Mel Brown

[RainyDay]

Mel is from my hometown. Last time I saw him was at Yoshi's with Jessica Williams. Great drummer, just the best. If you can catch him at Jimmy Mak's in Portland, you are really in for a treat.

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Mel Brown: Jazzman riffs from limelight to green eyeshade

THE MONDAY PROFILE Daylighting drummer
Monday, April 18, 2005 MARTY HUGHLEY

Mel Brown strides briskly up the curving staircase at Salty's on the Columbia, lugging a variety of large black nylon bags. The bag slung over his left shoulder holds cymbals, the one in his left hand, a tom-tom. In his right hand, he carries perhaps 40 pounds of hardware, the stands for his drum kit .

Early on a weekday afternoon, the upscale seafood restaurant is nearly empty. Brown greets the hostesses and bartenders with a warm smile as he sets up for a trio gig there later in the evening. But there's much to do before the music starts. Already, he's been running errands: Long known as a natty dresser, he's picked up a batch of freshly pressed clothes from a dry cleaner. And things have been so busy at his second job that he's had to zip into the Hollywood District to order a new box of business cards at a Kinko's.

As soon as the drums are arranged just so, Brown hops back into his powder-blue Cadillac and heads to Gresham, to a small nondescript office building that houses Metropolitan Accounting and Tax. With the federal income tax filing deadline looming, this is an important stop for Brown.

Sure, he's Portland's most beloved and in-demand jazz musician, leading different bands five nights a week. But he's also a tax preparer and bookkeeper coming to work. Daylighting, you might think of it.

And unlikely as the pairing might seem, in Mel Brown the freewheeling spirit of jazz and the dry precision of accounting dance elegantly together, as though made for each other.

Brown's musical career has taken him around the world as a drummer for the Temptations and other Motown acts in the 1960s and '70s and later as a longtime member of Diana Ross' touring band. For the past two decades, the Portland native has been a linchpin of the city's jazz scene, leading a handful of popular and highly accomplished bands.

In 1989, the Mel Brown Sextet, a hard bop group modeled after Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, won a nationwide competition that earned it an opening slot in the prestigious Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. Now a septet, that band carries on with regular Tuesday night shows at the Pearl District club Jimmy Mak's.

The club hosts the more fun-loving, soul-oriented Mel Brown B-3 Organ Band on Thursdays. Wednesdays, it's home to what Brown calls his "most creative" group, a finely tuned straight-ahead jazz quartet with pianist Tony Pacini, guitarist Dan Balmer and bassist Ed Bennett.

This Wednesday, the quartet will celebrate the release of a CD, "Girl Talk," which Brown calls one of the favorite things he's ever recorded.

Part of what's special about Brown's various bands is their broad appeal. It's common to find Jimmy Mak's packed with everyone from white-haired, jazz-purist retirees to dreadlocked young jam-band fans and even high schoolers. Tuesday and Wednesday shows start early so underage fans, often aspiring musicians, can catch a set before curfew.

Much of this appeal comes down to Brown's skill, style and charisma on the bandstand.

"You can be a total ignoramus about jazz drumming and yet know that he's outstanding," says drummer Ron Steen, another of the jazz community's central figures. The great jazz drummers, he says, have one thing in common: "They all make you think that nothing more right could have been played at that moment than what they just played. And Mel is one of those. . . . He's exceptional among exceptional drummers. He's a state treasure."

"Mel really wants to connect with the audience," says pianist Gordon Lee, a co-founder of the septet. "It's much more important to Mel than to a lot of other great musicians I've worked with, who want to do their thing and just hope the audience likes it. I think that's the reason he works five or six nights a week and always has. It's like he needs to be there, playing for the audience."

Syncopating tax tables

Metropolitan Tax, with its wood paneling, faded blue carpet and overhead fluorescence, feels a long way from the limelight. Yet Brown's just as upbeat there as when he's making music. He settles his compact frame into an office chair, turns on the chair's vibrate feature to keep his lower back loose, pops on a pair of reading glasses from Costco. He pores over a stack of papers, answers phone calls, checks e-mails. Behind the chair sits a 40-gallon paper lawn-debris bag, stuffed with shredded documents.

But the office also hints at Brown's other life. A poster pinned to a room divider announces the Western Oregon University/Mel Brown Summer Jazz Workshop, set for Aug. 7-13. In addition to helping organize the event, Brown spends Mondays teaching at the campus in Monmouth. He gives private lessons, too, on Saturdays at Allegra Drumcrafters on Southeast Woodstock Boulevard. The company makes his drums, and he keeps its books.

Juggling all the jobs requires flexibility. After a few hours in the office, he gathers some papers into his briefcase so he can deal with them over the weekend in his home office. "I'm going to drop by the house and refresh a little bit before the gig at Salty's," he says.

