BRATTLEBORO — The Vermont Jazz Center at 72 Cotton Mill Hill will present a special benefit concert this Saturday starring it bass faculty member, Cameron Brown. The performane begins at 7:30 p.m., with all net proceeds going directly to the Windham County Heat Fund. For the last 21 years, the Heat Fund has raised over $1 million and aided over 2,000 local families.
Brown, who turned 80 in December, is considered a living legend who has played and recorded with a who’s who in the jazz world since the mid-1960s. He is also a dedicated member of the Vermont Jazz Center community, having taught at the Summer Jazz Workshop for almost two decades. For this concert, Brown will be heard in two settings, the first as a duo with pianist, Harvey Diamond. The second is with his New York quintet, “Dannie’s Calypso,” a project whose music reflects the freedom and white-hot grooves of some of Brown’s former employers such as Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, Don Pullen & George Adams, Art Blakey, and Dannie Richmond.
The piano and bass duo came together when pianist Diamond was asked to perform in April 2016 at Mezzrow, a piano-centric bar in New York’s West Village. Diamond called Brown to join him, and, as the saying goes, “the rest is history.” To date, the two faculty members of the VJC’s Summer Jazz Workshop have played this venue a total of 15 times. They now have released two duo recordings thanks to the sponsorship of a generous patron from the Summer Workshop community.
The second set of the evening will feature a band that Brown organized to perform music that was inspired by his time in the bands of trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Dannie Richmond. Dannie’s Calypso demonstrates the breadth of Brown’s prolific history, embracing bebop, swing, tightly scripted melodies, and even free jazz. Dannie’s Calypso is chordless (without piano or guitar). Instead, the instrumentation consists of a three-horn frontline (two saxophonists and one trumpeter), plus drums, and the leader on bass.
Tickets are available online at www.vtjazz.org, by email at [email protected] and by phone 802-254-9088 ext. 1
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.reformer.com ’
