The talented Waxahachie High graduate is living the musician’s life in the state’s music center.
For 1988 Waxahachie High School graduate Jacques Brown, band was more than an extracurricular — it was career training.
Immediately after high school, Jacques moved to the Texas capitol city to study music at the University of Texas at Austin, graduated from there and moved on to hold the position of band director at various high schools in the Austin area for the next two decades.
And just as he left his career in education to re-enroll in graduate school with the plan of obtaining his Ph. D., the country was invaded by a novel pathogen that upturned daily life, pushing Jacques to hustle his talents as a saxophonist at any Austin area event, party or music venue before they were all shut down by the COVID-19 response.
Once life returned to a post-COVID normal, Jacques had become a sought-after musician, performing regularly before packed crowds at Spinners Bar and Grill and and as part of a band at other venues in Austin’s popular Sixth Street and Red River Entertainment District.
“So there’s times where I will be playing R&B cover tunes with bands. There’s times where we’ll play traditional jazz, Latin style. It just depends on what the gig calls for at the time,” says Jacques on what audiences can expect.
He says his preferred genre is gospel, which is the style that got him airtime on an Austin-area radio station.
“I have a really, really talented friend. He lives in Houston now. His name is Andre Venson. And the guy is a phenomenal musician, one of the best musicians I know. And anyway, we decided to put together this gospel jazz C.D. And, you know, we went through and rearranged some hymns and all that stuff, put it in this really cool jazz fusion style. And anyway, I ran into one of the D.J.s here, in Austin — I was at an event playing, and she came up and asked me if I had [a C.D.], and I said yeah and I gave it to her. And the very next Monday, I get a call from from friends [saying] Jacques your music is on the radio. I turn on the radio, and it’s there, so that was really, really, really big,” he recalls of the first time he heard his music being broadcast.
“And that was back in 2007 when it first happened. And then I did another C.D. that I did a long time ago, but I put it out like, last year — a year ago. It got playing time as well, and the same D.J. — she played it every day for like about three months. And I was like, whoa, this is really, really cool. Those things where you get to share your music with a huge audience — that that means a lot,” he adds.
Having proved his mettle as a professional musician in a highly competitive music scene, Jacques says he still plans to get his Ph. D. and return to the high school music world as a band director again.
“At the essence of anything and everything, I’ve always wanted to be a band director — always,” he says. “I knew way back in seventh grade that I was going to be a band director, and I was very, very fortunate to be a successful band director. My band at Taylor [High School] made it to the Texas State marching contest three times in a row. We marched in the Allstate Sugar Bowl back in 2007 and won every trophy that they had at this marching band contests — won several festivals and sweepstakes so I was really successful. But more than that, just the interaction with the kids — being able to have an influence on their lives and being able to help them dream and achieve goals and dreams. That means a lot to me. So I want to get back into that.”