Trumpeter Tom Browne offers a modern urban twist on some soulful classics with R’n’Browne (Hip Bop HIBD 8020; 52:19), a finely crafted, detailed effort. Browne’s retro-to-modern vibe is expressed best on tunes like “Back to Life,” which he reinvents as a bass and piano-driven, hard-bustling funk romp. Mysterious, smooth harmonies swing the familiar vocal refrain as an otherworldly chant. A similar mystery element is present in Browne’s read on Frankie Beverly’s “Joy and Pain,” which pits a big beat hip-hop chug rhythm against Browne’s lithe, free flowing and somewhat artsy trumpet play. Browne works a gentler retro-style on a pair of reverent ballads-beautiful full-horn orchestration sets off the masterful alto of Dianne Reeves perfectly for “Someday We’ll Be Free,” and light acoustic guitar augments Browne’s musing flugelhorn melody on “Un-Break My Heart” for a bittersweet reflective feel. The trumpeter may save the most unusual treat for last, however, with a puff of modern psychedelia on Jimi Hendrix’s immortal “The Wind Cries Mary,” fanned by a unique wah-effect electric trumpet and spindly Fender Rhodes.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading

Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading

Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time