Donald Brown (musician)
Donald Ray Brown ( born March 28, 1954 in Hernando, DeSoto County, Mississippi) is an American jazz pianist, composer and university teacher.
Life
It was only on the advice of James Williams, the brother turned five piano -playing sisters to play the piano after he had previously played on the baritone horn, trumpet and drums. He attended from 1972 to 1975, the Memphis State University as a music scholarship, played rhythm 'n' blues in Memphis and released in 1981 for a year as a pianist James Williams of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers from. Because of arthritis, he took on in 1983 began teaching at Berklee College of Music with Jerry Coker; He also teaches at the University of Tennessee since 1988, currently as an Associate Professor. Occasionally he recorded with musicians such as Eddie Lockjaw Davis and Freddie Hubbard and played one of her own albums, so Blues Man from Memphis with the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra and Bill Scarlett (2007).
He is a member of the Contemporary Piano Ensemble. In Blakey, he composed and arranged pieces. His pieces were played by Williams, Art Farmer, Donald Byrd, Jon Faddis, Wynton Marsalis, Kenny Garrett and Wallace Roney.
His music
His way to arrange small and large jazz ensembles, influenced, for example, Mulgrew Miller. It can be a hymn -rehearsed Killing me softly with his song by Aretha Franklin show as a piano solo. He is sound in the neighborhood of Phineas Newborn and Harold Mabern. In the title Cartunes his CD of the same sounds, the entire blower package like a piano. His way to arrange for groups is unobtrusive strongly reminiscent of fusion music and is also multi-layered.
His arrangements and compositions are rhythmically driving, fall spontaneously into a swing and change to the style, for example, I Did not Know What Time It Was on " The Sweetest Sounds".
Auswahldiskographie
- Cause and effect, 1991, Muse, with Steve Nelson, James Spaulding and Joe Henderson
- Cartunes, 1995, Muse MCD 5522nd with arrangements for three horns, vibraphone and percussion and vocal humorisistischer contribution of Harold Mabern
- The Sweetest Sounds, 1989, Jazz City, 660 53 008, quartet with vibraphonist Steve Nelson