Mel Brown / Painting by Diane Russell
Editor’s note: This was published on OMN’s first day. Not many folks saw it. Now that we’re pretty popular, I wanted to give it another shot.
Start with drummer and leader Mel Brown and Thara Memory, the band’s Musical Director.
Thara knows how it happens but he says, “I’m not telling that. I’m not telling THAT. I’m not telling it.”
A little later he says, “I believe in that thing that Elvin Jones said. Someone asked him ‘How come you guys sound like that when Trane plays?’ He said, ‘Because we’re willing to die for one another.’ And so when I hit the bandstand, that’s what I expect from everybody, that they’re willing to die for one another that night.
“That’s the real reason.”
That’s the conclusion. Here’s the beginning and middle.
The Tuesday night band / The Mel Brown Septet
Personnel from left to right if you’re facing the stage:
Gordon Lee
Gordon Lee, piano
Gordon Lee is the kind of pianist who always surprises. There is a distinct pleasure in hearing any musician and never really knowing what’s coming next. It is the thrill of discovery and it’s why we sit and listen, as opposed to getting up and dancing, although there is the kind of dancing you do in your seat when you find your leg is moving in time and you don’t remember starting to move it.
Anticipating a Gordon Lee solo is like anticipating a journey you know will take you someplace you’ve never been before and bring you home happy.
Stan Bock, trombone
Stan Bock is a big ole bald bone player whose personality reflects his instrument. He’s got something to say, and goddamn it, you’re going to listen. You have to, it’s a trombone. His occasional scatting is in the same vein.
Warren Rand, alto saxophone
Warren Rand is on the same wavelength as Lee. He’s brainy and his solos are short but leave you breathless.
Thara Memory / Painting by Diane Russell
Thara Memory, trumpet (Musical Director)
Brilliant composer, performer, teacher, trickster, musical psychologist, muse and Mel Brown notwithstanding, the reason this band is what it is.
Derek Sims, trumpet
Derek Sims was in a tough spot. He replaced Thara Memory when Thara became incapacitated. His personality is totally different. He isn’t flamboyant, but he has monster technique from his training as a classical trumpeter. He doesn’t try to do too much. The role of the trumpet in the band has changed but certainly not for the worse.
Renato Caranto, tenor saxophone
Renato Caranto is full of soul. The other members of the band call him “Soulfinger,” and they count on him to express the heart of the band.
Andre St. James
Andre St. James is a wonderful bassist in a town of virtuoso bass players. His combination of rhythmic heft and acute interplay with Brown can often get lost in the blasting of the horns. Worth focusing on him for those reasons alone.
Mel Brown, drums
He has what Memory calls, “Actual accurate rhythm.” He started out in Portland playing behind strippers, moved quickly into the upper-echelons of drummers as a very young man, was on the road with Motown’s Diana Ross and the Temptations. Came back to Portland and formed the basis of this band 25 years ago with Memory, Lee, bassist Tim Gilson, and saxophonist Michael York.
Sitting in on tenor and alto saxophone:
Was one of Warren Rand’s students. Began sitting in with the band at age 15. Left to attend and graduate from the Manhattan School of Music. Came back and is very active in several bands.
Disclosure: John is Webmaster for Oregon Music News
Note: Jof Lee is on piano.
In the mid-1980s Brown was getting tired of the road and wanted to settle back in full-time in Portland. He had been playing with Thara Memory for over a decade in bands of all sizes and during that time the two of them had developed a musical telepathy that they had not found with anyone else.
When Brown came home, he and Memory started a new band, a quintet with Lee, Gilson and York. The unspoken communication between Brown and Memory strengthened. “Mel and I could play all night long without talking to each other,” Memory said. “That’s the truth. We just started practicing the band to do that.”
Let’s hear from Thara, Mel, Gordon, Warren and John on just how things work:
Mission Statement:
Thara: All of our moves are to feature Mel Brown. It doesn’t matter how well they solo. Everybody solos anyway. It’s like having that bowl of soup and putting Mel Brown in the middle. If you get some splashed on you that’s really cool.
At the beginning:
Gordon: 1986 was another world. Mel called me to do a gig at the Hobbit, the primary jazz club in 1986. 39th & Holgate. Notorious club. Very mixed audience. Lot of social backgrounds. I thought we were just going in for 2 weekends. Our gig got extended again and again.
Thara: I was playing with Mel 15 years before the Hobbit.In the early days we had lots of configurations of this band. We had a mean big band. We were settled about playing together. I just wasn’t going to let go. By the time we got to the Hobbit we were one of the better bands in the country.
