As the hours counted down until Rachel Brown’s musical performance in the Vaughn Center lobby last Tuesday night, Student Productions steadily put together last minute preparations while Rachel rehearsed, her surfer girl pipes filling the background.
Once everything was in place, Brown began her set with some uplifting soft reggae to get the audience warmed up. The ambiance was contented and chill, because the low lighting and the smoothness of the band lured in a humble crowd of music lovers on their way back from grabbing a late dinner.
“My music evokes happiness and calmness. I want people to feel relaxed while they listen to my music, but at the same time, I’ve got a few songs that tug at the heart strings. For the most part, I want people to relate to my music– just be chill,” said Brown.
Rachel and her backup band performed her three most popular songs, “Bumblebee,” “Diamond In the Rough,” and “Lullaby,” as well as a few unexpected covers. They did a cover of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” giving it a touch of a Jack Johnson meets Sara Bareilles flair. Rachel also sang a softer rendition of T-Pain’s “Buy U A Drank.”
Brown’s band members include: Abdoulaye Alhassane (guitar), Mamadou Ba (bass), Idrissa Kone (percussion), and Yacouba Sissoko (kora), all immigrants from the west African country of Mali. The entire band hails from the Big Apple, which is where they met and decided to form a band just one year ago.
“There’s this awesome musician hangout spot in New York City called St. Nick’s, and I walked in there one night to check it out. Abdoulaye and the other guys were playing that night, and I just so happened to be looking for some people that could play west African influenced music. They were killing it on stage, so I talked to them afterwards. They agreed to play with me just like that. It was pretty fateful,” said Brown.
Although it may look as though Rachel has been performing on stage her entire life, she’s actually a fairly recent addition to the music industry. After she graduated high school in 2005, she took a year off before beginning college to take a recuperation period.
“I bought something like a Guitar for Dummies type of book and started to teach myself. I didn’t even start performing until my sophomore year of college, so before that it was kind of secretive that I was learning to be a musician. None of my friends even knew, because I was super shy about it,” said Brown.
Despite her shyness, she bit the bullet and decided to perform at any and every open mic night in the City she knew about. Even though Brown began this as a hobby, she never imagined that she would turn this into a career for herself, but she says that all the craziness is well-worth it.
“You never know if people are going to like it. There’s always going to be nerves. But 23 hours of the day I’m running around like crazy, then during that one hour that I’m on stage, it’s like everything it going to be okay. It’s my time to just chill,” said Brown.
Brown’s main audience is college students, because many of them are extremely open-minded to new music. She’s also quite relatable, considering she’s a recent college graduate. Many of her songs are about friendship and heartbreak, which are very prevalent topics to college students.
Though her lyrics claim familiarity, the instruments in the background are anything but. The band’s percussion player, Idrissa Kone, plays on unique west African drums, one called a talking drum and the other called a calabash. Yacouba Sissoko plays the kora.
“A kora is a traditional African instrument. It’s kind of different, because it’s like a weird mix between an electric guitar, a banjo, and a sitar,” said Brown.
An intimate crowd showed up to the concert, and many passersby would stop to catch a listen. After the show, many audience members bought Rachel’s featured three-song album, Bumblebee, while Rachel casually talked to a few students and thanked them for buying her merchandise.
Brown said that every show she plays is important to her, including all of the little ones, but one performance stands out further in her memory than all the others.
“My milestone moment was when one of my musical inspirations, Wyclef Jean, was performing. He invited me on stage to sing with him. It was so crazy, too, because he picked a Bob Marley song for us to sing together, and Bob Marley is my favorite. It was so bizarre that that happened,” said Brown.
Even though she has performed with big names such as Wyclef Jean, Rachel still frets with nerves just like any other musician.
Natalie Hicks can be reached at natalie.hicks@spartans.ut.edu.