Knoxville pianist/composer Donald Brown ascends on high in the pantheon of jazz
by Mike Gibson
Mary Costa remembers with an abiding fondness the first time she heard pianist Donald "Silk" Brown, an unforgettable moment that transpired in the very forgettable setting of a now-defunct Bearden restaurant.
A classically-trained former professional singer of some renown, Costa has performed from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera before a symphony orchestra as well in smaller music halls alongside jazz legends like Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong. To her discerning ear, Brown's keystrokes were wistfully and ineffably beautiful, the stuff of breathless nostalgia.
"All of a sudden this music started; I told the owner 'You know, I'm not going to turn around; I'm just going to stand here and let the music come into my ears,'" she remembers. "It sounded so much like Duke Ellington. After three selections, I thought, 'I've got to meet this person, because this has been such a treat.'"
Costa introduced herself to the pianist, and learned he was an associate music professor at the University of Tennessee. She also learned they shared a love of classic jazz, and of the great pianist and bandleader Ellington in particular.
"I've seen him more than a dozen times since, and he never fails to electrify his audience," Costa says. "Donald has a kaleidoscopic mindset for jazz colorations. You think you know where he's going and it's never that way. It's a wonderful, mysterious pathway."
Jazz trumpet legend Freddie Hubbard has a similarly cherished memory of another Brown performance, this one an impromptu recital in Hubbard's hotel suite after a gig in Chicago.
"He got to playing, and I got the whole band in there listening to him," says Hubbard, who had taken Brown on the road as his pianist for a tour in the late 1980s. "He played so many compositions—his own compositions—so many beautiful songs. He was complaining about his hands hurting. I said, 'You don't sound like you're hurting.' ...I'll never forget it."
And former Knoxville newscaster Edye Ellis recalls walking through bitter single-digit cold from the Tennessee Theatre on Gay Street to Lucille's jazz club in the Old City on a winter evening, only to be rewarded upon her arrival with a transporting rendition of her favorite Brown composition.
"He was playing 'A Dance for Marie-Do', which is the most lyrically beautiful piece of music," says Ellis, who made the trek to Lucille's to hear Brown play after a concert by jazz singer Diana Krall at the Tennessee.
"It was so cold, and suddenly you walk in and it was as if you had stepped into the warmest, most wonderful place. It was one of those moments, joyous and magical."
Krall made an appearance at the club that night, and paid her own tribute to Brown, whose music she had studied in college. It would seem that all of the composer/pianist's most ardent fans have a special Donald Brown Moment to share, some recognition of how his singular compositional and pianistic stylings have moved them in a profound, ineffable way.
But Brown's professional reputation continues to outweigh his popular recognition. He's a veteran of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, one of the most important outfits in the music's history, and he's been involved in three Grammy nominations, two as a composer and one as a player. No less an authority than piano great Dave Brubeck, progenitor of the so-called "cool jazz" movement, ranks Brown among his own favorite players, calling him "one of the greatest" as both a teacher and an artist. Jazz pianist and writer Jonny King in his 1997 book What Jazz Is hailed Brown as "(perhaps) the most important composer on the scene." Still, the descriptor most often attached to Brown's name is "under-appreciated"; his name is unknown to many even in his adopted city.
"I tell him he'd get a lot more gigs if he moved to New York," Hubbard says. "But he says he doesn't want to move. I guess he likes it in Knoxville."
But the reasons for Brown's relative anonymity bear only passing resemblance to the shopworn template of great-artist-in-a-small-town. While it's true that he is a devoted husband and father of four, and a similarly devoted educator—factors that by themselves might stand in the way of an ambitious career—he's also a man beset with a vast, festering self-doubt. For three decades, he has wrestled with the crippling effects of no less than four debilitating medical conditions, joint and muscle ailments that have wrought havoc with his pianistic dexterity.
Brown believes that the instinct to hold suspect his own abundant gifts is wholly a byproduct of those ailments. But the truth is more complicated. A seemingly ego-less man with considerable generosity of spirit, Brown seems not inherently conditioned to accept the mantle of greatness. He's a man of conscience—a fact often reflected in the themes of his compositions as well as in his personal and professional habits. Those who know him well believe it would offend that conscience were he to proffer anything that fell short of his own gigantic expectations.
"He has set such extraordinarily high standards for himself," says friend, mentor, and fellow former Memphian James Williams, also a former Blakey pianist. "I wish he would have been as aggressive about his career as some of his contemporaries. Some people crave the limelight, but not Donald. He's just a regular guy, who happens to be a genius."
