Remembrance

Dannie's Calypso first came together in 2005 for a Don Cherry celebration at the Stone, the performance space founded by John Zorn. Brown, who at age 20 worked with Cherry in Europe, writes eloquently elsewhere in this package about the trumpeter's impact on his life. The name Dannie's Calypso pays homage to drummer Dannie Richmond 1931-1988, the former Charles Mingus stalwart with whom Brown traveled the world between 1979-88 in the combustible Don Pullen / George Adams Quartet, one of the best bands of the era. Remembrance was recorded on August 2, 2011, at University of the Streets, a nonprofit youth and arts organization, then located on Manhattan's Lower East Side. A single mic hanging from the ceiling captured the music, and a friend of Brown's recently prepared the digital files for release. Brown's brightly paced "Sheila, It's You!" opens the set with a stop-and-go line over the harmony of the standard "It's You or No One." The rhythm break in bars 7 and 8 winks at Ornette. Brown wrote the piece for his duet partner of 25 years, the late singer Sheila Jordan 1928-2025. The horns trade choruses, then 16s, 8s, 4s, and 2s, before group improvisation leads to a Jefferson drum solo. Brown's aggressive beat drives the bus, and his freely conceived bass lines open alternative lanes for the soloists. Parrott adopts Rigby's last motif so seamlessly in their first handoff that it's easy to miss the baton passing between them. Brown calls "Baby Suite" his magnum opus. The jaunty first theme - brief, highly syncopated, swinging - gives way to a free solo by the composer that morphs into a rubato second theme expressing darker emotions. The horns pick up the melody and mood in staggered fashion. Parrott's compelling alto solo pirouettes in many directions, shadowed by Jefferson's fiery drums. Johnson's trumpet is more introspective, while Rigby's smokey tenor sound and slippery phrasing curl around the beat, inventing magnetic melodic and rhythmic rhymes in a swinging solo that highlights the track. Brown's written material returns in varied guises, ending in a whisper. Richmond's calypso "Soft Seas, " recorded by the Pullen-Adams Quartet in 1980, features the sort of sing-song melody listeners start singing along with in the middle of the first hearing. Brown's "Lullaby for George, Don and Dannie" honors his former quartet bandmates with a heartfelt, through-composed lament in 3/4; Johnson's pensive trumpet tone and rangy solo, reminiscent of Booker Little, furthers the contemplative mood. Brown's "Rylie's Bounce, " a deceptive, quirky 24-bar blues, contains enough twists to keep you guessing and Parrott's only appearance on soprano. A haunting dirge, Brown's "For Dad and Dannie" honors two important men in his life. The misterioso, sequential theme unfolds in a 22-bar form with enigmatic harmony. Rigby plays the melody beautifully, developing it's implications through his improvisation. "Cocktail Suite, " a 20-minute tour de force of elasticity, adopts Don Cherry's strategy of linking multiple songs together in an unpredictable narrative flow of pliable written material and thematic improvisation. Cherry likely picked up the idea from working with Sonny Rollins. Cherry's indelible melody, "Remembrance, " opens the journey, followed by a fast, 32-bar, minor-key tune with a beboppish head of unknown origin - Brown thinks Cherry may have written it. Then comes Jobim's lovely "Portrait in Black and White, " Dewey Redman's free bop classic Mushi Mushi, a reprise of "Remembrance" and, finally, Cherry's "OC/DC." The music hurtles forward, backward, and sideways, and soloists alone or in multiples spin out from the ensemble like orbiting satellites. You never know what's coming next. What a gift.