Just after 5 p.m., he gets back to the Northeast Portland house he shares with Shirley, his wife of 13 years. Showtime is less than two hours away. Here's how he refreshes himself: He changes into some old clothes and a pair of plastic goggles, then goes out to mow the front lawn. The grass looks barely 2 inches tall.

"Oh, it never gets this long," Shirley remarks, glancing through the living room window. "The rain just caught him off guard the past few days."

"Are you going to talk about him vacuuming the sidewalk?" asks Carmell Fitz, Brown's stepdaughter. Then she imitates the way Brown shook with anticipation when he got a fancy new edger: no more fine-tuning the lawn on his knees with a pair of scissors.

Such fastidiousness might seem like compulsive behavior. "But for him, it's just what he likes doing," says Louis Pain, the organist in Brown's Thursday night band. "He told me once that he really enjoys ironing."

"He does everything well and loves everything he does," Shirley says. "I think that's the key: He's a happy person."

But even she wonders why he does so much. "He goes like that rabbit," she says, meaning the mechanical bunny in the Energizer ads. "He's 60, and I tell him it's time to change that battery. He has just two speeds: fast and stop."

Tempo always set on fast

Brown says he's always kept busy. At Washington High School, Brown played quarterback, going up against future NFL star Mel Renfro of Jefferson High. He used drumming to relax, to work out the inevitable muscle kinks from football. That is, when he wasn't working with his hands another way, repairing the rental houses his father often bought.

In a tight-knit family of six, there always was someone to keep him on task. "I had all those older sisters watching me," he says. "They'd give me a whuppin' before Mom or Dad came home."

Between the big fun and the tough love, he learned to enjoy hard work. He recalls the advice his father gave him at graduation: "Be the best you can possibly be at whatever you want to do. But don't step on anybody's toes to get there. You have to earn it, and then nobody can ever take it away from you."

So, after cutting his teeth in Portland clubs for a few years, Brown began touring. Backing guitarist Tommy Chong (later famous as part of the comedy team Cheech & Chong) at a club in Vancouver, B.C., he was "discovered" by comic Redd Foxx.

Foxx, who was in town opening for Motown's Martha and the Vandellas, came into the club and was so impressed by Brown that he called singer Martha Reeves at her hotel and told her she had to hear this young drummer. Soon he was part of the stable of jazz-bred musicians that crafted the Motown sound, both on the road and in the studio.

He sacrificed greater national recognition when he returned to Portland in 1975 and opened a popular drum shop. But as his parents neared the end of their lives, he said, he "wanted to come back to show them how much I appreciated them."

Returning also allowed him to repay a debt. In the 1960s, Portland singer "Sweet Baby James" Benton turned his garage into a musicians' hangout, with barbecue outside and regular jam sessions inside.

"That's where I really learned to play," Brown says. "A lot of the older guys like Cleve Williams and Bobby Bradford, they told me, 'We'll show you. But it's your job, once you get it all together, to pass it on down.' "

"Snap, crackle and pop"

On a Wednesday night at Jimmy Mak's, Brown takes a break and sits at a counter, sipping a tall drink -- watered-down orange juice. But he's quickly engaged by a fan, a musician who wants to start a gospel-jazz project with him. He talks himself up and needles Brown repeatedly for not returning a phone call. Brown smiles, nods, politely says, "We'll see what happens," but otherwise can't get a word in edgewise.

Though shy by nature, even when cornered he gives no sign of irritation, only graciousness. Finally, he escapes back to the bandstand, and the magic of Mel appears.

He sits at the drums, his back finishing-school straight. His left knee swivels outward like a metronome as he works the pedal of his high-hat cymbal. The sticks seem to dance in his hands of their own accord, betrayed only by efficient movements of his forearms and a few fingers. He sets a crisply swinging groove yet finds room to answer his bandmates' improvisations with variations of his own, trading knowing glances and laughs. A collector of drum-technique books, Brown is, as organist Pain puts it, "snap, crackle and pop" precise.

When he switches to brushes for ballads, the sound is low and soothing, yet the rhythm remains emphatic. He aims, he says, for a sound like gentle ocean tides. His solos unfold like short stories, concise and colorful, ingeniously structured, never the jumble of disconnected ideas and purposeless flash that give drum solos a bad name.

And always, below his salt-and-pepper mustache, as neatly trimmed as his lawn, beams a smile of pride and joy you'd expect to see on a little boy strutting safe to home plate.

"Sometimes musicians look so serious that folks don't even know if it's OK to clap," Brown says. "They're busy thinking, 'Am I hip enough to get this?' But with me, sitting up there all teeth, they'll think, 'He sure is having a good time! I may as well, too.' "

And as long as everyone's having a good time, Mel Brown, like that bunny, keeps going and going and going . . .

Marty Hughley: 503-221-8383; martyhughley@news.oregonian.com

[JazzJunkie]

That was fun Rainy, thanks for posting!