Brian Brown (musician)


Brian Ernest Austin Brown OAM was an Australian jazz musician and educator. He played the soprano and tenor saxophones, flutes, synthesizers, panpipes and a leather bowhorn designed by Garry Greenwood. In 1993 he was awarded the Order of Australia for service to the performing arts as a jazz performer, educator and composer.

Biography

Brian Brown was born in Melbourne, Australia. He performed as a soloist and with his own ensembles since the mid-1950s throughout Australia and in Scandinavia, US, Japan, UK, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Brunei and Germany. He played only original music. A self-taught player who emerged in the '50s as a leading figure in Australia and remained prominent through the 1980s. According to Allmusic "Brown was one of first Australian musicians to develop a reputation for highly personal, individualistic style that was intense, lyrical and not simple imitation of an American great."
In early 1956 Brown returned to Melbourne from Europe and formed a new Hard Bop band with like-minded players – drummer Stewie Speer, trumpeter Keith Hounslow, schoolboy pianist Dave Martin and bassist Barry Buckley. The Brian Brown Quintet were regulars at Horst Liepolt's influential Jazz Centre 44 in St Kilda, which operated from 1955 to 1960. The band were enthusiastic ambassadors for bop, introducing Melburnians to a musical style which was still largely unheard in Australia.
Brown made eight albums over an 18-year period heading various groups. He toured Europe with his Australian Jazz Ensemble in 1978, and also led groups doing experimental and original classical pieces from 1980 to 1986. He founded the Improvisation Studies course at the Victorian College of the Arts, where he taught from 1978 until his retirement in 1998. He appeared at the World Saxophone Congress in Tokyo in 1988, with Tony Gould. In June 1993 Brown was awarded the Order of Australia for service to the performing arts as a jazz performer, educator and composer.

Discography