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Trading Fours: A Novel About Music

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TRADING FOURS captures a single day in the life of four musicians, whose lives intersect in profound ways, much like the very intersection of a musical trading fours that builds to a great dramatic cadence.

Los Angeles native Angela Carole Brown is a musician, novelist, and award-winning poet (Heritage Magazine Award), who has brought us her debut novel, TRADING FOURS, which released on Infinity Publishing in 2005, and about which she was interviewed on KPFK's Arts in Review with Julio Martinez, and given an honorable mention in Music Connection Magazine and ejazznews.com.

She has also been a veteran of the L.A. music scene for two decades as a vocalist, recording artist, and songwriter. She has recorded voice-overs, movie cues, jingles, and CDs for herself and other artists, her most recent being Josh Groban's hit single “You Raise Me Up" on his Closer CD for Warner Bros. Records; for the independent film Funny Money, starring Chevy Chase; and for the political documentary Running with Arnold. She has worked theatre, clubs, concert halls, television, and radio, in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Four years ago, Angela released two very different albums of original music on her own Rue de la Harpe Records label: A modern folk experimentation, utilizing instruments from around the world, entitled Resting on the Rock; and her acclaimed jazz recording The Slow Club.

Her most recent releases are the folk Music for the Weeping Woman with guitarist Ken Rosser, and the jazz Expressionism with The Slow Club Quartet, also on Rue de la Harpe Records.

Angela began her career, however, as an actress, after graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and landing work with various Los Angeles theatre companies, performing the repertoires of Shakespeare, Williams, Brecht, Shaw, and Puccini, to name a few.

Her singing career began by joining various bar bands; and in 1984, won the grand prize in the first-ever (to become annual) Stardom Pursuit singing contest sponsored by the old legendary Rose Tattoo Cabaret.

In 1989, her debut CD Angela, on Teichiku Records, Japan, rose to #2 on Japan’s pop charts.

In 1994, she authored, composed, and starred Off-Broadway in her critically lauded one-woman show The Purple Sleep Caf, at Primary Stages' 45th Street Theatre in New York City.

In 1995, she released a CD of jazz standards Standard Procedure, on Sand Canyon Records, with pianist Dana Bronson and bassist Jim DeJulio, longtime collaborators with her from the Four Seasons Beverly Hills.

And in 1996, she created the role of larger-than-life vixen The Fabulous Miss Thing for the exquisitely radical Elvis Schoenberg's Orchestre Surral, a wild, genre-bending orchestral show. Her involvement with the orchestra included work as performer, contributing writer, and art designer.

For seven years, Angela was “Miss Thing" to select Los Angeles audiences, through the release of two CDs, Air Surral, and It's Alive!, for which she created the artwork that serves as their covers; a slot on Music Connection's Best Unsigned Acts List, and as L.A. Weekly's “Music Pick of the Week" in 2000. Her final performance with the orchestra, in 2003, was their John Anson Ford Amphitheatre debut, a show that ended up winning the L.A. Music Award for “Best Rock Opera of the Year."

Angela has had the honor to sing with/for David Foster, Danny Seraphine, Linda Hopkins, Ricky Martin, Marilyn McCoo & Billy Davis Jr., Billy Childs, Keb' Mo', Freda Payne, Rita Coolidge, Trini Lopez, Roy Clark, Heatwave, Al Wilson, and Peter Yarrow.

Today, however, Angela speaks to us most uniquely through her newest canon of original songs, and as a woman of letters.

On Trading Fours

”...Ms. Brown is an extraordinarily talented writer who has an almost preternatural ability to bring music alive on the printed page, writing from the perspective of musician and audience with equal skill and realism. She is clearly well versed and educated in the underpinnings of music theory, but never for a moment does she lose her sure grip on the soul of what drives people to make music. ”The world of casuals that she paints in her novel Trading Fours is both interesting and depressing, with a sense of independence among these musicians battling with an undercurrent of the encroaching rot of the ordinary. For any fan of music, Ms. Brown’s insights from the inside of the music scene are riveting and enlightening. Having played guitar, myself, for about twenty-five years and having been a rabid music fan for even longer, I thought I knew a few things about music. Whatever I thought I knew, Ms. Brown’s book has added to it considerably. She goes inside the mind and talents of gifted guitarists and prodigious pianists and bears like Masonic secrets the amorphous currents of inspiration and devotion that keep musicians going back to their axes and audiences. ”For all of Ms. Brown’s expertise in conveying the mystery and intangibility of music, she is equally adept at evoking her characters’ emotional lives. The people populating the pages of Trading Fours are fully fleshed-out three dimensional human beings, who had lives before the opening of the novel, and whose lives continue after the final page. This is no mystery novel or thrill-ride suspense, but the lives of each character are so vivid and well rendered, and enormously engrossing. ”Trading Fours is an expertly written story about passion, ambition, envy, and each person’s struggle and need to make some sort of impact in this world, in this life. Ms. Angela Carole Brown is an amazing writer with a gift for dialogue and engaging the reader on a deep, visceral level.”

