AUG. 15th – Toronto’s hip hop and jazz community had quite the treat towards the end of the summer, when genre-fusing and sound-defying Brownman Electryc Trio performed at My House. The swanky bar and lounge hosted the trio, led and founded by Internationally-acclaimed Brooklyn, NY jazz trumpet player Brownman Ali, as they took the audience on an aural journey through the development of electric jazz and its crossroads with hip hop, house, and more.

“The idea with this group is the collision of black American music,” explained Brownman before the show. He describes the Electryc Trio’s sound as a collision of Black American music, including iconic genres such as funk, soul, rhythm and blues, as well as newer ones like hip-hop, dnb (drum and bass), and house. The trio represents the sounds of “hip hop, funk, soul, r&b,” with “modern jazz language.” This means that the typical jazz format of “20% melody, 80% solo…is present here, except instead of ding, ding, ding-ding, ding, it’s ‘boom, bap'”.

(Boom bap is a common way to refer to rap and hip hop beats or rhythms.)

The Performance

Brownman Electryc Trio is Brownman Ali on trumpet, Josh Cohen on 6-string electric bass, and Adam Mansfield on drums.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a performance like this before – as a fan of both contemporary electronic music like drum n’ bass, house, and jazz music such as bebop and swing, I’ve heard many jazzy-influenced acts and even seen South African outfit Goldfish several years ago back in high school – but Brownman Electryc Trio truly marries the style and tone of electronic music and hip hop with the form and technique that makes jazz, jazz.

The style of the performance trended more towards the kinds of jazz shows I’ve seen, with lots of banter and information between incredibly long individual tracks. This isn’t a complaint, mind you, as I enjoyed learning about the process and the background of the tracks. They played hip-hop versions of tracks from Miles Davis and Joe Henderson, while also playing their own originals and interpretations of jazz and blues standards.

About Brownman and the Trio

Ali was born on the small Caribbean island of Trinidad and schooled in NYC. He now splits his time between Toronto, ON and Brooklyn, NY, leading 8 unique ensembles, all on his label Browntasauras Records.

Ali Brownman is the winner of multiple awards, and was educated in New York City, the protégé of Grammy-winning trumpet legend, Randy Brecker.  He’s played over a wide range of styles from bebop, to hip-hop, and has worked with the likes of Guru’s Jazzmatazz (replacing Donald Byrd in the ensemble), Mos Def, KRS-1, Quincy Jones, Paul Simon, Jay-z, Missy Elliot, Mingus Dynasty Big Band, Gary Bartz, and Chucho Valdes. A highly decorated player, Ali splits his time between New York City and Toronto, putting him in a unique position with a foot in each city’s scene.

Brownman’s awards & accolades include a recent JUNO Award nomination for “Jazz Album Of The Year”, the Montreal Jazz Fest’s “Grand Prix Du Jazz” award, a CBC Galaxie Rising Star award, a SOCAN composers award, and the Toronto Independent Music Award for “jazz artist of the year”. NOW magazine named him “Toronto’s Best Jazz Musician”, while CBC Radio Canada named him “one of the most recorded trumpet players in Canadian history”.

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