Mel: I had been playing in Motown, Diana Ross and The Tempts but I was ready to get off that road.
Stan Bock
Stan: First time I heard the 5 piece band in the 80s, I was still on active duty and the Air Force Big Band that I was directing at the time played right before them. So I was in the audience and I was dumbfounded. This is amazing!
Gordon: I think there are different stories about that. We played at the Mt. Hood jazz festival and we only had 45 minutes. We wanted to show what we can do, why don’t we segue from one song to another, who needs to hear the end? So then other musicians would say, “Oh yeah that’s the band that doesn’t know how to end a song.” It started out of necessity. I had heard bands do that before. I saw Sun Ra segue for 3 hours and Art Blakey had done that. Mel really like it and he said let’s start.
Mel: I had been playing that way in soul and R&B bands for a long time.
How DO they play non-stop like that?:
Thara: This is an early James Brown concept. It’s how he pulls it off. I paid a price to learn how to do this. You can do it several ways. All I know is that there are things that have to hook up for it to happen and if they don’t hook up, they don’t hook up, it ain’t happening. You’ve got different levels of things happening. You got your lower level, you’ve got your middle level and then you’ve got you highest level.
Gordon: The technical problem is all about how you join one song to another. Because we all were willing to put the time in we figured out ways to do it. Thara figured out ways. After we did it so many times and we got used to it, we could do it without rehearsing. For a long time, we tried out a bunch of different approaches in rehearsal until we found one that worked. Making a seamless show was very time consuming.
Warren Rand
Warren: We put in the necessary rehearsal time. If you get in with Thara Memory and you give him some time then he’ll start sculpting. He’s a musical sculptor and a presenter like very few I’ve ever worked with. How do we present this music? What do we want them to see? How do we want them to see it? What the audience gets is something that he’s always been particularly good at sensing. How to we make the music our own? What do we need? We have six people in this band and every one of them needs to be featured. What is it each one of them is best at doing?
Stan: We have a two inch thick book that you see up there of 200 tunes. We don’t have any idea when we hit the stage of what we want to do. Thara would read the audience to see what the audience would like. He’s looking at the audience and seeing what they need. It’s a delicate ballet because he’s also seeing what the musicians on stage need and he’s trying to reconcile those two things.
Gordon: We learned a lot in the rehearsal process. Usually it’ll be one soloist who has a cadenza – an a capella solo – and they will set up the next song. But we started to bounce it around. Sometimes I might be piano or drums or one of the horns. Thara was getting more and more into his conducting thing and we got into the practice of not having a full count-off to get into the song and that meant we watched Thara to give the downbeat. That’s what classical orchestras do all the time. Eventually all of us would do that. These are basic conductor skills.
Thara: The only thing I will say is that I have a knack for bringing the best out of any individual player. And I won’t tell you how. Once I find out how the cat thinks, I won’t tell you how I use it. That’s the whole thing. That’s what we do. I’ve seen other people try it, and they give it up real soon. You know why? Because it’s not a holistic approach.
They’re out there having fun and entertaining and tearing up the stuff. I want to play in a band like that. I want to play in a band where work doesn’t seem like work. When they get there, you just put it on them. Play till you can’t play no more
Getting from one tune to the next:
John: There’s a whole system of communication that goes on onstage. The first and most obvious type is how the group communicates the choice of a song. Sometimes this is just the musical director calling out the name. Other times, it’s a hand signal.
Stan: If we’re doing Hammerhead, we make a fist and hit ourselves on the head with it. If you see somebody looking like their putting a big glove on hand, that’s Hand In Glove, a Cedar Walton tune.
Gordon: Moose the Mooche is a hand held up over the back of the head like moose antlers
Warren: Wayne Shorter’s tune called Tom Thumb is somebody’s thumb up in the air like you were hitchhiking. Two fingers behind my head is Gordon Lee’s song Sitting Bull.
Stan: Gordon is the master of the musical segue. He’ll take a cadenza that might last even ten minutes but we actually hear the tune in his cadenza. Mel Brown will take a drum solo and he’ll play the tune where we’re headed in his drum solo.
John: Sometimes, it’s left up to Gordon to play a segue on the piano. If they’re looking for a quicker change, the next song might get counted in during the last couple of bars of the previous one, making the change more of a jolt when suddenly there’s a completely different song in a new tempo. The audience seems to like that one in particular. Mel will often play a drum into leading into the next song where the melody is hidden somewhere in his solo, often on the bass drum or snare. Since the audience isn’t always listening, it feels like magic when the band knows where to come in without anyone counting it out-loud.
