CHRIS BROWN : BIOGRAPHY

       Christopher Maurice "Chris" Brown (born May 5, 1989) is an American singer, songwriter, dancer, actor. He made his recording debut in late 2005 with the self-titled album Chris Brown at the age of 16. The album featured the hit single "Run It!", which topped the Billboard Hot 100, making Brown the first male artist as a lead to have his debut single top the chart since Puff Daddy in 1997. The album has sold over two million copies in the United States and was certified double Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

    Brown's second studio album, Exclusive was released in 2007. It spawned two successful singles; his second U.S. number one hit, "Kiss Kiss" featuring T-Pain and "With You", which peaked at number two on Billboard Hot 100. Brown released a deluxe version of his album called The Forever Edition in 2008. The first single from it, "Forever" reached number two. Exclusive has been certified Platinum by the RIAA. The third studio album, Graffiti was released in 2009. The first single "I Can Transform Ya", featuring Lil Wayne and Swizz Beatz, peaked at number 20, becoming Brown's eighth Top 20 hit. He has had various other hit singles, and his dance routines have been compared to Usher.

     In 2009, he pleaded guilty to felony assault of singer and then-girlfriend Rihanna. He was sentenced to five years probation and six months of community service. The case received extensive media attention and negatively affected his career as a singer and all-around entertainer.

      Brown's fourth album F.A.M.E. earned him the Grammy Award for Best R&B Album, his first Grammy, at the 54th Grammy Awards.
 

      Chris Brown’s music has evolved within the intersections of many different traditions and styles. Following early training as a classical pianist, he was influenced by studies of Indonesian, Indian, Afro-American, and Cuban musics, and then took off on branches provided by the American Experimentalists in inventing and building a personal electronic instrumentation. At first these were amplified acoustic devices; then he went on to build analog circuits that modified their sounds, and custom-made computer systems that interactively transformed them. More recently, he has extended this fascination with instrument building to the design of computer network systems that interact with acoustic musicians and with other computers and musicians connected over the internet.

         Collaboration and improvisation have been primary in the development of his music for various traditional instruments and interactive electronics. He has had commissions for such pieces from the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, among others. He was a member with percussionist William Winant, saxophonist Larry Ochs, and electronic musician Scot Gresham-Lancaster of the pioneering group "Room", (1984-94) which explored the intersection of composition, improvisation, and electronics. His 1992 composition "Lava", for eight instruments and interactive electronics, is an hour-long, quadraphonic sound environment that virtuosically employs live-sampling to create spatially flowing counterpoints of timbre and rhythm.

         As pianist with the Glenn Spearman Double Trio he has performed and recorded music in the free-jazz tradition at venues including the San Francisco and Monterey Jazz Festivals, the DuMaurier and Victoriaville Festivals in Canada, and in Europe. He has performed and recorded with such prominent and varied improvisors as Butch Morris, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, Barry Guy, Ikue Mori, Dave Douglas, and John Zorn. He has also been active as a pianist in performing the music of composers such as James Tenney, Henry Cowell, Christian Wolff, William Brooks, David Rosenboom, John Coltrane, Luc Ferrari, and Terry Riley.

           Between 1986-97 he was also a member of "The Hub", an ensemble of computer musicians who developed "Computer Network Music", a genre whose sound arises from the interdependency of multiple computer-music systems. The Hub toured extensively in the U.S. and Europe, released three different CDs, and collaborated with such composers as Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, and Ramon Sender. The Hub also participated in several media projects, including remote-site concerts (distance-musics), a live, video-generated realization of of John Cage's chance-operations score "Variations II", and an interactive poetry/music piece for radio (supported by a grant from the InterArts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)).

         Chris Brown's most recent works involve extending the experiences of interactive electronic music into new performance venues including audience participation. His recent project, the "TRANSMISSIONS" series, is a collaboration with composer Guillermo Galindo using four FM radio transmitters to interact with an audience carrying portable radios; it was premiered in May 2002 at the Bienal de Radio in Mexico City. An installation involving networked rhythm-machines spread throughout a large space called "Talking Drum" has been produced in Montreal, San Francisco, and Holland. A new series of concert pieces called "Inventions" have sprouted from the polyrhythm generating software for that piece, including "Invention #7", for piano, percussion, DJ, and interactive computer, which was premiered at the 2001 Other Minds Festival in San Francsico. He has also worked with programmer Phil Burk's TransJam/JSyn software to produce on-line interactive music websites (www.sfmoma.org/crossfade), and with programmer/composer Mike Berry in supporting the development of the "Grainwave" live synthesis software for the Macintosh. A project called "Eternal Network Music" used Grainwave instruments to produce simultaneous, collaborative concerts between California, Germany, and the East Coast.

          He is a featured composer, performer, and/or producer on over 30 recordings of new music. These include CDs of his own compositions on labels including Tzadik, Centaur, Sonore, Ecstatic Peace, Sparkling Beatnik, and Artifact Recordings. He has published articles on his innovative approach to live electronic music in Computer Music Journal and the Leonardo Music Journal. He also authored the article "Pidgin Musics", on hybrid musical cultures, in the compilation volume "Arcana: Musicians on Music", published by Granary Books. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at such institutions as STEIM in Amsterdam, Institute for Studies in the Arts (ISA) at Arizona State University, and the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California.

      Since 1990 he has also taught electronic music, composition, world music, and contemporary performance practice at Mills College, in Oakland, where he is a Professor of Music and Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music.

 New works to be composed will pursue these future musical trends:

1) musicians with computers will play music in ensembles, and their software will interact with both other humans and other computers in performance;

2) electronic media will integrate ever more seamlessly with acoustic instruments by becoming more responsive to their musical signals and languages, creating extensions of human intelligence within networked sonic and visual environments.