For the fourth year in a row, jazz fans can find the holiday music they’re looking for at Portland Center Stage next week. Local musicians and bandleaders Domo Branch and Charlie Brown III will direct a 15-piece lineup of regional and national musicians performing traditional scores with a modern twist. Domo Branch, drums, and Charlie Brown III, keyboard, join us to play some songs and talk about their collaboration. The Brown Branch Big Band plays Dec. 16th and 17th at Portland Center Stage.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. For the fourth year in a row, jazz fans can soon find the holiday music they are looking for at Portland Center Stage. Next week Domo Branch and Charlie Brown III will direct a 15-piece lineup of regional and national musicians performing traditional scores with a modern twist. We’re going to hear from a stripped down version of the band today. Drummer Domo Branch and keyboardist Charlie Brown III join us now to talk about the concert, along with two more musicians from the band, Noah Simpson on trumpet and Finnegan Jones on bass. It’s great to have you all here.
Domo Branch: Good to be here.
Charlie Brown III: Great to be here.
Miller: Can we just start in with a song? What are you going to play for us first?
Branch: We’ll play “Christmas Time is Here.”
Brown: Charlie Brown, got to do it.
Miller: Classic.
[Music playing]
Miller: That was “Christmas Time is Here” by Vince Guaraldi from the 1965 Peanuts Christmas TV special. We heard Noah Simpson on trumpet, Domo Branch on drums, Charlie Brown III on keyboard, and Finnegan Jones on bass. I thought you guys were going to make it snow in here at the very beginning of that. Charlie, what can folks expect at the shows on Monday and Tuesday nights?
Brown: Just a vastness, community and just like, it’s just in a wave of sound. It’s a 15 piece orchestra and it’s not just like a quartet or anything, it’s a wall of sound and yeah, it’s just going to be a lot of fun.
Miller: I like that word, vastness. Domo, the program promises traditional scores with a modern twist. What do you mean when you hear those words, modern twist?
Branch: When I hear modern twist, I’m 24 years old and we’re all around the same age. In the times of today, we are modern compared to the modern listener. So, whatever we put on our music is gonna be modern.
Miller: By definition.
Branch: Yeah, regardless.
Miller: But you’re also playing music from this sort of great American mid 20th century tradition.
Branch: Absolutely. And with those songs that we’ve chosen, we all put our own arrangements on them. So the modern twist is really just to fuel the new, the word modernism because that’s what is attractive to people, I guess. But really we just gonna play music that sounds like us, which Noah has an arrangement, I have an arrangement, Charlie has an arrangement, Finn did an arrangement and we’re bringing to you ourselves within our community, coming from Portland and it’s all gonna be in the music.
Miller: You’ve said that you were made to play drums.
Branch: Yes.
Miller: What do you mean by that?
Branch: Well, to have a different view of that, I feel that the drums are just a part of me that allow me to do what I actually was made for, at least in my opinion, which is to heal, motivate and inspire through music. So I use the drums as a tool to do those things, such as I just said.
Miller: Heal, motivate, inspire.
Branch: Yeah.
Miller: We could spend an hour talking to each one.
Branch: That’s true.
Miller: Or more, but like, can we start with the first one? And just so what do you mean when you say heal?
Branch: So in context of our big band show, a lot of people I’ve talked to, and I’m sure anyone else in this room has talked to people about the show, and every time someone comes up to me they’ll say I just love the fact that we get to come here during the holidays and hear this music from a bunch of musicians that we’ve either seen across the country ‒ I mean across the the city ‒ or have heard about, and how good it makes them feel when they go back home after the show. That’s a version of healing, right? A doctor, you go see a doctor and hopefully they can do something in that moment to make you feel better. And then you go home and you say, wow, I’m healed from the doctor. That’s how I’m kind of viewing it when I speak and say the word heal. But I do that through music as my instrument versus surgery.
Miller: Charlie, do you have like a mission statement the way Domo does?
Brown: Yeah, in a sense. Space and creation is kind of like my outlook on how music affects me, and experiences. We all experience so many different things and in our space together, we create. And that’s from the listeners aspect as well. We can’t do what we do without the listener and their energy, and so we’re all in a space together and that’s kind of our way of creating together.
Miller: I’m only one listener you can see; well, there’s two of us here because we’ve got someone filming this as well, but a lot of folks listening wherever they are. Can we hear another song?
Brown: Absolutely.
Miller: What are we going to hear next?
Brown: “Take the Coltrane.”
Miller: OK. Is this, so not a Christmas song?