Besides calling tunes, there’s also the musical interaction. There are a lot of little hooks and games that soloists will play – quoting songs, playing certain rhythms, etc. Mel is always lightning-quick at picking those things up and responds on the drums almost instantly. Watch Gordon and Mel specifically and you’ll see this go on all night, even when Gordon isn’t even soloing, but is just comping behind someone else.
Warren: If you’re playing a slow tune, you can subdivide it, double the tempo to get to another song. That takes care of one situation: the tempo change between the two. If it’s metrically related, it’s simple. Then all you have to do is be in the right key and play the right first few notes. Sometimes you just have to remember just how the band plays the song and even though it might have nothing to do with the previous composition in any way, you just sort of remember it and go there. You have to do that while the other song is still going.
Thara: I rehearse the next tune while we’re playing. I can be rehearsing something in the middle of playing and then go on to the next thing and rehearse the thing in the middle of it and go on. I actually don’t really know how I do it. I was just trained to do it. You have to find people who you can do it with.
I can look at Mel and he knows instantly he knows what tempo I’m going to. I have to signal the other people, but Mel already knows.
Taking solos:
Stan: This band couldn’t happen unless we had a lot of regard for each other. Any thinking musician can see that there are a lot of tunes that we all would like to solo on but that isn’t going to work. We all sacrifice. We haven’t heard from Renato in a half-an-hour. He really needs to play on this tune. Even though I want to, he needs to play on this tune. We need to hear him.
Every once in a while Thara will direct where the solo goes, but most of the time the band recognizes this guy needs to play now. It’s a no-ego band. Nobody feels like they have to hog the spotlight.
Gordon: There’s an unspoken protocol. We’re all equal here, we have different roles but everyone should get their own space to solo. I can’t think of any other kind of music that does that so blatantly. If you violate that, just stomp and play whatever you want regardless of what else is going on, it’s considered gross and offensive by the other musicians.
Sometimes we’ll be nice and say, “OK, you go next.” But there are times when Derek and Warren will cue me and Renato will suddenly start a solo. And if he gets in there too convincingly before I’ve started, I have to back out. Or I can just stomp in and fight it out with him, but there’s the risk of hurt feelings. It could be between any combination of us.
On Thara Memory and Mel Brown:
Gordon: He figured out his own sound early on plus he has so much experience directing groups. He can make some very astute observations listening to us play. He brings authority. We all defer to Thara in those ways. You might say that Mel is the first guy who saw that and understood that about Thara. Mel is a behind-the-scenes leader. He’s not out there waving his arms but he’s really controlling the strings because he knows that Thara is really good at this so let Thara do his thing.
John: When I started sitting in with the band, Thara had few reservations about teaching young players a serious lesson on the bandstand, often in the form of humiliation. Keep in mind, I’m not saying that this was a bad thing. He knew that if you were a serious player and you got your butt kicked on stage, you would spend the week shedding and doing your homework so that the next week you could have a chance to redeem yourself. My clearest memory of this happening was when the band was playing Coltrane’s Moment’s Notice. Thara gestured at me to solo, but I didn’t know the tune. Thara shrugged as if to say, “Oh well, let’s see what happens.” Since I didn’t know the changes, it ended up being just me and Carlton Jackson (who was subbing for Mel that night) during the solo. It was a total disaster. But, the next week, I knew the song. I can’t even remember if I got a chance to play it again, but Thara knew that after an incident like that, I had learned an important lesson.
Warren: Thara is pure magic. He’s just magic. To be Thara Memory’s alto player is my idea of a good time. I’ve done it for years now and I’ve never been bored for a second. I’ve learned a lot of what I know about music from him. He’s past charismatic. It’s really difficult to keep your eyes off the guy and being musical director, you’re going to get more done when you have the band and the audience’s very close attention. But that wouldn’t mean anything if he didn’t have really good ideas, which he has. If you ask whether I would rather lead the band or play under the baton of Thara Memory, I get more satisfaction out of following his lead and trying to play my ass off as hard as I can when it’s my time.
Mel Brown is a little different from most people. You look at Mel Brown and you’d say, ‘There’s a man who’s done well for himself.” The thing about Mel Brown is that he does well for a LOT of people. He’s got seven people working for him every Tuesday night in little Puddle City. Nearly every night of the week he pays three to seven guys to play music.
Thara: The older Mel gets the fresher he sounds.
Mel wants to play. The other night we were playing and he got into it and the next thing Derek goes, “Now that’s the real Mel Brown, huh?” I said, “Yup.” The band needs to know that its purpose is to feature Mel Brown. You have all of these satellites around him, but it’s to feature Mel Brown and nobody doubts that.
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