Collection: Marion Brown

Marion Brown grew up in Atlanta, the grandson of an escaped slave from Georgia's Sea Islands, and spent his life moving between that Southern inheritance and the furthest edges of the jazz avant-garde. He joined the Army in 1953, played clarinet in a band stationed on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, studied music at Clark College and then pre-law at Howard University, and arrived in New York in 1962. Archie Shepp introduced him to John Coltrane, and in June 1965 Brown was one of eleven musicians on the "Ascension" session, a forty-minute collective improvisation that remains one of the most radical recordings in jazz history. His own ESP-Disk sessions followed, and then his first Impulse! recording as a leader, "Three for Shepp" (1966), with Grachan Moncur III and Kenny Burrell. In 1967 he moved to Paris, where encounters with African music, Impressionist painting and the music of Erik Satie pulled his thinking in new directions. When he returned to the United States in 1970, the result was "Afternoon of a Georgia Faun" (ECM, 1970), recorded with Bennie Maupin, Chick Corea, Anthony Braxton and Jeanne Lee: an album that sounded nothing like the free jazz he had made in New York, built instead on gentle, layered textures and childhood memories of the Georgia landscape. Two further Impulse! albums completed what became known as the Georgia trilogy: "Geechee Recollections" (1973) and "Sweet Earth Flying" (1974), both drawing on the poetry of Jean Toomer. A later run of Baystate recordings made in Tokyo and New York documented him in smaller settings, including the Johnny Hodges tribute "Passion Flower" (1978) with Stanley Cowell, Reggie Workman and Roy Haynes. Brown died in Hollywood, Florida on 18 October 2010, aged 79.