As the long black Cadillac glides down Frenchmen Street — an age-old road barely wide enough to accommodate it — everyone seems to know who’s sitting behind the steering wheel.
“There he is — there’s Maurice,” says one of the tattooed, T-shirted Gen-Yers hanging on Frenchmen, where music clubs stretch for more than three blocks.
“There’s the man,” adds Jason Patterson, who books the talent at Snug Harbor, the city’s top jazz room and the epicenter of Frenchmen Street culture.
“You can tell Maurice is coming from a block away.”
Even if the gleaming, 1989 Caddy Brougham didn’t announce his arrival, Maurice Brown’s outsize personality, fabulously elegant clothes and — above all — clarion trumpet calls might. For the young man from hardscrabble Harvey, Ill., — a tough town south of Chicago — has transformed himself into a kind of neon sign on wheels.
Showing promise
More important, in the nearly three years since he moved here, Brown — according to even the most skeptical, hard-to-please observers — has become a center of gravity in New Orleans music. Playing street parades in the midday, club gigs at night and jam sessions till dawn, he may be not only the hardest working man in Crescent City show business but far and away the most promising.
In a city that has given the jazz world such trumpet deities as Louis Armstrong and Joe “King” Oliver at the start of the 20th Century and Wynton Marsalis and Nicholas Payton at the end, many music lovers are saying that Maurice Brown is next.
“Except that I’m really from Chicago,” says Brown, after stepping out of the second black Cadillac he has owned in his 23 years.
Regardless of geography, however, the locals have flipped for “Chi-Town Maurice Brown,” as he was known when he arrived in 2001, before acquiring his latest sobriquet: “Mo’ Better Maurice Brown.”
“As soon as he got here, he was hot,” says Geraldine Wyckoff, a veteran New Orleans music journalist who writes for OffBeat Magazine and other Louisiana publications.
“He’s the guy in New Orleans right now,” says Patterson, who gave Brown one of the most coveted engagements in the city: a weekly stint at Snug Harbor, an honor typically reserved for New Orleans musical royalty, such as jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis (Wynton’s father) and R&B vocalist Charmaine Neville (of the Neville family dynasty).
“I think Maurice is what we all have been looking for,” says Alvin Batiste, the eminent New Orleans clarinetist and jazz educator who taught Brown briefly at Southern University, in nearby Baton Rouge. “We’re looking forward to Maurice creating something we’ve never heard before.”
Though the praise may sound extravagant, and though Brown still has a long way to go before his emerging art can be evaluated alongside that of his elders, his progress since leaving Chicago in 2001 has been nothing less than extraordinary.
On a recent evening at Snug Harbor, he led his quintet in one excoriating performance after another, unleashing not only a torrent of sound but also some of the most technically nimble, harmonically adventurous, rhythmically combustive solo work to have been played by an under-25 jazz trumpeter in the past 40 years.
Turning point for jazz
For all that, however, he knows he’s entering jazz at a precarious moment in its history, when most of the major record labels have cut back on the music and the business has shrunk significantly since the heyday of, say, Clifford Brown, one of his heroes.
“Yeah, it’s a little bit of a depressing time, since all the record labels are looking for the next Norah Jones,” says Brown, referring to the vocalist whose popular success indeed has persuaded record companies to focus on commerce more than art.
“But I’m taking it in stride. I don’t think people are stupid. Real music, honest music can’t be denied.”
If anyone can prove that a new jazz talent can make himself heard, even today, it may be Brown, for he already has built a following in the face of considerable obstacles.
Everything that Brown has achieved since he picked up the trumpet in 5th grade, at Markham Park Elementary School, in fact, has been hard-won, the results of a ferocious work ethic inspired by hard times.
“We didn’t have a lot of money, but I sure got a lot of family attention,” recalls Brown, whose father worked as a service technician on home appliances, his mother staying home to take care of Maurice and his younger sister, Charise.
At age 10, Maurice and the other 5th graders at Markham were led into a band room and instructed to pick out instruments, but Maurice didn’t reach for what he really wanted — a large, dark-gold saxophone — presuming his parents couldn’t afford it.
So he grabbed the smaller trumpet and found “I had a natural love for the instrument,” he remembers. “As soon as I put the trumpet to my lips, I was making a sound.”
Marsalis workshop
But not much more, for Brown paid scant attention to his horn until he attended a workshop given by Wynton Marsalis in a South Side Chicago church, around 1995. Though many kids were invited onstage to play briefly with Marsalis, Brown unfurled chorus after chorus, he remembers, with Marsalis afterward encouraging him to buckle down and start working to develop his talent.
“After that,” claims Brown, “it was 14 to 16 hours a day of religiously practicing.”
But why jazz, an art form that demands enormous discipline and sacrifice from musicians, without much promise of anything resembling a decent wage?
“Because I was always impressed by jazz,” says Brown. “More than any other style, it’s more difficult to play and more expressive. Anyone can learn to read music, but not everyone can learn to play jazz.”
