Although losing both parents in the past four months, Dr Katherine Brown, well-known pianist, composer, recording artiste and medical practitioner, has not lost her passion for music. In fact, she will be staging a musical event as soon as she comes to terms with her loss.

Her mother, Dr Monica Brown, former lecturer at Church Teachers’ College in Mandeville, died on February 19. Then on Friday, June 18, her father, Dr Earl Brown, of the Maths and Computer Science Department at the University of Technology, also passed on.

Regarding the event for which a date has not yet been chosen, Brown disclosed that she intends to fuse her music with poetry.

“I want to stage it possibly at Red Bones (Blues Café), but I haven’t chosen a date yet. But I am planning to put together a show which involves myself, poetry and possibly an acapella singing group. It’s a concert which I am putting together in my head, but the unexpected death of my father kinda throw me off course, so I am not able to focus on that project right now. It’s going to be put on hold until I get past all of this…,” explained the outstanding jazz and reggae pianist.

Asked what accounts for her maintaining her effervescent spirit despite the challenging circumstances, she declared, “I have no idea.”

“I think I am a strong person with a strong spirit. And there are times when I break down and cry…and there are other times when I am able to rise up again, realising that we are all just a ball of energy here in the universe and while we are here we should use our energy to the best of our ability,” she added.

The concert in the making will not focus on the passing of her parents. The idea came about after having met two poets and listened to their work. “It doesn’t have to do with my personal matters at all. It just have to do with life. Life in general which might involve death and other things. But it wasn’t directed at my parents,” affirmed Kathy Brown.

The jazzy medical doctor’s musical journey has so far taken her into the operating rooms of some famous Jamaican recording studios, including Marley’s Tuff Gong, where, after a succession of setbacks and a near miscarriage owing to a crashed computer disc, she delivered the labour-intensive first CD aptly named Mission: A Musical Journey.

The nine-track CD features clever interpretations of great works of jazz and reggae standards, for example, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, and Bob Marley/Peter Tosh’s Get Up, Stand Up. But it also contains Brown’s own compositions, Mission and Latin Groove.

Ever since she walked into the Phillip Sherlock Centre for Creative Arts on the University of the West Indies (UWI) campus in Kingston, Jamaica, and heard jazz for the first time, and since Jill Gibson, master piano tutor at the Jamaica School of Music, imparted to her the preliminaries of jazz piano, Brown has been a disciple. She began listening intently to Bob James, Joe Sample, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock’s earlier works, Chucho Valdes, Monty Alexander, Kenny Barron, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Michel Camilo and a few other influences.

In March 2002, she put together her Kathy Brown & Friends outfit and categorises her style of music as World Beat — music that people anywhere can appreciate. She makes the point on her website, “It is not just jazz, reggae or pure anything, it is true crossover that reaches out to different music styles, and [so] people around the world will most certainly appreciate it.”