Brazzaville

From an early age David Brown has led a musically and peripatetically adventurous existence, one that has taken him from the claustrophobic sprawl of Southern California to the frozen hinterlands of Siberia.
Born in the Summer of Love to a Jewish mother and a Canadian father, David's attraction to exotic climes was nurtured at an impressionable age by his father, a trucker, with whom David rode shotgun while he hauled shipping containers from the ports of San Pedro to the Southern Pacific train yards.
As a teenage runaway, David became immersed in the punk and poetry scenes of Los Angeles and San Francisco, at one point sharing a house with Courtney Love… until it burned down. Working as a dishwasher, he saved up enough money to buy his first saxophone. Out of these formative years as a teenage jazz hound and dope fiend emerged the unique combination of lighthearted resignation and self-possessed optimism that constitutes David’s singular worldview, and which has subsequently imbued his songwriting with such originality and conviction.
Having packed a lot of loose living into his hard-knocks teenage years, David cleaned up his act and took it on the road, honing his saxophone skills as he busked through Europe, India and South America. Upon his return to Los Angeles, the sound of his practicing could often be heard echoing through the canyons of the Hollywood Hills.
In 1995, David formed Red Clay, a collaborative jazz-based ensemble. Two years later, he joined Beck’s band, with whom he recorded and toured extensively, contributing to the albums ‘Odelay’ and ‘Midnight Vultures’. During this time he reinvented himself as a troubadour and formed a new band, Brazzaville (named after the West African port city), with a focus on songwriting, vocals and acoustic guitar. Brazzaville produce a sophisticated style of timeless jazz-inflected pop; the soothing melodies and languidly melancholic vocals often belying gritty lyrics that address the pleasures of low-budget travel and past misadventures, with a sympathy for the underdog always apparent.
Living out the recurring theme of escape to a better place so often heard in his songs, David moved to Barcelona in 2003 and kept Brazzaville going with a shifting cast of local musicians and the regular presence of musical lieutenant, Kenny Lyon. As an emissary of soft breezes and seductive, sun-drenched anomie, Brazzaville has been warmly received in some of the coldest and most remote places ever penetrated by a musical ensemble. Especially popular in Russia and Turkey, where they tour several times a year, there have also been forays into Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, China and the Ukraine, as well as frequent appearances in the USA.
Ten full length Brazzaville albums and one solo album later, David shows no sign of slowing down; he continues to provide a sane and reassuring presence in a world gone mad. He has recently expanded his scope into the manufacturing of handmade tube microphones, forming a company called Soyuz; made near Moscow, they combine Russian technology with Western design and are used by many musicians, including Radiohead and Coldplay.
Meanwhile, David is still working to realize his lifelong dream of retrofitting a cargo ship for the purpose of turning it into a perpetually traveling arts festival.


John Tottenham-Failed Visionary
author of The Inertia Variations,
Antiepithalamia, & The Hate Poems