Calendar of Events

Date: Wednesday, March 26, Time: 6-8PM
Location: Knoxville Museum of Art, 1050 Worlds Fair Park Dr, Knoxville, TN 37916
Price: Free

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 is part of the University of Tennessee 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 papers of Knoxville-born, African-American artist Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), widely regarded as one of the major modernist painters of his time. 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. Event Website: https://tiny.utk.edu/boundless2025
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