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It was the smell that got Steve Brown.

Sure, the way those drums sounded first captured his attention -- a friend of his brother, banging away down in the basement, that rhythmic, tribal beat, ragged as it was, summoning him down the stairs.

At first, the young Brown stood staring, taking in the sight of that drumkit. And that's when the smell hit him.

"I remember going down and staring at them and touching them, and then I remember smelling them," Brown told The Daily Times this week over lunch at Alcoa's Bread of Heaven. "It's hard to put into words -- it was this sort of metallic, greasy smell to the drums that I can't put my finger on. But I remember it clearly."

From that point forward, the drums would be the focal point of Brown's musical existence. These days, he's preparing for the release of "Within," his first solo CD and one that's been a long time coming. After all, Brown has been a fixture in the local music scene, most notably as one of the founding members of the Hector Qirko Band, since the 1980s.

He just doesn't stand out -- mostly because he's content to let Qirko or R.B. Morris or any number of other musicians with whom he's played take center stage.

"I think I'm reticent," he said. "You see Hector; you don't see me. I'm not a front type of person, and I never wanted to have my own group. I've always thought of myself as more of a collaborator."

Only next weekend, the roles will be reversed. Qirko and a number of other of Brown's peers will pitch into help him celebrate his new CD, and while Brown himself might still be in the back, he won't be able to escape the spotlight.

A graduate of Bearden High School, