Alto Saxophone | 1931-2010

Marion Brown arrived in New York in 1962 already shaped by the Georgia landscape he had grown up in, by two years in an army band in Japan, and by a parallel interest in pre-law studies at Howard University that gave him a writer's analytical instinct alongside a musician's ear. Archie Shepp introduced him to Coltrane, and he was on the "Ascension" session in 1965, one of eleven musicians improvising collectively for forty minutes in a recording that remains among the most extreme things jazz has committed to tape. His own ESP-Disk sessions and the Impulse! debut "Three for Shepp" (1966) placed him firmly in the New York free jazz scene before he relocated to Paris in 1967, where African music, Impressionist art and the works of Erik Satie pulled his thinking somewhere quieter. The ECM album "Afternoon of a Georgia Faun" (1970), recorded with Bennie Maupin, Chick Corea, Anthony Braxton and Jeanne Lee, sounded nothing like his New York work: layered, slow and deeply rooted in memories of the South. Two Impulse! records completed what became the Georgia trilogy, "Geechee Recollections" (1973) and "Sweet Earth Flying" (1974), both drawing on the poet Jean Toomer. A later series of Baystate albums made in Japan, including "Passion Flower" (1978) with Stanley Cowell, Reggie Workman and Roy Haynes, documented a quieter and more lyrical side of his playing. Brown died on 18 October 2010 in Hollywood, Florida, aged 79.