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Rob Brown: Unknown Skies

By John Sharpe

Each year alto saxophonist Rob Brown brings a project to NYC's annual Vision Festival. Among the most raw and compelling was this stellar trio, featuring pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Nasheet Waits, which graced the 2009 gathering but had gone unrecorded, until now. Fortunately the voguish Paris-based Rogue Art imprint has issued a fine live recording from the 2010 Sons d'hiver festival in that city, which regularly presents highlights from the New York jamboree. His chosen format echoes ...

Rob Brown Trio: Live at Firehouse 12

By Jeff Stockton

Alto saxophonist Rob Brown has the lean physique and worried forehead of a typical free jazz improviser, but through his associations with the leading forces of the downtown scene (including Matthew Shipp and, most fruitfully, William Parker) he has positioned himself as an in-demand sideman as well as a creative and ear-catching leader. He has been a mainstay in the groups put together by Parker and has arguably done his most intensely impressive work with the Quartet, as well as ...

Right Hemisphere: Right Hemisphere

By Florence Wetzel

In the early '80s, saxophonist Rob Brown and pianist Matthew Shipp played as a duo, eventually forming a quartet with William Parker on bass and Whit Dickey on drums and releasing the CD Points on Silkheart in 1990. Flash-forward to the present, where Joe Morris has taken over the bass chair, and the group has released this altogether excellent, eponymous follow-up. The eleven songs explore a wide range of moods, including the meditative “Red in Gray," urgently ...

Rob Brown: No More "Mr. Avant Garde"

By John Sharpe

Alto saxophonist Rob Brown would feature highly on most people's lists of modern purveyors of reed magic. Leading New York avant-garde bassist William Parker has featured Brown for the last fifteen years, and Brown has been associated, both as sideman and leader, with other well-known modern jazz musicians including Matthew Shipp, Joe Morris and Whit Dickey.

A recent example is the group Right Hemisphere. He has also recorded and worked alongside such luminaries as Cecil Taylor, ...

Rob Brown: Crown Trunk Root Funk

By John Sharpe

One-off assemblages can be hit or miss affairs, but so powerful was saxophonist Rob Brown's ensemble at the 2006 Vision Festival that it was deemed essential that they were brought into the studio. With his carefully controlled use of harmonics and split tones, allied to a quicksilver inventiveness, Brown is one of the most instantly recognizable voices in free jazz today. In pianist Craig Taborn Brown has found a like-minded spirit averse to the obvious route. Taborn's ...

Rob Brown: Crown Trunk Root Funk

By Lyn Horton

The function of liner notes is to bring the listener closer to the music. They need not be very broad in scope. Some of the most straightforward liner notes are often the most useful. For they do not impose layers of unnecessary skin to peel away in order to reach their point. After all, the music is the point. Rob Brown wrote the liner notes for his quartet's recording Crown Trunk Root Funk. In their humility and simplicity lies a ...

Rob Brown Ensemble: Crown Trunk Root Funk

By Troy Collins

After its successful premier at the 2006 Vision Festival, alto saxophonist Rob Brown took his newest ensemble into the studio to record Crown Trunk Root Funk, his first recording as a leader for AUM Fidelity. A formidable blend of funky abstraction, angular post-bop and dark impressionism, it offers an expansive view of Brown's adventurous aesthetic.

A two decade plus veteran of New York City's Downtown scene, Brown employs three of today's most in-demand sidemen in this quartet. Bandleader, ...