Kansas City, Mo. ? Frederick J. Brown is a jazz and blues artist whose instrument is a paintbrush.

The rhythm and emotions of the music have run through his life since he was a child on Chicago’s South Side, when musicians such as Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed befriended his family.

Jazz and blues artist Frederick J. Brown displays his painting Stagger

After a 32-year career of experimentation, the music is now the inspiration for one of Brown’s most ambitious projects creating up to 400 paintings of the greatest blues and jazz players. Since starting the project in 1987, Brown has completed about 100 paintings, including Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong and Koko Taylor.

Some of those paintings are part of a retrospective, “Frederick J. Brown: Portraits in Jazz, Blues and Other Icons,” on display through Sept. 1 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City.

The retrospective will later go to New Orleans (Feb. 1-March 16, 2003, at the New Orleans Museum of Art) and Harlem (April 23-June 29 at the Studio Museum).

Brown said he turned the musicians’ tones into color, shape and image. Usually working from photos of his subjects, with their music blaring through his studio, he creates vibrant, abstract portraits that stare out of large canvasses.

“I listen to the music while I paint because it gives me their spirit,” Brown said. “The music represents the rhythm of life, and it gives my painting that rhythm.”

Brown said the blues were his litmus test for any great work of art.

“I only pay attention to music that expresses the human condition, whether it’s from Africa, China, folk music or jazz,” he said. “But blues get to the innermost feelings. If you can express yourself as well as the blues, you’ve done your job.”

Brown’s homage to jazz and blues continues a long tradition in black art, said Jacqueline Francis, an assistant professor of art at the University of Michigan.

	The exhibit “Frederick J. Brown: Portraits in Jazz, Blues and Other Icons,” will be at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Mo., through Sept. 1.

“That’s always a very resonant association with people of African descent,” Francis said. “With any African-American art there is an automatic assumption of musical influence.”

Francis said black artists had created a new pantheon with “black musicians as the kings.” But she also noted that Brown had refused to target his work strictly to black audiences.

“That speaks to his desire to simply create as many beautiful things as he can,” she said.

Brown’s work also has been strongly influenced by spirituality, American Indian culture and European religious paintings. The retrospective includes some of those works, and showcases Brown’s experimentation with different styles throughout his career.

After his childhood in Chicago, Brown went to New York City in 1970. He eventually established his own SoHo studio loft, which became a gathering place for all types of artists, including Coleman and abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, who became friends and mentors.

In 1985, art historian and critic Barbara Rose included Brown in a group of artists she called “rule breakers” who would define the future of art.