You
could see right away why Clark Terry called this
gawky young gent the new Brownie, and it wasn’t just because
his name is Maurice Brown.
On the first number at the Jazz Bakery,
"I Hear a Rhapsody," the sound that came out of the young man’s horn immediately brought to your memory the glorious
golden warmth of an earlier Brownie, the late Clifford Brown –
and that was just for openers.
The elder Brownie’s magnificent singing
phrases were shaped from the clay of bebop, the newly minted
stuff he learned on the streets of Philadelphia before the
classrooms of Berklee School of Music and North Texas State
made it common post-graduate currency.
But
the new Brownie, who came up in Chicago and is
now a New Orleans resident, seldom resorts to the clichés of
the Dizzy Gillespie clones. He uses improvisation on you,
developing melodic fragments with blinding speed into complete
sentences, so to speak, that actually give you something,
something kind and generous.
For that methodology, you have to go back
to such golden hornmen as Roy Eldridge or Sonny Berman – or
Clark Terry, the Duke Ellington stalwart whose protégé Brown
is.
So maybe good old do-it-yourself
creativity, without slavish reliance on the underlying chord
structure, like a secret code, is coming back. The tenor
saxophonist in Brown’s little band, Derek Douget, another New
Orleanian, was in that bag. His solo on "In a Sentimental
Mood" was an understated gem without a trace of any
illustrious predecessors a tender, unadorned sound all his
own.
Plenty of gems were cascading from the
bell of Brown’s trumpet that night in September, 2004, not at
all understated. On the ballads, his phrases were burnished
mini-tunes that you could almost sing, if they weren’t going
by so fast. These goody-bags were delivered in a
conversational tone except that every once in a while, like on
the ending of "Mood," the notes came out hotter than burning
arrows, targeted exactly on pitch. That was electrifying.
Brown and Anthony
Wonsey enjoy the work of Derek Douget.
The
original material was not fully graspable on one
hearing, but it was laden with creative adventure unlike
anything else on deck at the moment, although there was
nothing weird for the sake of being weird. Just lots of open
space and high speed contemplation, with an occasional foray
non-keyward. "Rapture" and "Hip to Bop," from Brown’s new CD
of the latter name, were full of light and shadow, narrative
and drama.
Anthony Wonsey, a pianist skilled at
backing trumpet players such as Nicholas Peyton, took a couple
of interesting solos that showed he was tracking Brown and
Douget; Jason Stewart could have done more on bass and Adonis
Rose, alas, was not the superior drummer we are used to.
All in all, though, the 23-year-old Brown
gave you a salutary evening, a night in the presence of an
artist who is charting his own course and throwing off hints
of a friendly new jazz world to come.
