Mr. Kicks

In Harlem's Church of the Master this week, a preacher named Oscar Brown Jr. delivered a sermon in song--an elegy for castaways between a front-porch Heaven and a sidewalk Hell. It was his debut in the pulpit--but the message was scarcely new to him. He had delivered it just the night before, downtown at Manhattan's smoky Blue Angel club. Mixing the groovy with the grave in songs that filled his life during a dozen mute years. Oscar Brown had at last found his voice. Matched with Brown's stylish skill as a performer, it promises to introduce him as the best new entertainer since Belafonte.

A wounded knowledge of the "world full of grey" is the source of Brown's idiom--a varied and appealing bouquet of jazz, folk music and the blues. He snaps from one mood to the next with commanding effect, leading his audience through the street scenes that echo in his music. With porkpie hat and elbows locked to his hips in the pose of the cool twist, he sings a celebration of the street-corner king. The song ends with a spin, a pause, and Brown turns back to his listeners--a mask of pain that conjures up the setting for his next lament. In a minute he is downtown again, fingers snapping.

His lyrics caused Ebony to pronounce him "a hip Negro folk poet" Lorraine (A Raisin in the Sun) Hansberry calls him "a startling genius." But the 150-odd songs he has written mostly dote on the city's familiar figures, black and white alike, and on private themes of wonder and frailty. "Emotion has to be the heart of the song,"Brown says. "You make the people feel; they make themselves think." Expression of Hope. Ardent and boyish at 35, Brown grew up on Chicago's South Side. He attended three colleges without success, finally took a halfhearted fling at his father's real estate business. He wrote Brown Baby, his best-known song, eleven years ago as an expression of hope for the world inherited by the first of his five children. Then, without learning to read music, he was suddenly composing in earnest, humming his tunes to musician friends who copied them down. "I lose a little that way," he says. "Only music, though. I can type."

Oscar ran head-on into failure in Chicago last fall when his musical, Kicks & Co., a social fantasy built on a finger-snapping Mephistopheles called Mr. Kicks, collapsed after four performances. "Too factual." observed the Chicago Defender.

"Inexperience is a drag." said Oscar --and got to work again. Now deep into a second musical. Oscar writes all morning, sings most of the night. His voice has found only a rented room in the range it occupies, but he has such command over it that he can blithely abandon any melodic confines and sing out with a freedom possessed by no other jazz singer except Ray Charles.

God & the Devil. Brown is an evangelist of the social gospel only. For Oscar, the Devil is Mr. Kicks and God is any one's honest try -- both of them amiable enough figures in his life. But the accept ance of his music, the success of his record albums, the outlook for kicks in the future -- all are too bright to take seriously. "The other day a burlesque girl came by my room and asked if she could sing Mr. Kicks in her act," Oscar says.

"Imagine that! I was so happy I forgot all about the rights and that jazz. I just smiled up and said, 'Sing it in good health, baby.' "

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