In person, Donald Brown is eminently prepossessing, chiefly by dint of his famously endearing gap-toothed grin—a trait shared by all of his siblings, he says—but also by virtue of his casual geniality, and his voice, a honeyed mixture of rasp and softness.
Loose-limbed, almost rolling in his movements, he's engaging and readily approachable, and generous to a fault. Despite hand-lettered notices on his office in the UT music building door pleading for the tardy return of borrowed CDs and videotapes, he continues to lade private students with recordings from his personal collection at the end of their lessons.
Brown's general humility was well-earned, as he grew up poor, though not underprivileged in a close-knit southern home. Born in Desoto, Miss. in 1954 and transplanted to Memphis in 1956, he was the fifth of Clifton and Laura Brown's 11 children.
An Illinois Central Railroad worker and part-time handyman, Clifton was also a talented amateur piano player, though he rarely touched the instrument after Donald's early childhood. Laura sang in the choir of the Baptist church the family attended, and both parents instilled in their children a love of music as well as a spiritual core.
"I heard a lot of Gospel when I was growing up," Brown says. "My parents made sure we had a strong spiritual background. I learned how to treat people, how to be a respectable person. I learned to judge people by where their heart is, not by their education level, what they have or how many languages they speak."
Brown delved into music in earnest around fifth grade, picking up on his oldest brother Raymond's drum kit, and he quickly earned a reputation as an adept player in church and neighborhood bands.
He learned trumpet and brass instruments in eighth grade, playing in the school marching band and even winning an award for baritone horn performance. His age notwithstanding, Brown was playing horn in rhythm and blues bands in local clubs by tenth grade. Fatefully, he also began learning a few piano chords to aid inchoate efforts at composition.
Already a talented multi-instrumentalist and veteran performer, Brown entered Memphis State (now the University of Memphis) on a full scholarship in 1972. Beset with neck problems, he gravitated to piano, spurred by the exhortations of kindred spirit James Williams, a fellow student and pianist a few years his senior.
Together, Williams, Brown and another fellow pianist Mulgrew Miller plundered the fertile Memphis music scene of the early 1970s, a scene replete with jazz and r&b clubs, and home to soul music's Stax Records. Copiously buying and trading records, they also haunted local venues like the Gemini jazz club to see musicians like Phineas Newborn, a brilliant underground piano legend who never achieved wider public recognition.
"It was a renaissance period in Memphis, and we were mesmerized by the music," Williams says. "Donald was absorbing it like a sponge. From the start, he understood the concept of jazz, how to teach yourself, how to get inside a phrase, how to get the spirit and soul of jazz. And he seemed to be doing it effortlessly."
"Some things came pretty easy for me, I guess," Brown admits. "A lot of things were never explained to me. I knew how scales worked even before I knew chords. It was the most natural thing to me; I was playing chords when I didn't even know what they were."
While at Memphis State, Brown also met a pretty co-ed named Dorothy Griffin, to whom he offered piano lessons free of charge. After only a few sessions, they started dating. "She was interested in jazz, and I was interested in her, because she was extremely beautiful," Brown laughs. "I called her up and told her I was a jazz teacher, just because I wanted to be around her."
After less than three years at Memphis State, Brown moved to Boston, Mass., with an eye towards attending the prestigious Berklee College of Music. He never enrolled, but the experience proved invaluable. Brown networked, took part in countless jam sessions, and witnessed the likes of guitarist George Benson and sibling horn tandem Randy and Michael Brecker playing in small club settings.
Brown paid rent though an organ gig in a strip club, a thankless job that saw the earnest young musician ever at loggerheads with his more jaded bandmates. "I spent a lot of time arguing with the drummer," Brown remembers. "He had been there and done that for so long, and he didn't care. He was always watching the girls, so he kept messing up the beat."
Within a few months, Boston's prohibitive cost-of-living and his separation from Dorothy gave Brown impetus to return home, where he found work as a studio musician at Memphis' Hi Records. Over the next several years, he married Dorothy, started a family, toured, and played sessions with a host of national and regional talents, including singer Al Green. He also played in several of his own projects, including Sirprize, the kind of classic '70s funk 'n' soul outfit replete with choreographed stage moves and bright spandex costumes.
"All that time, it was like I was going to school," Brown says. "It served as the foundation of my musical style. To me jazz is the most logical extension of blues and gospel. Almost all of the great jazz players, even guys like Charlie Parker, started out playing R&B."
