Marion Brown Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun LP 1970 Import ECM Braxton Corea Maupin
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Marion Brown Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun LP 1970 Import ECM Braxton Corea Maupin
Unique and Original super duper fantastic very avant-guard
Afternoon of a Georgia Faun is an album by American jazz saxophonist Marion Brown recorded on August 10, 1970 and released on ECM later that year. The sextet features fellow saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Bennie Maupin, pianist Chick Corea, and vocalists Jeanne Lee and Gayle Palmore, backed by two percussionists on one side and five on the other.
In an interview regarding the recording, Brown stated that the sound world of the album was related to "things that I saw and heard each day going from my house to school, church, visiting, roaming with my dog and a BB gun looking for birds to shoot... It was also... the things my ears enjoyed: birds singing outside my window, dogs barking, a rooster crowing in the morning, crickets in the summer, the sound of people having a good time in one of the houses where those good times are had, standing outside the sanctified church at night enjoying music, and the sound of happy feet stamping furiously, in tune with the preacher and themselves."
Concerning the recording session, Chick Corea recalled: "There was so much respect for one another in the studio that... as soon as the first sounds began and we knew we were recording, everyone was in it and totally listening to one another—listening to the sounds that the others were making and always putting something in that complimented the other sound or contrasted the other sound one way or the other... That was the vibe, and it was very thick and very pleasurable."
Andrew Cyrille reflected: "I don’t remember Marion saying, 'Stop. No. Do this, do that.' He just accepted what was going on... He just asked us to go ahead and play, and that's what we did...Everybody was kind of focused on him spiritually."
Difficult as it may be for younger listeners to believe, there was a time when ECM released adventurous improvised music. Back near its inception in the early '70s, the label issued a wide variety and decent number of challenging avant-garde recordings that represented some of the most forward-looking musical thinkers of the time. One of these was Marion Brown, who, at the time of this session, was about midway between his extreme post- Coltrane explorations and the luscious, down-home evocations of Georgia that he would create for Impulse! over the next few years. He gathered 11 musicians, including a couple from the then current Miles Davis Bitches Brew band (Chick Corea and Bennie Maupin), the then little-known Anthony Braxton, Andrew Cyrille, and the late great vocalist Jeanne Lee for two side-long, wide-ranging pieces. The first, the title track, is a wonderful, percussive evocation of pastoral Georgia, something along the lines of what the Art Ensemble of Chicago were doing around the same time, but without the satire and with a greater sense of serenity. As the flutes, reeds, voice, and piano enter, there is no idea of "soloing"; instead, each contributes to the ongoing, evolving texture of the piece, creating a fabric that's as cohesive as it is unplanned. The remaining cut, "Djinji's Corner," is a bit more fleshed out, a little more "traditional" in one way, though still quite unusual for the time. Again, a reference point might be Art Ensemble works from around the same time, here a mélange of free horns and intense percussion, with Jeanne Lee soaring over the top, mixing words and glossolalia, similar to her stellar work on Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill. The effect is more eerie and spiritually infused than the preceding piece, with keening, bowed cymbals and deep pulses from the lower clarinet family. It gradually builds to something of a frenzy, but in an unforced manner that shows it to be merely another approach to the territory explored earlier. Afternoon of a Georgia Faun is a lovely, inspired album, a key work in Marion Brown's oeuvre and a recording that belongs in any collection of contemporary jazz.
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