Search - Maurice Brown :: Hip to Bop

Hip to Bop is unusually sophisticated and timeless for a debut album. Trumpeter Maurice Brown's original pulse-quickening compositions will make die-hard jazz fans feel like they're listening to a long-lost album by the Miles Davis Quintet, while causing others to exclaim, ''This is jazz?!'' In the first track, Rapture, the thumping heartbeat of the bass will envelop your ears, and then quietly explode into a melodic cacophony of horns, drums, and piano. But just as Maurice quickens your pulse, he'll then pepper your ear with a soulful groove in It's a New Day, before letting you catch your breath with a caressing melody, Mi Amor. It's at this point you realize this is no ordinary jazz trumpeter and this is certainly no ordinary contemporary jazz album. In A Call for All Angels, Anazao, Conceptions, and Look Ma No Hands, he illustrates his ability to create a comfort zone from the ballad to the virtuoso. In the album's liner notes, jazz great Ellis Marsalis proclaims, ''Hip to Bop is an appropriate title for a CD that employs background riffs, wide intervals in the melody, a trumpet solo with a wah wah pedal all combined to connect the modern idiom to the BeBop tradition. He is paying homage to the past with elements of the present serving as the foundation for future concepts. Such is the tasteful compositional technique of Maurice Brown.'' Without a doubt, Hip to Bop belongs in the musical library of every music lover.