Jazz Pianist and Composer Donald Brown Premieres New Work Inspired by Libraries’ Archives, March 26

March 12, 2025
[Donald Brown is pictured at the piano] "works by Donald Brown — Boundless: Artists in the Archives. Knoxville Museum of Art, Wednesday, March 26, 6–8 PM EST”

Internationally renowned jazz pianist, composer, and producer Donald Brown will premiere a new composition inspired by the Beauford Delaney Papers in the University of Tennessee Libraries’ archives. The debut will take place at the Knoxville Museum of Art on Wednesday, March 26. The reception at 6 p.m. and the performance at 7 p.m. are free and open to the public. Jazz musicians, including special guest Greg Tardy, will perform Brown’s composition.

The performance, in partnership with the 2025 Big Ears Festival, is part of the UT Libraries’ unique series Boundless: Artists in the Archives. The Boundless program invites musicians and other artists to visit the UT Libraries’ archives and create original works inspired by the unique primary sources preserved there.

Brown visited UT’s Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives where he explored the Beauford Delaney Papers. The collection consists of family, personal, and professional correspondence, photographs, sketchbooks and notebooks, artwork, exhibition material, and biographical records created or collected by the Knoxville-born, African-American artist Beauford Delaney (1901­–1979). He is widely regarded as one of the major modernist painters of his time. 

The Knoxville Museum of Art is located at 1050 World’s Fair Park Drive. An exhibit of KMA’s Beauford Delaney holdings will be open for viewing during the March 26 event. The KMA holds the world’s largest public collection of work by Beauford Delaney.

Any contemporary jazz composition by someone of my generation or younger bears Donald’s influence, one way or another, whether you know it or not. —JAZZ PIANIST GEOFFREY KEEZER

An internationally renowned jazz pianist, Brown has played with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis, Joe Henderson, Donald Byrd, Willie Mitchell, and the Boys Choir of Harlem. Wynton Marsalis’s recording of Brown’s composition “Insane Asylum” earned Marsalis a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist. In addition to albums of his own, Brown has recorded with many jazz artists. His original compositions are widely recorded.

Brown taught at the Berklee College of Music in Boston for five years before coming to the University of Tennessee College of Music, where he taught piano, improvisation, and jazz history for 32 years.