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Venue: Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Address: 500 S. Goodwin Ave. , Urbana

Cost: Flex: 28 / SC 23 / Stu 19 / UI & Yth 14 Single: 30 / SC 25 / Stu 21 / UI & Yth 16

posted 2:47 pm Jul 21
modified 4:46 pm Nov 3

The son of an African American/Choctaw serviceman and a Japanese woman who met jitterbugging to jazz in post-World War II Tokyo, Anthony Brown grew up to the soundtrack of his father’s blues and American folk records and his mother’s Japanese lullabies and children’s songs. His older brother played bass guitar with Bo Diddley’s band, and Brown has developed his own style that reflects his intercultural heritage and resonates with our world culture today.

A composer, percussionist, Guggenheim fellow, and the former director of the Smithsonian’s Jazz Oral History Project, Brown brings personal and academic expertise to this melding of Eastern and Western sounds and sensibilities in which Asian instruments inscribe American jazz. In this concert, the orchestra delivers reimagined, redefined Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin works on the erhu (two-string Chinese violin), shakuhachi (Japanese flute), and suona (Chinese trumpet), along with the brass and reeds of a typical jazz orchestra. Brown notes that he and most of the other musicians were “trained in jazz as well as Asian music so we’re able to bring in two languages. And a household with two languages is a much richer one.”

Amazingly inventive and equally satisfying, the work of Brown and his orchestra is resonating across the country. Downbeat magazine rated Monk’s Moods a “five-star masterpiece” and one of the four best CDs of 2003.

To give a final stir to this musical mix, the performance will include an on-stage conversation between Brown and Scott Schwartz, archivist of the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music at the U of I, a Smithsonian Affiliate.

Concert Prep, 6:15pm, Foellinger Great Hall, free

For more information, visit:
www.anthonybrown.org/aao.html