (the first track is named "New Blue," for heaven's sake--and totally unironic, in contrast to similar reclamations of material on the part of the near-contemporaneous Europeans). There's some cheeky stride/showtune type stuff, a Rollins-esque calypso, a free ballad that teeters on the brink of the Blue Note school of grainy pastoralism... it's an album that I'd think you'd be proud to make decades after the fact--it still sounds fresh and s**ts on completely nothing.