Remembering the keyboardist and larger-than-life Delmar Brown on his birthday
Last week, on Feb. 20, I thought about Delmar Brown, who would’ve turned 71 on that day. The dynamic keyboardist-singer and charismatic personality whom I had come to know through his tenures with Jaco Pastorius, Gil Evans and his own band Bushrock, passed away on April 1, 2017 at the age of 63. I remember him breaking the news to me, at a Cutting Room gig of a Gil Evans alumni band, that he had been diagnosed with cancer. And in that moment I believed him when he told me: “I am gonna beat this thing!” Delmar had such a commanding persona on stage that I was convinced that his personal strength and single-minded determination would carry over to his life off stage, allowing him to beat the dreaded disease. It didn’t happen.
This remembrance of Delmar was prompted by a Facebook post from drummer Kenwood Dennard, who played alongside Delmar in Pat Martino’s Joyous Lake band of 1976-77, in Jaco’s Word of Mouth small group of 1983-84, in Gil Evans’ Monday Night Orchestra of the early ‘80s and later in Bushrock. I remember first hearing Delmar on that great 1977 Martino album, Joyous Lake. His atmospheric comping on Fender Rhodes behind Pat’s incredible guitar soloing on the title track, along with his great synth playing and wild falsetto vocals, were particularly engrossing. That album was every bit as powerful and transformative for me as Weather Report’s Heavy Weather, which also came out that same year.
I wouldn’t actually meet Delmar until after I moved to New York in 1980. He was a regular on the scene and could often be seen jamming with Jaco and Mike Stern and the like at 55 Grand, the notorious Soho club also affectionately known by the clientele as 55 Grams. By 1983, Delmar was touring in Jaco’s Word of Mouth Sextet, alongside Stern, Kenwood Dennard, percussionist Don Alias and either Melton Mustafa or Ron Tooley on trumpet and Alex Foster on saxophone. Delmar’s featured number each night was the gospel-soaked “Promise Land,” which he also wrote.
Delmar would later form Bushrock with Israeli-born electric bass phenom Yossi Fine, New Orleans drummer Ricky Sebastian and African percussionist Kahinde O'uhuro, premiering with 1985’s State of Mind.
Delmar’s longtime drumming partner Kenwood Dennard would later replace Sebastian in the Bushrock lineup.
I later saw Delmar at the 1991 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, performing in a combined Gil Evans-George Gruntz Orchestra, conducted by Quincy Jones, that backed Miles Davis on that memorable and deeply nostalgic evening.
The following day, I went with the band up to Montreux Jazz Festival founder Claude Nob’s chalet in the mountains to watch a video of the previous night’s performance. Afterwards, I ended up jamming with Delmar on organ and Kenwood on drums (me on electric bass) in Claude’s music room. I remember after playing, Gil Evans’ widow, Anita, came up to me and said, “I didn’t know you played guitar.” Which I did. But this was the bass. Maybe I was overplaying? (I blame Jaco).
In 1992, I began working on my Jaco biography, The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius: The World’s Greatest Bass Player. Among the many people I interviewed for that book was Delmar, who told me about this near-disastrous gig he had played with Jaco in Milano, Italy back in November of 1982:
That night, with 20,000 expectant Italians waiting in the audience, Jaco walked on stage barefoot to thunderous cheers and applause. He then counted off a brisk tempo, and the band kicked into Word of Mouth’s regular opener, a blazing rendition of Bronislaw Kaper’s “Invitation.” Halfway into the marathon burner, following lengthy solos by alto saxophonist Alex Foster, trumpeter Elmer Brown, and drummer Kenwood Dennard, Jaco totally turned the tone of the proceedings around by launching into a slamming rendition of “Purple Haze” before leaving the stage. To cover Jaco’s sudden absence, keyboardist Delmar Brown grabbed the audience’s attention with a riveting gospel-flavored synthesizer romp, on which he doubled his synth lines with falsetto vocals. Percussionist Carol Steele followed with a mesmerizing Afro-Cuban conga solo, which had the crowd clapping along, and then Dennard picked up the momentum with his own furious drum solo. By the time Delmar started noodling away on half-hearted versions of “Liberty City” and “Sophisticated Lady,” Jaco’s absence was quite conspicuous. Scattered whistling ensued, indicating impatience and dissatisfaction from a crowd that had come to see the ex-Weather Report bassist play his ass off.
Finally, a pissed-off Pastorius returned to the stage, grabbed the mic and announced in a snide tone, “OK, Italy, this is audition night. Who wants to play?” He then proceeded to strap on his bass and began toying with his “Slang” looping effect. Clearly, it wasn’t happening, though, and the audience was none to pleased by Jaco’s fumbling display. From there, the whole scene escalated into a confrontational fiasco. Jaco began muttering incoherently into the mic in a kind of mock gruff voice, carrying on about Jimi Hendrix and the particular key he was playing in, all of which left audience members befuddled and whistling their disapproval. This time, unfortunately, Jaco yelled back, “Shut up!,” prompting the first chorus of jeers from the audience. Jaco then tried to win them back by launching into Bach’s “Chromatic Fantasy,” but he had several false starts because his bass (which for this gig was a borrowed bass; not his favored Fender Jazz fretless but rather some el-cheapo, bright-tone fretted substitute) was slightly out of tune, causing him to stop and retune before starting the piece over from scratch. This routine was repeated a couple of times. Sensing him floundering on stage, the audience broke into a round of rhythmic clapping, as if to collectively say, “Come on, man! Get on with it!” Jaco responded defiantly by cranking up his volume to 11 and aggressively picking his way through the chops-busting Bach line so the notes crackled and distorted horribly; it was an audio “Fuck you!” to the crowd.
