Starting when he moved from NYC to Putney after 9/11, Julian McBrowne has worked as a sound engineer quietly behind the scenes at music performances here in SE Vermont: Yellow Barn, Next Stage in Putney, Eugene Uman’s Vermont Jazz Center, for Becky Graber and the Brattleboro Womens' Chorus or Friends of Music at Guilford.….. Before 9/11, he was a sound engineer working across England, Europe, even Japan.
For years he was the sound engineer with a Big Band - Kid Creole and the Coconuts who were hugely popular in Europe – four singers, a horn and rhythm section, dancers – twelve to fourteen in all performing in London, Paris, Lyon, Berlin, Tokyo. Here is a guy who knows how to get the music out there. Now he works mainly in Brattleboro and Putney, but the range of musicians he’s working with are still coming from around the globe.
Julian was born in Brooklyn. His father – St. Julian McBrowne- and mother, Mary Winifred - met in The School of Pharmacy at St. Johns University. When Julian was born on November 18, 1951, his parents were well established in the pharmacy they had established two years earlier - Julian’s Pharmacy in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
His parents enrolled him in the Pre-K class at The Waldorf School in Garden City, Long Island. He stayed there through 12th grade – then on to four years at Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island, majoring in theater arts. He then moved into recording for radio and television.
“I took a job at the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather just off 5th Avenue recording auditions for radio and TV commercials and gained audio engineering skills. Two years later, I shifted to working for Chappell Music, a big music publishing company in Manhattan. I recorded musicians, worked at the mixing board and learned multi-track recording from about 1978. I was also bopping around NYC mixing sound at shows and clubs.
“My big break came when I recorded an up-and-coming big band – Kid Creole and the Coconuts – a mix of pop, rock, calypso and reggae: a lead singer and three backup singers, a rhythm section, a horn section – 12-14 in all. I left Chappell and became Kid Creole’s production manager and front-of-house sound mixer five months a year. We toured the UK and Europe – London, Paris, Lyon, Berlin…..once to Japan and another time to Japan with Nona Hendryx.
“It was high energy touring: We’d perform in London, for example. The concert would be over around midnight when the band would leave for a hotel in Birmingham (or wherever). The crew and I would take down all the lighting, sound equipment, staging – the works -and load the gear into two 40’ trailer trucks and head out after the band at 4:00 AMin a bus fitted with bunkbeds. Or we’d head to the ferry to France and on into Europe. (Kid Creole was way more popular in England and Europe than he ever was in the US.) I toured with him for six or seven 5-month stretches until around 1985.
“Once we performed in Communist East Berlin. First we drove to West Berlin, then down this fenced road – wire and soldiers on both sides - to arrive at the gates into East Berlin: dogs, armed guards…. We’d set up and play at The Metropole. The sold-out crowds LOVED IT – high energy, big band sound, dancers, horns – a totally theatrical show, which sometimes began with 30 minutes of non-stop music.
“The band roadies were all from the US, but the sound and light crews I was working with were from England. They’d worked with The Who, Duran-Duran, Boy George, Queen, The Police and the whole British Explosion scene. It was wild! Then we’d pack up all the sound and lighting gear and the backline equipment…. into the two 40’ trailers and head out between the gates, dogs and armed guards and head for Turku, Finland or….
“I stopped touring with him in 1986. This was before cellphones. One morning I was paying my phone bill at the front desk and was crestfallen. I had called my sweetie in NYC the night before and ran up a $130 phone bill. Long-distance relationships were tough. It was time to move on.
“But The Digital Revolution was happening. In 1986 I moved back to NYC. I started free-lance engineering for record companies while learning all the skills around digital recording. And what that recording revolution meant was that musicians wanted to learn how to do their own recording. I began helping others learn those skills.
“I did that from 1986 to 1995 (in the midst of which he worked with Thelonious Monk III, Lionel Hampton, Peter Tosh, Gloria Lynne…..) but I was getting done living in expensive Manhattan and kept moving north on the island – almost across the river to The Bronx - in search of affordable housing. I was in a relationship with a woman who was a teacher in NYC. She had links to southern Vermont. One year we rented a place during her summer vacation. That was my introduction to Putney.
“Over the next year or so I met Lisa McCormick who at the time lived in Putney and had been to Marlboro College. She was just getting known and had just released her album “Right Now” produced by Jonathan Edwards. Lisa and I started to make records together and eventually decided to put our lives together. After 9/11, I moved to Putney and have been in the area ever since. Lisa and I bought a house in Brattleboro and we’ve been living there these last 22 years.
“I slowly got back into recording and sound engineering here in SE Vermont, first at Billy Strauss’s recording studio in Putney and sometimes at Gary Henry’s Northern Tracks in Wilmington. I worked a bit with Barry Stockwell and his Twilight Music shows at the Hooker-Dunham. I worked with Becky Graber and the Brattleboro Women’s Chorus. And it began to blossom for me. I began working with Friends of Music at Guilford and their classical concerts. I worked with Eugene Uman at The Vermont Jazz Center where musicians from all over the country perform. I also helped Eugene begin live streaming from the Jazz Center. Eventually, Billy Straus invited me to be on the first board of Next Stage, where I was the first sound engineer.
“Over the past twelve years I’ve become the recording engineer and sound guy for Seth Knopp and Catherine Stephan, directors of Yellow Barn Chamber Music Center in Putney. In January and February every winter, they travel the US and Europe auditioning and beyond and then invite around 40 of those brilliant young musicians from all over the world for six weeks to study music refine their skills in Putney. (They raise money to pay all the students’ costs.) They also attract mature musicians from around the world to teach and perform at The Big Barn. I produce live sound for them as well as recording every concert.” Through YB, Julian has worked with the late Roger Tapping, violist with The Juilliard Quartet; with Lucy Shelton, voice, who won a lifetime achievement award from Chamber Music America; Anthony Marwood, violin, an international performer and Chair of Chamber Music at The Royal Academy of Music in London; the Parker Quartet, professors and artists in residence at Harvard University…..
“In my work with Eugene Uman who directs the now 50 year old Vermont Jazz Center in Brattleboro, I’ve been the sound engineer for performances by jazz pianists Aaron Parks and Orrin Evans, French jazz pianist Jacky Terrason and French/American jazz pianist Dan Tepfer, Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez, Jazz Trumpeter Etienne Charles and Creole Soul, American saxophonists Lakecia Benjamin and Vincent Herring. The list goes on……
“The remarkable thing is that I moved from years of recording and sound engineering around the world to little Putney and Brattleboro and I’m doing the same high-level work here in SE Vermont that I did for all those years across England, Europe and beyond. The added benefit is that I get to live in this beautiful place, surrounded by a supportive community of amazing artists and friends.”
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.