Brown: No, we just gonna get it in.
[Music playing]
Miller: That was “Take the Coltrane” by… Do you guys have a name, this quartet, just four musicians here?
Brown: Yeah.
Miller: A piece of a big band that’s playing on Monday and Tuesday nights, this December 16th and 17th at the Portland Center Stage. The big show is called The Brown Branch Christmas. But we are hearing four of the folks today, Charlie Brown III on keyboard, Domo Branch on drums, Noah Simpson on trumpet, Finnegan Jones on bass.
Domo, I was just watching near the end there and this whole time, I mean, it’s so much fun watching jazz players in particular who are paying attention to each other. You have to because you’re sort of, in some ways you’re not making the song up as you go along, but you’re making this particular version, you’re figuring out how you’re going to navigate this particular existing standard. It’s never been played this exact way and you’re doing it on the fly. What are you listening for, just there? What were you paying attention to? What are you listening for? At one point, you actually, you got Noah’s attention near the end. I mean, what’s in your mind in addition to everything you’re doing?
Branch: Well, really, I’m not paying attention or listening to what I’m doing at all. It’s almost as if we’re sitting here, you’re looking at me as I’m talking to you and then I’m looking at you as I’m talking to you, and it’s just like that. Listening and responding within the context of this conversation. So when we go to a song such as “Take the Coltrane,” we’re all trying to listen to each other. We all know what the topic is, right? It’s the song. But in between the song, we wanna talk about our conversations ‒ maybe how we slept or how our dinner was last night ‒ through the music. And so that’s kind of what I’m listening for is like, when they’re playing a solo, what are they actually trying to say? And what should I say in response to them?
Miller: When we were hearing the bass solo near the end there, you took your drumstick and you tapped Noah and then you touched your head.
Branch: Yes.
Miller: What were you telling him?
Branch: Basically, that means after this, after this bass solo, when I tap my head, that means we’re going to play the head out, which is the melody out.
Miller: We’re almost done here.
Branch: We have to wrap it up.
Miller: Wrap it up. Don’t take another solo. Charlie, I hope I can ask this question in a way that gives the respect that I really feel for jazz as just like one of the great American inventions. But 50 years ago, it was a more popular music and it was appreciated by people in a whole variety of ways. Now, I feel like a lot of people are afraid of it because they feel like they don’t understand it. It’s like it is such a potentially musically complex, intellectually complex thing that you’re all doing, that I feel like a lot of people who, in the past, 50 years ago this would have been the popular music that they love, they feel like it’s more inaccessible. First of all, I mean, does that ring true to you?
Brown: Yeah. No, I definitely hear where you’re coming from and I think the thing about jazz is the constant evolution, you know what I mean? Coming out from like church gospel folk music to the blues and the upbringing and then through the evolution of like John Coltrane and Herbie, and you kind of just keep evolving and bringing different sounds and sound waves and it kind of just, it’s never ending. And you have your traditionalist of people who like to listen to that traditional sound. But jazz is, it’s more of like a construct than like a genre of music.
Miller: What would you say to people who do feel like, I don’t understand jazz. It’s too complicated for me, and not that I’m afraid of it, but I’m not smart enough to understand jazz, which I’ve heard people say.
Brown: Yeah, I mean a lot of people like having voice to music, you know what I mean, lyrics and songs because they are able to connect better. And if you don’t play an instrument, sometimes you don’t feel connected or something like that. And so it’s hard to tell somebody what to listen to, but it’s just like, open your ears up and kind of just more so feel than try to listen. You know what I mean?
Miller: You play a bewildering array of genres. I mean, jazz, funk. And these are, they’re not straight categories with walls around them. Everything bleeds through. But jazz funk, R & B, gospel, hip hop, fusion. Can you imagine a world of your own music making where you were stuck with one of them?
Brown: No, because one of my favorite and one of my favorite producers, Quincy Jones, one of my favorite quotes was his, was ‘There’s only 12 notes.’
Miller: Can we hear one more song?
Brown: Absolutely.
Miller: What is this?
Brown: Oh, this is “The Christmas Song”, put us in the jolly spirit.
Miller: The Nat King Cole song.
Brown: Yeah. One of…
Miller: One of them, fair enough.
[Music playing]
Miller: Domo, Charlie, Noah and Finnegan, thank you very much.
Brown: Thank you, appreciate you.
Miller: Thanks also to our friends at KMHD, our jazz station, for connecting us. Again, The Brown Branch Christmas is this Monday and Tuesday, December 16th and 17th, at Portland Center Stage.
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