-- Matt St. Amand, author of RANDHAM ACTS

”I've known Angela Carole Brown for many years. I've spent many nights on the bandstand with her. She is one of my favorite vocalists. She has the rare quality of taking a song that maybe you've heard a million times and making it hers...making you feel something you might never have felt as she sings it to you. I never knew she was a writer until this novel. I have to say that she wields the same power as a writer that she wields as a musician/vocalist. She delves into the LA music scene with such thoughtfulness. She leads you through the lives of a few LA musicians, carefully taking you on a journey of their successes, failures, hopes, dreams, and realities. She challenges your ideals and your artistic goals and/or dreams through the lives of her characters. I think this is a must read for anyone making a living in music ...or trying to make a living in music. In my opinion, Angela Carole Brown's words are deep, thought provoking, and as graceful as her voice.”

-- Mindi Abair, Grammy-winning GRP Recording Artist, Los Angeles

(excerpt from the article Jazz Encounters of the Literary Kind) ”Perhaps one of the most under-explored aspects of jazz literature is fiction. There is an abundance of jazz product in the form of audio and DVD formatted recordings tumbling out on to the record store shelves and on the internet. There has also been a growing body of novels and short story work that makes jazz musicians a central theme. Los Angeles-based jazz chanteuse, writer and visual artist Angela Carole Brown belongs securely to this tradition. Her recent novel Trading Fours (Infinity Publishing) is set in a day in the lives of four LA musicians who make their living hacking away at an artistic seam called the ‘casual’. Whether it is corporate social events, Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and miscellaneous events calling for musicians-for-hire, Nick, Seth, Chloe, and Tristan take them all in their rhythmic stride--and still have to deal with the workaday issues of paying the bills and the rent and negotiating the minefields of personal relationships. Trading Fours deals with brilliant musicians who, oftentimes because of their lack of being well-connected, do not get the breaks they deserve. ”Trading Fours is in few respects, a triumphant meeting ground of art and sociology - a meeting ground as familiar in 2007 as it was in 1927, and one which it is hoped will receive even more insight and attention in 2008 and beyond.”

