By their very nature, jazz jam sessions are all about surprise, and the post-Jazz Fest show at the Velvet Lounge on September 4 was an especially good one. Sharing the front line with club owner and tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson was trumpeter Maurice Brown, a regular presence at the club in the late 90s but a rare sight in recent years. Brown normally would have been in New Orleans preparing for his weekly gig at Snug Harbor, the most prestigious jazz club in the city, but Hurricane Katrina changed his plans. For now, one of the most celebrated and fastest-rising jazz players to come out of Chicago in the past decade is back home.
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On Saturday, August 27, Brown played a gig at the legendary club Tipitina’s with his funky hip-hop-inflected project Soul’d U Out. By the early hours of August 28, the day before Katrina hit, he was riding with a friend to Memphis, taking only a handful of possessions (“my horn, a laptop, and a couple of outfits”). By Tuesday, when it was clear he’d be away from New Orleans for longer than he’d expected, he headed to his parents’ home in south-suburban Markham, where his career began.
Two years later he began sitting in at jam sessions at clubs like the New Apartment Lounge, the Velvet Lounge, and the now defunct Alexander’s Steak House. He was unusually open-minded for such a young player, and he was hungry to play in all kinds of settings. “My first impression was that he had nerve, that he wasn’t afraid,” Anderson says. “He just seemed like a natural, and he just jumped right in.” Doors began opening: Brown performed with the National Grammy Band, and he played in the Jazz Institute of Chicago’s Bebop Brass shows led by pianist Ken Chaney. Pianist Ramsey Lewis tapped him to play at one of his gigs at the Symphony Center.
“I don’t know what a lot of those musicians are going to do,” he says of Katrina’s impact. “That’s where they work, and it’s their whole life.” Brown’s friends and bandmates survived the hurricane, and he’s been able to keep working–last weekend he played in Hungary with the New Horizons Ensemble. But New Orleans’s Treme neighborhood, where Brown lived, suffered heavy flooding; Brown figures his home studio and nearly all of his belongings are destroyed. To help his fellow Katrina survivors, Brown is co-organizing a series of benefit concerts for the New Orleans Musician’s Clinic (wwoz.org/clinic), starting September 24 in New York with Wynton and Branford Marsalis, McCoy Tyner, and more; shows in Chicago and LA are still in the planning stages.
On September 17 five staffers from Bla, a club in Oslo, Norway, will take over the Empty Bottle as part of a unique cultural exchange program that began two weeks ago, when Bottle staffers visited Bla. The Norwegian rock band JR Ewing headlines, but the just-announced support act, a duo of pianist Havard Wiik (a member of Ken Vandermark’s Free Fall trio) and saxophonist Hakon Kornstad, is what I’m most excited about. Their brilliantly titled new album, Eight Tunes We Like (Moserobie), showcases their more lyric side, but these guys take jazz in all sorts of surprising directions. The show is free.