Drummer and bandleader Art Blakey was the stuff of jazz's most extravagant legend—colorful, gregarious, mercurial, he embodied a mass of contradictory notions as an Islamic convert, a recovering drug addict, a womanizer, a musical innovator and leader of men. Of his success as a bandleader, Blakey once said the key was that "I keep my foot in (band members') behinds every night. I scare 'em to death." When he died in the 1990s, age unknown, he was considered the last remaining giant of the '40s bebop era; he left behind a two-year-old child and a wife less than half his age.
"I didn't get to walk the streets with Charlie Parker, but I got the next best thing," Brown says. "Art was a bigger-than-life figure, a renaissance man. Everyone loved him.
"He was a master psychologist; he knew just what it took to get the best out of you, even if it meant lying, which he often did. One of the guys in the band used to say 'If Art Blakey says hello, he's lying to you!'"
Brown joined Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1981, on the recommendation of Williams, who was leaving the band to pursue other interests. It was no less than the third time Williams had recommended him for a high-profile gig, and Brown decided that this time he had best not pass on the opportunity, as he had done in the past.
His stint with Blakey was a turning point, imparting to Brown a measure of the confidence he had always lacked, providing a high-profile showcase for both his playing and his writing, and introducing him to young soon-to-be greats like brothers Wynton (trumpet) and Branford (saxophone) Marsalis, who were Blakey band members at the time.
"Art took me aside one night and told me he really loved the way I comp [the jazzer's term for improvised chordal accompaniment]," Brown remembers. "He told me 'All you need to do now is relax. You've got nothing to prove, because you're up there with me. All you have to do is swing me into the ground.'"
It was Wynton Marsalis who was largely responsible for Brown's nickname, "Silk," which most people falsely assume derives from his deft musicianship. "I had this polyester shirt that had a shine to it," Brown remembers. "Wynton would say 'Man what you wearing that shit for—that's out of style.' He insisted it was silk, even when I told him it was just polyester. The name stuck, and now everyone thinks it's because of my playing.
"Working with Art was a catalyst, no question. It was my first experience with big jazz artists, my first reviews in big magazines, my first time playing outside the country. Even if he hadn't paid me, you couldn't measure what Art Blakey gave me in money."
The experience led directly to three watersheds for Brown: the live Blakey recording Keystone 3, from the Keystone Corner venue in San Francisco, was nominated for a Grammy; "The Insane Asylum", a Brown composition, also received a Grammy nomination as recorded by his friend Wynton Marsalis in 1986; and Berklee offered Brown, by then an established jazz veteran, a teaching job in 1983.
His time at Berklee was fruitful, if often hectically paced. Teaching harmony and arranging as well as jazz and R&B keyboard styles, he saw several of his students achieve wider acclaim, including Cyrus Chestnut, now the preeminent young pianist in jazz, and Wayne Shorter sideman and Downbeat magazine cover boy Danilo Perez, a Panamanian keyboardist.
Brown also recorded his first album as a leader while still on the faculty—Early Bird on Sunnyside Communications, featuring a talented sextet performing a fetching selection of mostly Brown-penned originals.
But medical problems, Berklee's sweatshop faculty working conditions and, again, the cost of living in a large mid-Atlantic city caught up with Brown, who was a father of three sons and a very young daughter by 1988. He was on the verge of quitting music altogether and accepting a job with Federal Express in Memphis when another James Williams recommendation salvaged a promising career.
Donald Brown's hands are a marvel, as much for what they can't do as for what they can. Brittle, sometimes shaky, the fingers a little crimped, the knuckles slightly knotted and intermittently swollen, they don't look anything like the hands of a capable musician, much less a great one, and especially not a pianist. It often looks as if he's holding a dead fish in each palm.
At times, he is barely capable of moving the fingers independently; his thumbs and small fingers are often frozen in an attitude of graceless immobility, while even his stronger index and middle fingers sometimes lack the lack the strength to play with convincing force.
Complicating those afflictions is a pair of shoulders crippled by chronic rotator cuff problems. Brown says that at times he felt as if his shoulders were being pulled back and pinched together; the burning pain forced him at one juncture to sleep in a chair for more than a year. Today, even in the wake of surgery, he experiences discomfort in the simple act of raising his arms above his head.
"Because of my health problems, I don't think I'll ever be the pianist I could be," Brown says. "If I hadn't experienced those difficulties, I'd probably have a different kind of confidence about myself, been more aggressive in my career."
Brown first noticed the stiffness in his hands and fingers in 1973, during his second year at Memphis State. Doctors assumed he had rheumatoid arthritis, and prescribed medication.
