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On Monday, July 24, an audience at Stanford California’s Campbell Recital Hall were treated to the rustic cadence of the voices of southern quilters juxtaposed with stirring arrangements of drums, guitar, saxophone and electronic instruments. Improvised saxophone solos will travel alongside the voices of Japanese workers and Black churchgoers, and lush chords and driving grooves will converse with field recordings from the early 1900s.
Jaimeo Brown Transcendence, featuring drummer and composer Jaimeo Brown not only showcases the group’s distinctive style of jazz, but also provides audiences with important history lessons surrounding the genre’s roots and power. For this show, Brown was joined by Transcendence co-collaborator Chris Sholar on guitar and electronics and saxophonist Howard Wiley.
The Transcendence project centers around a rereading of jazz history. While dominant narratives about the genre focus on New Orleans as the style’s birthplace, Brown seeks to draw attention to the often overlooked influences of the Black church on jazz, and American music more broadly. Through the innovative use of sampling and an extensive library of field recordings of spirituals, work songs and everyday life, Brown said he hopes to use Transcendence to re-center Black life and spirituality within today’s jazz; the project’s upcoming concert at Stanford promises to do the same.
The project’s first record, also called “Transcendence,” was released in 2013, and focuses on recordings of primarily spirituals from Black communities in Gee’s Bend, Alabama.
“The album was really dedicated to the Gee’s Bend community and those spirituals in general,” Brown said. “The second album was more about the ideas of work songs in general. And so I ended up going to the Library of Congress and Sony and the Black History Museum and started to use some of that material that I would find on reel to convert into digital and use as sampling material. To help tell these stories for me, it was important to kind of use a lot of the original voices and sounds of those work songs because there’s a certain quality of sound within the human voice that is so distinct in those older recordings, that I don’t hear in contemporary voice characteristics. I got the chance to explore that.”
Through the process of recording and performing these two albums, Brown said he began to discover the universality of his work and the importance of the stories he was highlighting beyond the Black community.
“When I was performing this music, people of all different cultures would come up to me and start to share some of their histories and stories,” Brown said. “In the first two albums, I’m also trying to make connections between the work songs of other cultures and how there are a lot of common denominators in folk music that bind us together, and that this music demonstrates. These are the common grounds that I like to emphasize in a time when there seems to be so much division.”
While work on the Transcendence project deepened Brown’s understanding of the connection between spirituality and jazz music, his early years, in both the Bay Area and New York, solidified the place of both music and spirituality within his understanding of the genre.
“Both of my parents are jazz musicians,” Brown said. “When they couldn’t find a babysitter, I would be put in a backpack, sometimes during gigs when they would play together. So I’d actually be on stage. And so being around music and musicians and performances, that’s just something that I’ve experienced my whole life, and so I’ve always felt at home in that atmosphere and environment. I eventually decided to move to New York, for the dream of being able to create something that combined the elements that deeply motivated me about music. John Coltrane was a huge influence because he integrated his music into his spiritual practice. And so when he was playing music or he was practicing music, it wasn’t just about the music itself. It was something that was attached to his spirituality. And that idea is why I was excited and why I am excited about music.”
These connections, between history, music and spirituality, are something that Brown hopes to emphasize in his work, both as a performer and as an educator; he returns to the Stanford Jazz Workshop this year as a faculty member as well as a performer with the hopes of transmitting some of his knowledge of the forgotten history of this music to his students and audiences.
“I hope people come to understand the importance of the African American experience in context to all American music,” Brown said. “All American music. Without the spirituals or the work songs, without that struggle, there would be no rock’n’roll, there would be no jazz, there would be no electronic. There would be no none of this.”
Beyond just intervening in dominant historical narratives, Brown said he also hopes to provide his audiences with an appreciation for the purpose of music, as a form of spirituality, healing, community building and power.
“There’s a lot underneath the surface that I wasn’t taught about, within the contemporary jazz education models,” Brown said. “Yes, the mechanics are important and … you can study those mechanics, but if you don’t understand the purpose of the music, the purpose of the mechanics, then you’re going to miss a lot of the richness and reward I believe, which is the idea that music can be used for things much greater than just performance. And I believe that the world needs to hear that and the world needs to know that.”
www.jaimeobrown.com
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