UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MANOA OUTREACH COLLEGE
Community Services Division
The Alison Brown Quartet with Joe Craven
Info: Apr 3 • Fri • 7:30pm • Paliku Theatre, Windward Community College • $15 to $25 in advance, $20 to $30 at-the-door • TO PURCHASE TICKETS ONLINE, click on www.etickethawaii.com. Tickets also available by calling 944-BOWS (2697), press "1" (charge by phone at UH Ticket Hotline, M-F 8am-4pm) or by visiting any UH Ticket outlet (Rainbowtique stores, Stan Sheriff Center, UHManoa Campus Center ticket office, Windward Community College OCET office), service charges apply. Advance sales end 4 hours and 30 minutes before the performance. At the door sales begin 1 hour and 15 minutes prior to the performance. For more information call 956-8246 or visit www.outreach.hawaii.edu/community.
Alison Brown achieved an international reputation as a banjo player by pushing the instrument out of its familiar Appalachian settings and into new musical territory. Through five albums on the renowned Vanguard Records label and four on her own Compass Records, Brown has composed and played her way into the affections of fans of jazz-hued acoustic music with a unique voice on a relatively unexplored instrument. "Like James Taylor`s voice or B.B. King`s guitar, Alison Brown`s banjo is an instrument possessed of a unique sonic signature and an inescapable beauty.` -- Billboard Magazine
Many bluegrass fans are aware that Brown`s first marks on the national scene came when she was asked by Alison Krauss to join her band, Union Station, in 1989. Fewer are aware that Brown honed her chops as a teenager in Southern California with some of the best pickers and singers to emerge in the subsequent decades. She met fiddler Stuart Duncan as a 12-year-old. They performed extensively together and sometimes sat in with country superstar Vince Gill and Gene Libbea, now bass player with the Nashville Bluegrass Band. In the summer of 1978, she traveled the country with Duncan and his father, playing festivals and contests. A first place finish at the Canadian National Banjo Championship helped her land a one-night gig at the Grand Ole Opry.
Brown`s journey to a professional music career then took a detour. She attended Harvard, studying history and literature, then UCLA, where she secured an MBA. That led to two years with the public finance division of Smith Barney in San Francisco. After taking a hiatus to return to composing and recording music, Brown assembled the material for her solo debut. While it heralded a new voice on the banjo, Simple Pleasures, also owed much to the California-based jazz/bluegrass hybrid sound pioneered by mandolinist David Grisman, who produced the album.
Simple Pleasures earned a Grammy nomination, and Brown went on to make a total of five records for Vanguard as a bandleader and composer. Her most recent jazz-tinged release, Out of the Blue, featured the smooth sound of her custom electric nylon-string banjo and her Grammy-winning Fair Weather won 2000 Best Country Instrumental Performance.
In 1995, Brown put her business skills to work, founding Compass Records with her husband Garry West. The internationally recognized Compass Records Group oversees more than 600 releases from the Compass Records, Green Linnet and Mulligan Records catalogs and has been called by Billboard Magazine "one of the greatest independent labels of the last decade." Alison Brown has been a guest speaker at Harvard Business School, Dartmouth`s Amos Tuck School, and the University of Colorado Boulder, and currently serves as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University`s Blair School of Music. Brown has been featured on CBS` Sunday Morning, National Public Radio`s All Things Considered and Weekend Edition and BET`s Jazz Central.
The Alison Brown Quartet offers up an astonishingly original instrumental sound that blends jazz, bluegrass, Latin and folk music and takes the banjo far from its stereotyped hillbilly roots. Since 1994, the Quartet has been touring nationally and abroad and has garnered extensive critical acclaim. Special guest is Joe Craven on fiddle, mandolin, percussion, and vocals. Craven is a 17-year-member of the David Grisman Quintet, and recently released the critically acclaimed solo album "Django Latino," a Latin-hued tribute to guitarist Django Reinhart.
Opening for The Alison Brown Quartet will be Hawaii`s own "progressive bluegrass and new acoustic" band the Saloon Pilots with multi-instrumentalist Barbara Higbie. Higbie`s Grammy-nominated, Bammy-winning career spans recordings with Windham Hill Records to Carlos Santana. She and Joe Craven are also former bandmates.
Click below to listen to Sound of Summer Running by Alison Brown:
A University of Hawai`i at Manoa Outreach College presentation, part of a Performing Arts Presenters of Hawai`i tour, and co-sponsored by Windward Community College. Funded in part by the Hawai`i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.