Tom Browne

During the span from 1979 to 1989, Tom Browne appeared regularly on R&B charts thanks to his pop-oriented recordings released through GRP and Arista. After a year of piano lessons beginning at age 11, he turned his attention to the trumpet and enrolled at New York City's High School of Music and Art. His early passion for classical music shifted toward jazz during his college years in the mid-1970s. Collaborations followed with Sonny Fortune and Lonnie Smith before he secured a contract with GRP. Despite drawing influence from Freddie Hubbard and venturing into hard bop tracks from time to time, the bulk of Browne's work in that period targeted commercial appeal. Though he pursued a career as a commercial pilot and largely stepped away from music by the late 1980s, Browne returned in 1994 via a Hip Bop release featuring multiple contexts, one being the solid jazz album Another Shade of Browne that prompted the question "What took so long?"