Though Brown never received a private trumpet lesson — and hasn’t, to this day — he began to develop a leonine technique through sheer will and talent. Imitating CDs he played repeatedly, rehearsing trumpet drills until the neighbors begged for relief, Brown in a couple of years developed such technical command of the horn that, by the time he entered Hillcrest High School in Country Club Hills, his reputation preceded him.
“I’d play tapes of Maurice for the other band directors,” says Keith Anderson, Hillcrest’s music director, “and they’d say to me, `Geez, that’s a sophomore? No way a kid could play like that.’
“But he did.”
Indeed, when Brown started gigging around Chicago in his teens, listeners wondered where a talent of his caliber could have come from, unbidden, unannounced, unheralded.
At Alexander’s Steak House, on the South Side, in August 1999, he played with the old Jazz Masters band and brought to his trumpet an impressive knowledge of the vast sweep of jazz history. The palpable brilliance of his tone, the barely contained aggression of his swing rhythm and the ineffably poetic lyricism of his balladry added up to perhaps the strongest debut of a jazz trumpeter since Nicholas Payton begin playing around New Orleans as a teenager, in the late 1980s.
Father injured on job
But Brown had more motivation than many of his colleagues, in part because his father had been badly injured at work, when he was helping to move a freezer down a flight of stairs. His partner let go, the massive object crashed onto his back and two surgeries have not yet relieved his pain. Unable to work ever since, Charles Brown found himself strapped for cash.
“Maurice helped us out financially quite a bit back then,” says Charles Brown.
Adds Maurice Brown, “I definitely didn’t have the luxury of laying around. I was playing constantly around Chicago, not only because I wanted to but because I had to — we needed the money.”
That apprenticeship sharpened Brown’s performance skills and bolstered his reputation, with music schools across the country urging him to accept full scholarships. But while he was trying to balance a frenetically busy performance schedule in Chicago with classes at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Brown received a call from the great trumpeter Clark Terry, who invited him on the road.
“I really took a liking to Maurice,” recalls Terry. “He was all ears, constantly taking in all the information around him.”
New type of improvisation
But Brown was just getting started. In 2001, he headed to Southern University, in Baton Rouge, to study with the formidable clarinetist and musical theorist Alvin Batiste, who introduced Brown to a new system of improvisation. Batiste calls it “root progression,” and, in essence, it shows improvisers how to break free of standard chord progressions without veering into the seeming anarchy of the “free jazz” players.
“After a little while, you really could hear him going in new directions,” says Batiste.
“He also started getting away from what he had heard of the master trumpet players and play more of Maurice, more of his own sound.”
Armed with Batiste’s insights and his own growing mastery of the theory underlying the elusive art of improvisation, Brown in January 2002 felt ready to head home but decided to swing through New Orleans on his way back. Something about that city — its easygoing tempo, its deep cultural roots and perhaps, above all, its century-plus veneration of the trumpet — persuaded him to stay, at least momentarily.
“It’s the whole feeling I got here that made me want to stay for a while,” says Brown, who also leads a funk band he calls Soul’d U Out.
“I drive through this town, and I think, `Wow — Louis Armstrong walked these streets and breathed this air.’
“The place is just so soulful — the music, the food, the people.”
Brown now clearly stands at a turning point. It won’t be long until some shrewd record executive signs him, a booking agency sends him around the world and the media discovers the jazz phenomenon of the moment.
How well Brown will be able to withstand the attention is something even he may not know.
Not rushing to New York
At the very least, though, his reluctance to rush into a move to New York, where he believes musicians often try to chase “the next hip thing” rather than nurture an aesthetic of their own, suggests a savvy beyond his years.
Judging by his recent show at Snug Harbor, he continues to blossom at a remarkable rate. His compositions — from the ebullient and danceable “It’s a New Day” to the high-flying, extraordinarily sophisticated “Rapturous” — point to an artist in the first bloom of potentially important work.
“You know what I hope for?” asks his father, Charles Brown.
“I’d like to turn on the radio one day and hear my son Maurice playing, and hear the announcer say, `That was Maurice Brown.’
“That’s all I want, so I keep telling him to take his time, don’t rush into anything.
“It’s not about the money,” continues Maurice Brown’s father, who, like his son, never has had a great deal of it.
“It’s about the music, and I want people to hear it.”
That much, at least, seems inevitable.
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Where to find Maurice Brown
CHICAGO
7:30 p.m., May 24, performing as part of Ernest Dawkins’ New Horizons Ensemble; HotHouse, 31 E. Balbo Drive; phone 312-362-9707.
NEW ORLEANS
9 p.m. every Tuesday, leading the Maurice Brown Quintet; also, hosting post-midnight jam sessions during the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, April 23, 24, 30 and May 1; Snug Harbor, 626 Frenchmen St., New Orleans; phone 504-949-0696.
ONLINE
For a full lineup of Brown’s schedule and other information, visit www.mauricebrown.net.
