Who is Brazzaville?
I was talking to a friend of mine and was asked what music have I been listening to lately. I listed off a few but when I came to band, Brazzaville, he was dumbfounded. He had never heard of them. It didn’t surprise me. Even though the the main guy from Brazzaville grew up and is from Los Angeles, they are better known overseas.
I’ve put together a short bio for future reference, and you can read about the show Skye and I went to in early January here.
Excerpt from iTunes’ posted Biography on Brazzaville.
“Led by Beck saxophonist David Brown, Brazzaville’s exotic, globally minded indie pop was as much a product of Brown’s extensive travels as it was the Los Angeles coffeehouse scene from whence most of its members came. Born in L.A., Brown had been a teenage runaway and heroin addict before cleaning up and finding a new lease on life from his love of traveling the world on the cheap. He criss-crossed Europe, South America, and Asia, picking up musical influences from the Far East, Brazil (bossa nova), Africa, and France (cabaret pop), among others. Eventually, he returned to California, where he studied the saxophone at L.A. City College. There he first met Beck, and was introduce to a community of artists and musicians centered around the Los Feliz/Silverlake area of L.A. When Beck hit the big time, he tapped Brown as the saxophonist in his touring band, and invited him to play on the Odelay album.
In 1997, during the world tour supporting Odelay, Brown conceived the idea for Brazzaville, taking the name from the capital of the Congo, which in a recent study had been branded with the worst quality of life of any major city in the world. Brown added guitar to his instrumental repertoire (which grew to include piano, trombone, and percussion as well), and when he returned to Los Angeles in 1998, he put together a diverse line up of musicians.
Brazzaville recorded a self-titled debut album and released it on Brown’s own South China Sea imprint in 1999. It received favorable review of its hybrid of indie pop, lounge jazz, world music, and noir-sh atmosphere. Later that year the Engine label picked up the record’s distribution rights and reissued it under the title 2002. The follow-up Somnambulista, released in 2001, their third full-length, Rough on Pockmarked Cheeks, appeared in 2002. Afterwards, Brown relocated to Barcelona and assembled an alternate European lineup of Brazzaville.”
Since this write up on iTunes Brazzaville has release a few more albums, Hastings Street and East L.A. Breeze both in 2006, 21st Century Girl in 2008, Brazzaville in Istanbul in 2009. Brown has also released a new album titled Teenage Summer Days in 2009 under his name David Arthur Brown. For more information visit their website Brazzaville-Band.com. While you’re there check out their Band Manifesto. It begins with, “Brazzaville is dedicated to the naïve idea that the world is a beautiful place filled with wonder.” Enough said.
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