Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Pud Brown was born Albert Francis Brown on January 22, 1917 in Wilmington, Delaware but was raised in Shreveport, Louisiana. Brown was fluent on saxophone by age five, and toured throughout North America in a family band at the age of seven, playing the circus, nightclub and minstrel show circuits in the mid 1920s.
After moving to Chicago, Pud found work in Phil Lavant’s orchestra in 1938 and then in Lawrence Welk’s band. In 1941 he married, left music to run a motorcycle shop in Shreveport – a failed endeavor, relocated to Los Angeles and found work as a jazz musician.
Brown career exploded over the next several decades working with such jazz musicians as Les Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Doc Cheatham, Danny Barker, Kid Ory, Percy Humphrey and Louis Armstrong among others. He returned to New Orleans in 1975 and became a mainstay of the local scene playing with Clive Wilson’s Original Camelia Brass Band in the 1980s, holding a regular gig at the French Quarter’s Palm Court Jazz Cafe.
Pud Brown, clarinetist, reed player and active as an educator in local schools until his death, passed away on May 27, 1996 in Algiers, Louisiana.