By now a harsh adversarial relationship had been established between Jaco and his once-adoring fans as they continued to egg each other on. When they whistled, he launched into a disjointed version of “America” (another “Fuck you!” to the Italian audience). When they jeered, he answered with a Hendrixian blast of white noise before throwing his bass down, giving the crowd the finger, and storming off the stage.With Jaco gone again, Carol Steele tried to win back the Italians with a berimbau solo, but the audience was clearly dissatisfied with the small amount of time Jaco had spent on stage. Feeling cheated, they expressed their indignation with more irate whistling. Dennard tried to drown out the hostile crowd with another unaccompanied drum solo. Finally, Jaco returned to the stage and began beating savagely on his strings with his fist while pedalling a single remedial note over and over, taunting the crowd with his sarcastic display of anti-virtuosity (as if to say, “You want to see me play a lot of fast notes? Fuck you, I’ll give you just one!”).Delmar Brown tried once again to salvage the gig with some quick and clever keyboard work, layering chords and melody on top of Jaco’s “groove.” But it didn’t work. The obviously disturbed audience began whistling louder and chanting in unison like a pack of disgruntled soccer hooligans. A full-fledged mutiny was brewing, and Jaco was standing on the hair-trigger of a tense, potentially volatile situation. So what did he do? Did he play diplomat? Did he try to appease them witha word, a gesture, a bass solo perhaps? No, instead he grabbed the mic and further antagonized the crowd by barking, “Scuzi! If you had ears, y’all would shut up! Youare the audience, we are the musicians. So give us some respect!”
The crowd continued jeering and whistling. Then Jaco announced, “Please! Prego! If anybody throws any more shit on this stage, I’m leaving. Good bye!” And with thathe began the familiar bassline to Buddy Miles’s “Them Changes,” but within a fewseconds he had veered off course once again and drifted into another disjointed,poorly executed idea before leaving the stage altogether to another chorus of boos. Backstage, the panicked Italian concert promoter searched frantically for Jaco,who by this time was lying on the floor in a fetal position. Meanwhile, the rest of the band slowly filed off stage as the angry crowd continued chanting its disproval. The desperate promoter begged Jac, to go back onstage and finish the show. Jaco lifted his head and offered this quick reply: “I’m not playing unless I get $10,000 in cash…American! RIGHT NOW!”
The crowd grew louder and angrier by the minute. Road manager Michael Knuckles alerted the band members that they should be ready to make a quick exit from the stadium. The tour bus pulled up behind the stage just as the Italian riot police showed up to calm the unruly mob with a volley of tear gas. Backstage, paparazzi hovered around Jaco, snapping pictures of “The World’s Greatest Bass Player” curled up on the floor. “A full-scale riot had broken out,” recalls Delmar Brown. “20,000 people were screaming, and the tear gas was burning our eyes. I started pushing these cameramen away, yelling, ‘Get the fuck outta here!’ Suddenly, Jaco got up on his feet, winked at me,and said, ‘We got ’em now!’” Meanwhile, the Italian promoter approached Alex Foster and pleaded, “Can’t you do something?” Alex surveyed the chaotic scene—a hailstorm of cans and bottles rainingdown on the stage from the audience—and he promptly replied, “I’m not going out there!” Kenwood adds, “I was ducking, I was bobbing and weaving, trying to avoid those bottles, man.”
Finally, the Italian promoter grabbed the mic and berated the audience members for their rudeness, which was like pouring gasoline on a smoldering campfire. They predictably erupted into a more vehement chorus of boos and chants. Tour manager Knuckles cornered Delmar Brown and demanded, “You’ve got to go on. Play something!”At this point, Delmar gathered his wits, took a huge swig from a bottle of cognac and bravely walked onstage to face the frenzied masses alone, like Daniel going intothe lion’s den. “The whole stage was moving by now,” he recalls. “Gangs of people in the audience were shaking the foundation pillars and rocking the stage. I looked overmy shoulder, and there was Jaco, back on the floor in the fetal position—and this time he wasn’t winking. Meanwhile, the riot police are running around with nightsticks, bottles and bricks are flying around—it was like some kind of wild theater piece.”In the face of this doomsday scenario, Delmar cranked up his amplifier to the max, leaned into the microphone and belted out the highest falsetto note he could sing. “It was the only way I was gonna get the crowd’s attention,” he says. “And I held this note for a long time, then dropped down into this gospelish tune I wrote called ‘The Promise Land,’ which was one of Jaco’s favorite songs. And as I started singing thissong, everybody got into it and began to cool out.”