The pain waxed and waned, but worsened over time. He visited specialists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, even homeopathic practitioners in Memphis, Boston and later Knoxville. It was in the 1980s that the shoulder problems set in; musician friends said he probably had rotator cuff tears, but doctors couldn't find evidence of such through ordinary x-rays
Brown now believes that his efforts to circumvent the pain compounded his problems. He played with greater wrist action when his fingers were hurting, more shoulder torque when his wrists stiffened. When his shoulders began seizing and burning, he simply did the best he could. At one point, his customary posture was at an angle to the keyboard, his hands turned almost completely inward toward one another when he played.
"It's hard to describe how I got by sometimes," Brown recounts. "I kept adjusting my technique, adjusting my shoulders. It took every muscle in my body and every ounce of concentration."
Of Brown's condition, Williams observes that "I can't see how he does what he does without being able to practice more. He's one of the most courageous people I know...He's a magician as well as a musician."
It was Williams who called Brown when he was on the verge of leaving Berklee and quitting music altogether. There was an opening on the music faculty at the University of Tennessee, he said. Both he and pianist Ellis Marsalis (Wynton and Branford's father) had turned down the position, but Williams recommended his friend Brown for the job.
The opportunity would give Brown a means to raise his family and continue his music through teaching, drawing on his vast wealth of knowledge and experience, yet buying more time to seek medical solutions to his pain.
Brown quickly fell in love with Knoxville, and he was an easy fit on the UT faculty, teaching theory, improvisation and jazz history. Current office mate Mark Boling, an accomplished guitarist, met him at his initial interview for the position, and sensed an immediate kinship both personally and musically.
"Donald's such a warm person," Boling says. "The first time we played together, I felt like I knew him like a brother, like I was close to him from the very start."
Saxophonist and former fellow instructor Bill Scarlett says that in addition to Brown's warmth and good humor, he was immediately taken with the pianist's "highly sophisticated and advanced musicianship...there are players with more physical technique, but none of them play with the imagination and creativity he does."
UT provided fertile soil for that creativity, despite Brown's ongoing physical problems. Since his arrival in '88, he has released another 12 albums under his own name (now 13 in all), the latest of which, a gorgeously spare set of trio renderings entitled Autumn in New York recorded in 2000 and released in Fall 2002, might be his best yet, in spite of having been recorded in the throes of a particularly cruel bout of arthritis. He also earned a third Grammy nomination, this one for a song he composed for the Spike Lee biopic of Malcolm X.
He's a favorite among students, who describe his instructional method with words like "unorthodox," "unstructured," even "stream-of-conscious."
"He points out lots of things other teachers wouldn't, and he loves to talk about rhythm," says bass player Tommy Sauter, noting that Brown's R&B underpinnings are writ large in both his playing and his instruction.
"To him groove is the most important thing. He doesn't use a lot of technical terms; he's very intuitive. But he knows so much. He can take one lick and show you how to apply it in so many ways. He gets so much out of just a little bit of music."
"Donald is more free association in his teaching," says fellow instructor Boling. "He has his students develop an 'ear relationship' with the music, through listening, through learning and transcribing solos, and then incorporating that material into their own playing. He doesn't get too hung up on theory."
As was the case at Berklee, a few of Brown's UT pupils have achieved notoriety since leaving his tutelage, players such as Matthew Fries, a jazz pianist now based in New York. Says Scarlett, "They're the proof in the pudding. Donald teaches by example."
Since coming to Knoxville, Brown has played sometimes two and three times weekly at a handful of local clubs, including Lucille's, West Knoxville's Baker-Peters, and currently, the Bearden-area 4620 Club. Brown says the latter is his favorite local venue to date; he'll be playing there along with son Keith, a drummer, on Wednesdays and Thursdays beginning in August.
The constant gigging has exacerbated his ailments; at a few shows, Brown says he turned his piano toward a wall so the audience members couldn't see the discomfort etched on his face, the tears that welled in his eyes at particularly excruciating moments.
Still, his sufferings did not go unnoticed. "I've watched him play in extreme pain," says Edye Ellis. "The way he held his body, the intensity he had in trying to compensate for the pain—sometimes the contortions were amazing. For the audience, it was like the music was coming out of his whole body, not just his hands."
Brown admits that in some ways, the pain molded his style: "Because I had problems, it made me learn to play things my own way. A lot of times I'd play someone else's idea, and it would come out sounding like my idea rather than the original one."
Boling adds that his friend "plays better with three fingers than most people do with two hands...sometimes the beauty comes in working through it, like the irritation that causes the pearl."
But the compounding afflictions eventually grew too severe for even the most resourceful musician to continue in any semblance of artistry. Through the years of specialists and clinics, Brown learned that he suffered not only from arthritis, but also from tenosynovitis, an inflammation of the tendons, and focal dystonia, an affliction of a nerve that runs along the ulna bone of the forearm.
