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  Anthony Brown: Biography
Percussionist,
composer, ethnomusicologist and Guggenheim
Fellow Dr. Anthony Brown is a seminal figure in
the contemporary California creative music scene, directing the
Asian
American Orchestra in addition to performing with some of
the foremost musicians in jazz today.
Since 1998, his Orchestra has received
international critical acclaim for blending Asian musical
instruments and sensibilities with the sonorities of the jazz
orchestra. The orchestra's recording of Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn's
Far East Suite received a 2000 GRAMMY™ nomination for
Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance.
The
late jazz saxophonist
and MacArthur Fellow Steve Lacy joined as guest artist for the
Orchestra’s next recording, Monk's
Moods. Rated as a
"five-star masterpiece" and one of four "Best
CDs of 2003" by Downbeat magazine, the recording
features new interpretations of Thelonious Monk’s
compositions in collaboration with Monk’s original producer,
Orrin Keepnews. Dr. Brown can also be heard on over twenty
other recordings on Asian Improv, Soul Note, Blue Note,
Gramavision, and Hat Art Records.
Anthony
Brown’s musical career, spanning performance,
composition, and education, dates back to the 1970’s. A San
Francisco native of Japanese and African/Native American
descent who grew up around the world as an "Army
brat," Dr. Brown has developed a unique compositional and
performance voice reflective of his own intercultural heritage
and experiences. His work in the early 1980’s with the
pioneering San Francisco-based jazz quartet, United Front,
sparked an interest in blending non-Western compositional
approaches and instruments with traditional jazz idioms and
improvisation that he is still developing today.
Jazz
critic Neil Tesser wrote, "When it comes to
integrating Asian musical traditions with jazz, no one has
better credentials than percussionist and composer Anthony
Brown. Brown even seems to have been born to the task ..."
He grew up in California, Japan and Germany, writing
Bach fugues in high school while penning his first blues
compositions. His father was a thirty-five year career Army
Sergeant Major of African/Choctaw heritage from South
Carolina, and his mother is a native of Tokyo, Japan. While
living in Japan as a preteen, Brown developed an interest in
visual arts, and then began emulating his brother Michael, an
electric guitarist and bassist who later toured with Bo
Diddley. After returning stateside to Los Angeles in 1966,
Brown switched to drums and began playing in Jimi Hendrix/Sly
Stone-influenced bands with then-bassist/vocalist James
Newton. They experimented with jazz in high school before
Brown moved to Frankfurt, Germany in 1970, where he studied
music theory and flute while playing in R&B/progressive
rock dance bands.
Anthony
Brown earned Bachelor degrees in music and
psychology at the University of Oregon, and then lived in
Athens, Greece and Heidelberg, Germany as an Army officer from
1976-80. Captain Brown performed and toured with visiting
artists (flutist) James Newton, John Carter, David Murray, and
with the ensembles Muntu (Billy Bang, William Parker, Jemeel
Moondoc), and Cultural Odyssey (Rasul Siddik, Idris Ackamoor,
Jesse Sharps, Rashied Al Akbar, Joe McKinley). Brown returned
to San Francisco in 1980 and pursued a professional musical
career with United Front, making his recording debut in 1981.
In 1983, Brown received a commission from the San Francisco
Chamber Music Society to compose Incantation Suite, an
extended work for jazz quartet and string trio. A
twenty-minute suite in five movements, Incantation Suite
is prototypically Fifth Stream in its varied conceptual
approaches, structural details and instrumental influences
from Asia and Africa. In 1984, Brown appeared as a guest
artist with the San Francisco Symphony in performance of
Anthony Davis’ Wayang V, and the next year in
his opera, X at the American Music Theatre in
Philadelphia.
In
1985, Brown moved to New York, worked with Newton and
Anthony Davis, Sirone, Mark Helias, Tim Berne, and others in
the nascent downtown scene. He also earned a Masters of Music
degree at Rutgers University in jazz performance, studying
with Ed Blackwell, Kenny Barron, and later with Max Roach and
Dr. Billy Taylor. Brown was awarded a Ford Foundation
Fellowship to earn his doctorate and chose to complete a Ph.D.
in music at UC Berkeley, specializing in ethnomusicology to
research the musics of his cultural heritage. Afterwards, he
began four years of bi-weekly commutes to Washington, DC as
Curator of American Musical Culture and Director of the Jazz
Oral History Program at the Smithsonian Institution.
Successive commissions from the Asian Heritage Council and the
Rockefeller Foundation in 1995-96 cemented Brown’s pursuit
of a career as a composer in addition to a performer and
independent scholar.
Dr.
Brown and his music are featured in the film
documentaries, Doubles: Japan and America's Intercultural
Children (1995), and Outside In Sight: the Music of
United Front (1986). His composition, "Rhymes For
Children," is the theme music for Pacific Time, a
syndicated weekly newsmagazine heard coast-to-coast. In 1993,
Dr. Brown founded and toured with the Smithsonian Jazz Trio
with Sir Roland Hanna and Keter Betts. He has also
collaborated with Max Roach, Cecil Taylor, Zakir Hussain,
Oliver Lake, David Murray, George Lewis, Andrew Hill, Julius
Hemphill, and with poets Sonia Sanchez, Janice Mirikitani,
Jayne Cortez, Genny Lim and devorah major. He recorded and
toured throughout the United States, Canada and Europe from
1982-94 with United Front, James Newton, Jon Jang and the
Pan-Asian Arkestra, Mark Izu’s Circle of Fire, and toured
internationally with his own large ensembles, Anthony Brown’s
Uptown Showdown and Eclipse.
In
1997, the Asian American Jazz Orchestra was founded
under Brown’s artistic direction for a federally-funded
national educational touring project about the Japanese
American internment experience of World War II. After the
project ended in 1998, Brown expanded the group and renamed it
Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra, in keeping with
the traditions of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, and
Machito and his Afro Cubans. The Orchestra has been featured
at the Monterey, San Francisco and Chicago Jazz Festivals, the
San Francisco Asian American Jazz Festival, the Earshot
Festival, the Smithsonian Institution, and numerous
universities and concert halls nationally.
Anthony
Brown has received grants, fellowships, awards and
commissions from, among others, Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest
Fund, Meet the Composer, National Endowment for the Arts,
California Arts Council, TheatreWorks, and the MacDowell
Colony. He has presented master classes, lectures and
scholarly papers at the National Academy of Sciences,
Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, Columbia
University, the Franz Schubert Conservatory (Vienna, Austria),
and at every campus of the University of California. Dr. Brown
has encyclopedia articles in The New Grove Encyclopedia of
Music and The Encyclopedia of African American Culture and
History published with Simon & Schuster Macmillan, and the
University of California Press will publish his book, Give
the Drummer Some! The Development of Modern Jazz Drumming,
in 2007.
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