Jaco soon regained his composure, walked back onstage, strapped on his bass, andbegan playing along with Delmar as Kenwood joined in on drums. “Everybody wascheering by then, and Jaco was smiling. He looked like he was cool,” says Brown. “We played through the whole tune, and amazingly we were back in favor with the crowd.” Indeed, the crowd registered its approval for Delmar’s “The Promise Land” with a round of hearty applause. Before the next song began, there was still a smattering of whistling and jeering in the audience, but this time Jaco addressed the naysayers with a more restrained, “Silencio, por favor.” The band then launched into “Teen Town,” but Jaco scuffled badly through the tricky head to his own song, sounding tentative, clumsy, and terribly out of tune. Somehow they made it through the sad version of “Teen Town” (just barely) before segueing into “I Shot the Sheriff.” The once hostile crowd clapped along to the infectious one-drop riddim and showed its approval for Elmer Brown’s adventurous trumpet solo. Next, the audience enthusiastically fell in line behind the band’s swinging, if long-winded, rendition of “Cherokee,” which featured some brilliant, bristling trumpet work from Brown. They even cheered for Jaco’s bass solo.
Miraculously, Jaco and company had averted disaster, it seemed. But the band wasn’t out of the woods yet. Jaco stumbled his way through “Donna Lee,” embarrassingly, with Alex Foster trying to double Jaco’s fumbling line on soprano sax. But Elmer Brown followed with another dazzling trumpet solo on top of this swinging groove, and the crowd roared its approval once again. Sadly, things gradually dissolved once again. Jaco took over the drums and began playing a jungle beat to Delmar’s improvised vocal. Next, Jaco slipped over to the keyboard and began playing a funky soul-jazz groove, stopping to chastise the audience once again by snarling, “See, some of us are musicians. The rest of y’all are the audience. You dig?” But the audience hung in there, clapping along to Jaco’s soulful piano vamping and rough-hewn vocalizing on Eddie Floyd’s R&B classic, “634-5789 (Soulville, USA).” ( Jaco inserted his own Deerfield Beach phone number into the verse.) Unfortunately, this vamp went on far too long, and the crowd grew impatient with Jaco’s incessant noodling. Patches of dissatisfied concert-goers began whistling once again. Jaco switched back to bass and began the bassline to another R&B classic, Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” As Delmar recalls, “Then all of a sudden Jaco made another checkout. He started playing loud and totally out of context. Then he threw down his bass and went back-stage again and started making all kinds of demands on the promoter. ‘Where’s my money? And I want my wife and kids flown in on the Concorde . . . RIGHT NOW!’”
Once again, the Italians went wild, shaking the stage and throwing bottles with evenmore vehemence. Giving up all hope of salvaging the gig, the band jumped on thetour bus to make a quick getaway. “People were jumping on top of the bus and trying to overturn it,” says Brown. “The cops were fighting off the crowd with their bare hands. We barely got out of there alive.”
I would later profile Delmar in the June 1988 issue of Downbeat, highlighting his work with Sting, touring in support of Mr. Sumner’s current album at the time, Nothing Like the Sun. As I wrote:
Delmar's wild bohemian charm and party sensibility make him a natural for the rock circuit, not to mention his keyboard facility and stunning four-octave vocal range. He's still doing his thing, keeping spirits high with his infectious personality and playful abandon to the music, only he's doing it now in soccer stadiums and hockey rinks in every major city in the free world rather than in just a select few jazz clubs around New York City and a handful of prestigious festival venues in Europe. In short, Delmar Brown is finally reaching the throngs of people he always dreamed of reaching with his own funk-pop ensemble, Bushrock. And though Sting's gig is sideman work, Delmar does get to step out and do a few of the things he does so well. Like singing. When he rares back and lets loose with one of those two-octaves-above-C yelps, it's hide-the-crystalware time. It's a strictly trained voice, drawing on the varied influences in Delmar's musical past. “Gospel music was the first thing I ever sang,” he said. “I was a choirboy with the robe on Easter Sunday. That was mandatory. The classical thing came when I was in high school singing first tenor in the choir doing Messiah and all that. And I was also in a high school barbershop quartet that went to the state tournament. We did ‘Sweet Adeline’ and all that stuff. Great singing, man. You gotta really hit the notes in that kind of music. You can't just slide up to it or around it, you have to nail the note, even if you're doing a leap from low register to high. And all those experiences gave me something. The gospel thing gave me the imagination and the power, the classical thing gave me the harmony, and the barbershop thing helped me tune my instrument.”
And he used that instrument to great effect, touching hearts and souls over the next few decades with Pat Martino, Jaco Pastorius, Gil Evans Orchestra, Bushrock and Sting. The unofficial mayor of Jaco's Hang Dynasty, he was one of the funniest, most soulful cats I ever encountered on the crazy New York scene during the early '80s. I loved the cat and still miss him.
WHO LOVES YA, DELMAR!
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