You have heard Grammy Award-winning trumpet player Maurice “Mobetta” Brown before. After all, he’s appeared on LP’s from Santigold, Ski Beatz, Prodigy, Talib Kweli, Cee-Lo, Diddy, Musiq Soulchild and countless others; but you heard his trumpet and not his voice.
Think Louis Armstrong and his trumpet uploaded for the 21st century to a Hip-Hop beat, and you begin to understand who this young genius is. Maurice is a classically-trained Jazzman mentored and supported by the iconic Wynton Marsalis and the legendary Ramsey Lewis. But “Mobetta” is also a Hip-Hop head for life, and that journey on this planet rock literally parallels the history and evolution of rap. Little wonder that Maurice not only blows the roof off God’s sky with his horn, but he also spits lyrics the way Satchmo spit his own brand of vocalese back in the day. Yup, Mobetta is a horn-playing-rhyme-spraying-dancing machine that Jazz-Hip-Hop collaborators like Donald Byrd and Gang Starr’s Guru, or Ron Carter and A Tribe Called Quest fantasized about in the early 1990s. No need to cram to make that Jazz/Hip-Hop experiment happen in these times because Maurice Brown is the living and breathing embodiment of it all, a one-stop shop destined to be this era’s Quincy Jones. And then some!
