"Marion Brown (September 8, 1931 - October 18, 2010) was an American jazz alto saxophonist and ethnomusicologist. He is most well known as a member of the 1960s avant-garde jazz scene in New York City, playing alongside musicians such as John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and John Tchicai. He performed on Coltrane's landmark 1965 album Ascension.

Brown was born in Atlanta, in 1931. He joined the Army in 1953 and in 1956 went to Clark College to study music. In 1960 Brown left Atlanta and studied pre-law at Howard University for two years. He moved in 1962 to New York, where he befriended poet Amiri Baraka and musicians including Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Paul Bley, Clifford Thornton, and Rashied Ali. He appeared on several important albums from this period, such as Shepp's Fire Music and Attica Blues, but most notably John Coltrane's Ascension.

In 1967, Brown travelled to Paris, where he developed an interest in architecture, Impressionistic art, African music and the music of Erik Satie. In the late 1960s, he was an American Fellow in Music Composition and Performance at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Around 1970, he provided the soundtrack for Marcel Camus' film Le temps fou, a soundtrack featuring Steve McCall, Barre Phillips, Ambrose Jackson and Gunter Hampel.

Brown returned to the US in 1970, where he felt a newfound sense of creative drive. He moved to New Haven, Connecticut, to serve as a resource teacher in a child study center in the city's public school system until 1971. He composed and performed incidental music for a Georg Büchner play, Woyzeck. In 1971, Brown was an assistant professor of music at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, a position he held until he attained his Bachelor's degree in 1974. In addition to this role, he held faculty positions at Brandeis University (1971-74), Colby College (1973-74), and Amherst College (1974-75), as well as a graduate assistant position at Wesleyan University (1974-76). Brown earned a Master's degree in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan in 1976. His master's thesis was entitled "Faces and Places: The Music and Travels of a Contemporary Jazz Musician".

Throughout his tenure as an educator, Brown continued to compose, perform and record. Notable recordings during this period included Afternoon of a Georgia Faun for the ECM label in 1970 and three albums for the Impulse! label between 1973 and 1975. He played alto saxophone on the composition "Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim" from Harold Budd's 1976 release The Pavilion of Dreams, a piece originally written by Budd for Brown's Vista LP, released the previous year.

In 1972 and 1976, Brown received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, which he used to compose and publish several pieces for solo piano, one of which was based on the poetry of Jean Toomer in his book Cane. He also transcribed some piano and organ music by Erik Satie including his Messe des pauvres and Pages mysterieuses, and arranged the composer's Le Fils des étoiles for two guitars and violin.

In 1981, Brown began focusing on drawing and painting. His charcoal portrait of blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson was included in a New York City Kenkeleba Gallery art show called Jus' Jass, which also included works by artists such as Romare Bearden, Charles Searles and Joe Overstreet.

By the 2000s, Brown had fallen ill; due to a series of surgeries and a partial leg amputation, Brown resided for a time in a nursing home in New York. By 2005 he had moved to an assisted living facility in Hollywood, Florida, where he died in 2010, aged 79."

"Gunter Hampel (born 31 August 1937) is a German jazz vibraphonist, clarinettist, saxophonist, flautist, pianist and composer born in Göttingen, Germany, perhaps best known for his album The 8th of July 1969 that included fellow musicians Anthony Braxton, Willem Breuker and Jeanne Lee. Jeanne, now deceased, was Gunter's wife.

Hampel became dedicated to free jazz in the 1960s, developing his own record label (Birth Records), and worked with a variety of artists over the years, including John McLaughlin, Muruga Booker, Laurie Allan, Udo Lindenberg, Pierre Courbois and Perry Robinson. In the 1970s he also formed the Galaxie Dream Band."

"Barre Phillips (born October 27, 1934 in San Francisco, California) is a jazz bassist. A professional musician since 1960, he migrated to New York City in 1962, then to Europe in 1967.[1] Since 1972 he has been based in southern France where in 2014 founded the European Improvisation Center

He studied briefly in 1959 with S. Charles Siani, Assistant Principal Bassist with the San Francisco Symphony During the 1960s he recorded with (among others) Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Giuffre, Archie Shepp, Peter Nero, Attila Zoller, Lee Konitz and Marion Brown.[1]

Phillips' 1968 recording of solo bass improvisations, issued as Journal Violone in the USA, Unaccompanied Barre in England, and Basse Barre in France, is generally credited as the first solo bass record. A 1971 record with Dave Holland, Music from Two Basses, was probably the first record of improvised double bass duets.[2]

In the 1970s he was a member of the well-regarded and influential group The Trio with saxophonist John Surman and drummer Stu Martin.[1] In the 1980s and 1990s he played regularly with the London Jazz Composers Orchestra led by fellow bassist Barry Guy. He worked on soundtracks of the motion pictures Merry-Go-Round (1981), Naked Lunch (1991, together with Ornette Coleman) and Alles was baumelt, bringt Glück! (2013).[3]

He has also worked with (among many others) bassists Peter Kowald and Joëlle Léandre, guitarist Derek Bailey, clarinetists Theo Jörgensmann and Aurélien Besnard, saxophonists Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker and Joe Maneri, and pianist Paul Bley.