And after years of skepticism, doctors finally confirmed the existence of the rotator cuff injuries Brown had long suspected, through a special scanning process that maps the course of a colored liquid injected into the body, revealing small tears invisible to ordinary x-rays.
"It's amazing what an injury like this can do to your self-esteem," says Brown. "Sometimes you feel like absolute zero. You start to think, 'Can I find something else to make me happy, some other way to define myself?' The last three years especially were more pain and frustration than I had experienced in my entire life."
But there was hope, too. When Brown's shoulder tears were confirmed, he found specialists willing to perform surgery. A wealthy jazz patron in Switzerland paid for the operation; Ron Carter, jazz giant and bass player for Miles Davis's classic mid-'60s quintet, a friend and fan, had also offered to foot the bill.
And last summer, Brown visited the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, on a tip from a former UT pupil, and for the first time met with physicians who seemed to understand the nature of his afflictions. Some of the doctors were players themselves and had performed surgery on other world-class musicians.
They operated on nerves in Brown's right arm, entering through an incision on the inside of the forearm near the elbow. Over time, Brown says he is realizing new range of motion in the fingers of that hand. He may go back for more surgery if his mobility continues to improve.
But recovery is often grueling. Since mid-2001 his schedule has included a nightly regimen of stretching, resistance exercises, and electrical stimulation, through a special device about the size of a Walkman. The routine took as long as four hours to complete when he began two years ago, but is now usually accomplished in two.
"It was hard when I first started the therapy," Brown says. "I'd teach until 7 or 8 (p.m.), come home and catch up with the family, then start exercising at 10 or 11 knowing I wouldn't be through until 2. And stopping wasn't an option.
"I came through a lot, the frustration and the not knowing and the doctors pulling you around, then all the work that went into rehabilitating. I'm proud of myself. But at the same time, I realize there was never a choice."
With July scarcely begun, there have already been two landmark events in Donald Brown's life in 2003, both of them centered around performances. The latest of these occurred in May, when Brown traveled to Saint-Louis, Senegal, on the African continent, to perform in front of thousands at an outdoor concert about three hours from the capital city of Daka.
Brown has long been concerned with issues of race and social justice, as evidenced by compositions such as "Capetown Ambush", a discordant meditation on violence in South Africa from his Sources of Inspiration release, or his Cause and Effect album with its Afro-centric spoken-word interludes and liner notes by Karl Evanzz, author of The Judas Factor about the plot to kill Malcolm X.
His first time on African soil, the Senegal trip was a heady, moving experience. He returned after four days abroad with a suitcase full of lovely African statuettes and artifacts, and a new perspective on his own struggles.
"It was really powerful, getting to go back to the motherland, where it all started for African Americans," Brown says. "A lot of the natives would greet you by saying 'Welcome home' when you arrived.
"The level of poverty there is unreal—villages without toilets or running water or electricity. I saw kids begging in the streets, but they were still able to smile. It was like they were much happier than we are, in a country where we measure success by how much money you make or how many homes you have. They see life the way it's supposed to be."
The other performance of note took place in New York, and it saw Brown thrust into the unaccustomed role of honored guest rather than featured performer. Part of Columbia University's composers' tribute series, the Music of Donald Brown paid homage with a clutch of jazz luminaries performing the music of the honoree. Donald and Dorothy were flown to New York, afforded red-carpet treatment, ushered to Columbia's Miller Theatre in a limousine to hear the likes of pianists Eric Reed and Mulgrew Miller, drummer Carl Allen and saxophonist Gary Bartz interpreting a set of all-Brown originals.
"That was a highlight of my career," Brown says. "To sit back and hear your work played by musicians of that caliber made me realize how blessed I've been to contribute to the music. It's nice to have something like that happen before you die. A lot of great jazz players never received that kind of recognition while they were here."
Whether Brown's status continues to swell from the level of revered statesman to that of jazz Olympian, to that of a player/composer in the grandest tradition of an Ellington or a Basie or a Monk, depends in part on how well his ailing joints and connective tissues respond to the treatments essayed in recent months.
More telling, however, will be whether Brown is truly able to overcome the corrosive self-doubt that has long plagued him, self-doubt that will probably continue in some measure so long as the music that emanates from his piano falls a note short of the sublimnities of his considerable imagination.
"If I can get healthy, there's a whole lot more I want to do," he says. "Jazz depicts life more than any other form of music. When you're playing jazz, your band members are always doing something that you didn't anticipate. The question is: Do you freak out and give up, or do you adjust? I'm trying to adjust."
July 17, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 29
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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