Lawrence Brown (trombonist)

Lawrence Brown with the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1943

Lawrence Brown (born August 3, 1907 in Lawrence , Kansas , † September 5, 1988 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American jazz trombonist who was best known as a soloist in the Duke Ellington Orchestra .

Life

Brown's father was a pastor, his mother a church organist, and as a result of this origin, Brown, who neither smoked, drank, played and withdrew, was later given the nickname “Deacon” in the Ellington Band. He grew up in Pasadena and learned the piano, violin, tuba and saxophone before switching to the trombone. His first appearance is said to have been in front of 6,000 people on Mother's Day in church. He started playing professionally in clubs in Los Angeles and San Francisco with the bands of Curtis Moseby, Charlie Echols and Paul Howard (with whose Quality Serenaders he made his first recordings in 1929/30). As a "strolling" trombonist he played at the tables in restaurants, played in the orchestra of Les Hite (with Lionel Hampton ) in 1930 and accompanied (under a pseudonym) Louis Armstrong .

In 1932 he joined the Ellington Band ( Duke Ellington at Fargo, 1940 Live ), which he was a member until 1951 when he joined the newly formed band of Johnny Hodges (also previously with Ellington). Brown played with small groups of Ellington musicians led by Johnny Hodges as early as 1938 , and Hodges and Brown saw better opportunities in smaller groups back in the early 1950s, when big bands were dying. After his time with Hodges, he was a freelancer from 1953 (including Big Joe Turner's Boss of the Blues 1956) and from 1957 a full-time studio musician at CBS . From 1960 to 1970 he played again with Ellington, including in 1963 with The Great Paris Concert . After that, he stopped performing, but worked as a business consultant, in Richard Nixon's re-election campaign , as a record producer at AFM and in the Local 47 musicians' union in Los Angeles.

Ellington valued him not only as a soloist for his ballad play, but also as an accompanist for singers. But he could also improvise "hot" with fast play. As he himself said, he had a cello-like tone spectrum in mind when playing the trombone, in contrast to the loud Tailgate trombone style from New Orleans. With Tricky Sam Nanton (known for his plunger innovations and the jungle sound, which Brown also played for Ellington in the 1960s) and Juan Tizol (who played valve trombone) he formed one of the strongest trombone sections of all big bands at Ellington and was Trumpet Section Head.

Brown also composed for the Ellington Orchestra, e.g. B. "Transblucency" (for the singer Kay Davis ) or "The Golden Cress".

Discographic notes

Johnny Hodges and Lawrence Brown (left), Turkish Embassy, Washington, DC, 1930s. Photo Gottlieb

Inspired Abandon - Lawrence Brown All-Stars with Johnny Hodges ( Impulse! ) - 1965 - with Cat Anderson , Ray Nance , Buster Cooper , Russell Procope , Paul Gonsalves , Harold Ashby , Jimmy Jones (pianist) , Richard Davis , Gus Johnson

literature

Bill Crow : Jazz andecdotes . OUP, New York 1990, ISBN 0-19-505588-8 .
Kurt Dietrich: Dukes bones. Duke Ellington's trombonists . Advance Music, Mainz 1996, ISBN 978-3-89221-059-7 .
Kurt Dietrich: Jazz bones. The world of jazz trombones . Advance Music, Mainz, 2005, ISBN 3-89221-069-1 .
Duke Ellington : Music is my mistress . Quartet Books, London 1977, ISBN 0-7043-3090-3 .
- German: Solitude. Autobiography . Luchterhand, Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-630-71105-7 .
Gunther Schuller : The history of Jazz . OUP, Oxford 1986/91 (2 vol.)

Early jazz. Its roots and musical development . 1986, ISBN 0-19-504043-0 .
The swing era. The development of jazz 1930-1945 . 1991, ISBN 0-19-507140-9 .

Web links

Remarks

↑ Gunther Schuller: "Early Jazz" , p. 133: "Once in a while the elegant trombone of Lawrence Brown penetrates the Labyrinth of commercialism"
↑ where he was the 13th man initially for six months and did not play and was not paid - but only when Otto Hardwick came in as 14th, so Brown in Bill Crow: Jazz Anecdotes .
↑ After Gunther Schuller's “The Swing Era” he was one of the first to use the trombone in this way, in contrast to the hot style of the New Orleans tradition
↑ Ellington emphasizes in his autobiography "Lawrence Brown is the accompaniest par excellence"
↑ Interview with Stanley Dance 1965: “Everybody was playing so loudly and raucously on trombone. I wanted a big, broad tone, not the raspy tone of tailgate, and if you think of the cello you can see how it influenced me. "

personal data
SURNAME	Brown, Lawrence
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American jazz trombonist
DATE OF BIRTH	August 3, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH	Lawrence , Kansas
DATE OF DEATH	5th September 1988
Place of death	Los Angeles , California

[1] Gunther Schuller: "Early Jazz" , p. 133: "Once in a while the elegant trombone of Lawrence Brown penetrates the Labyrinth of commercialism"

[2] where he was the 13th man initially for six months and did not play and was not paid - but only when Otto Hardwick came in as 14th, so Brown in Bill Crow: Jazz Anecdotes .

[3] After Gunther Schuller's “The Swing Era” he was one of the first to use the trombone in this way, in contrast to the hot style of the New Orleans tradition

[4] Ellington emphasizes in his autobiography "Lawrence Brown is the accompaniest par excellence"

[5] Interview with Stanley Dance 1965: “Everybody was playing so loudly and raucously on trombone. I wanted a big, broad tone, not the raspy tone of tailgate, and if you think of the cello you can see how it influenced me. "