Barre is the father of rock guitarist Jay Crawford from the band Bomb, of the bassist Dave Phillips and of singer Claudia Phillips, who was a one-hit wonder in France in 1987 with "Quel souci La Boétie". "

"Steve McCall (September 30, 1933 - May 24, 1989) was an American jazz drummer.

McCall was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States. As a young child, he "experienced a musical epiphany" when he was given an opportunity to play a drum in Chicago's annual Bud Billiken Parade. As a teenager, he attended Englewood High School in Chicago and studied music theory, Latin percussion, and classical percussion. After high school, he left to join the U. S. Air Force, then, in 1954, returned to Chicago, where he took a job in the airline industry. He soon bought his first drum set and began using free air travel passes to study with drummer Charles "Specs" Wright in Philadelphia. He also began freelancing, playing with Lucky Carmichael, Booker Ervin, Charles Stepney, Gene Shaw, and Ramsey Lewis.

In 1961, McCall befriended pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, and began playing with Abrams' Experimental Band, which brought him into contact with like-minded Chicago-based musicians. Over the coming years the two also played in a trio format with multi-instrumentalist Donald Rafael Garrett, and well as in a quintet which included Garrett plus saxophonists Gene Dinwiddie and Roscoe Mitchell. McCall went on to become one of the founders of the AACM, established in 1965, initially serving as treasurer. During the mid-1960s, he continued to freelance with musicians and groups in a wide range of styles, from blues to bop to free jazz. In 1966, he participated in the recording of Joseph Jarman's debut album Song For.

In 1967, McCall moved to Amsterdam, the first AACM member to visit Europe, and was soon playing with expatriates such as Don Byas and Dexter Gordon. In 1968, he began playing in a group led by Marion Brown, featuring Gunter Hampel, Ambrose Jackson, and Barre Phillips. McCall would go on to record five albums with Brown. That year, McCall moved to Paris and joined an existing group whose members were Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, and Leroy Jenkins. (The Braxton/Smith/Jenkins trio had recently completed work on the album 3 Compositions of New Jazz). Together, the four recorded the albums Anthony Braxton and This Time... for BYG Actuel. During his stay in Paris, McCall served as a link between the first generation of European free jazz musicians and members of the AACM, playing and recording with Willem Breuker, the Instant Composers Pool, John Surman, Tony Oxley, and Gunter Hampel. Notable albums recorded during this time included Hampel's The 8th Of July 1969, which also featured Braxton and Jeanne Lee, as well as Gittin' to Know Y'All, recorded during the 1969 Baden-Baden Free Jazz Meeting.

In 1970, McCall moved back to Chicago. In May of that year, he reunited with Braxton, Smith and Jenkins, forming a group which also included Muhal Richard Abrams and Richard Davis, and which became known as the Creative Construction Company. The group performed a concert at the Peace Church in New York City, a recording of which was released in two volumes. That summer, McCall also recorded the album The Chase! with Dexter Gordon and Gene Ammons. The following year, he played with Henry Threadgill and Fred Hopkins in a short-lived trio called Reflection. The group would later reunite under the name Air. In 1972, McCall played with both the Fred Anderson quartet and the Muhal Richard Abrams Sextet.

In 1974, McCall moved back to Europe. He then returned to the United States in 1975, moving to New York City and reuniting with Threadgill and Hopkins. The trio, now called Air, would go on to record eleven albums, with McCall participating in all but the last two. During the mid to late 1970s, McCall also performed and recorded with Abrams, Billy Bang, Arthur Blythe, Ted Curson, Chico Freeman, Cecil McBee, and Butch Morris. During the early 1980s, he recorded a number of albums with David Murray, and in the mid-1980s, he joined Cecil Taylor's group, recording Olu Iwa, and worked with Roscoe Mitchell again, recording The Flow of Things.

McCall died in 1989 at South Shore Hospital in Chicago. Despite his lengthy career, he never recorded a session as a leader. However, McCall received equal billing with tenor sax player Fred Anderson on the posthumously released Vintage Duets album, recorded in 1980 and issued in 1994."