-- John Stevenson, EJAZZNEWS, England

”They live among us, but in many ways they live in a parallel and opposite universe, like Bizarro World in Superman. They work all weekend while the rest of us play, but they get to sleep as late as they want in the morning. Except on Sunday of course, when they have to get up early to go play their Church gig. I’m talking about Casual musicians. No, not the musicians you see playing in the Symphony Orchestra down at the Music Center. Not the kids making a racket in your neighbor’s garage trying to play Linkin Park covers. Not even the Top 40 band playing down at the local nightclub. I mean the tuxedoed mercenaries who show up 20 minutes before downbeat to play the live music for your Wedding, Bar Mitzvah or Corporate Party. ”This is what is known as a Casual. No rehearsal. You may never have met the other Casual musicians you’re about to play with. You have all been sent to this hotel or Country Club ballroom by a Casual Agency, which books the gigs and takes most of the money. It will sound just fine however, because everybody knows all three or four hundred tunes they’re expected to, and can fake or sight-read the rest. Maybe it has something to do with the tuxedo (or black evening dress that female Casual musicians wear), or maybe it’s the income bracket, but Casual musicians hover in the social food chain somewhere between the waiter at your table and the guy that parks your car when you pull up to the hotel. This in spite of the years of diligent practice and yes, talent that it takes to master their craft and yes, their art. Art and Commerce make strange bedfellows, and most Casual musicians would scoff if you asked them if they considered a Casual an artistic event. ”Nevertheless, all but the most jaded and bitter among them bring as much musicality as they can to these proceedings and under the best circumstances, they can be very enjoyable events. They can also be endless, hellish tribulations, hence the raising of one’s wrist to look at one’s watch being known as the ‘musician’s salute’. There is a certain camaraderie among Casual musicians. Perhaps borne of a shared feeling of being outside the mainstream of society. Artists forced to prostitute their gift in return for a wage far below their qualifications. This is one of the favorite topics of conversation between musicians on Casuals. They will always chuckle when you tell them the old joke: “How do you make a musician complain?” “Give him a gig”. Almost all Casual musicians have something else that they’re working on besides Casuals. Something with a future, and something more fulfilling than playing slavish imitations of the same old songs, night after night. In this era of the home recording studio, everyone now has a studio quality CD of their own original material and performances. And there’s always that possibility in the back of everyone’s mind that they themselves could rise above this workaday existence with the stroke of a record company executive’s pen. ”The fact that it is a statistically tiny possibility does not banish the tinge of dreams that it brings to this lifestyle, like being permanently enrolled in the lottery. Not since the gold rush have there been so many dreamers happy to plug away at such a long shot. Actors don’t qualify, because they make their living waiting tables. Indeed, simply earning your livelihood playing music is the fulfillment of a dream. As they say, it beats working. This fraternity of dreamers lives right in the midst of the rest of us, and yet they have their own world, which is mostly invisible to everyone else. ”This is the world that Angela Carole Brown brings to life in Trading Fours. She is a natural born storyteller, and she has lived this life, so it exudes an air of autobiography. Indeed, you would swear these characters are real people. Maybe that’s because they are. ”I am aware of very few works of fiction that deal with this interesting world where art meets commerce and dreams encounter reality. The Adam Sandler movie ‘The Wedding Singer’ dealt with the subject in a somewhat slapstick vein, and did nail some of the truly hilarious aspects of this business, but the characters were cardboard cutouts. In Trading Fours we get glimpses into the lives of four central characters, all in the course of one 24-hour period. Each chapter deals with each of them in turn, emulating the Jazz musical device of ‘trading fours’, where each musician will improvise for four measures and then on to the next musician and the next in turn. Each four measure ‘solo’ by each musician should reflect and complement those of his band mates, and this is exactly how the chapters work together in Trading Fours, eventually coalescing into a whole at the denouement. ”But this is much more than a book about a lifestyle. It is a rumination on life itself, and what’s important. It’s about four people finding their way to their own answer to that question. It is all leading up to a tribute to a dying musical icon named Hayes DeWitt, who symbolizes the spirit of fierce loyalty to ones own dream, even in the face of worldly failure. This is a masterfully woven tale by a master storyteller. The spirit of the book itself is summed in one of the last lines of the book: “This one’s for Hayes”.”

-- Chris Haller, LA musician

“To anyone who has ever said 'Oh, you're a musician. What's your day job?' - READ THIS BOOK! Angela Carole Brown captures, in a “take no prisoners and pull no punches” style, the true realities of what it is to be a free-lance musician working the casual gig scene on LA. The roller-coaster lifestyle, the compliments, the insults, the loves and heartaches, the sacrifices and rewards, the way musicians are looked at by other people and the way musicians look at other musicians - it's all in “Trading Fours.” This book should be required reading in every college and university music school under the heading of “Gig Reality 101.” I have had the privilege of working with Angela in a variety of situations in LA over the past 8 years, and rest assured - she's no “chick singer.” She is a true musician, in every positive sense of the word. It's a shame her CD's are not included with the book. They would, without a doubt, establish her credibility to anyone who might have any doubt as to what she is talking about.”

-- Tim Wendt, NY musician

'As a career musician, I found Angela Carole Brown's book “Trading Fours” to be a sensitive and accurate portrayal of the lives of 'gigging' musicians. Much like the play “Sideman”, the inhabitants of this world were drawn with both bitter and loving strokes. The characters of her story, unique in his or her own ways, were very typical of any number of 'musos' that I have known and associated with over the years. I found myself absorbed into the world her characters occupied, empathizing with their struggles, defeats, and triumphs. Ms. Brown's brilliant use of original and illuminating metaphor and simile added vastly to these portrayals. For me, an excellent and compelling read”

-- Robin Swenson, LA musician

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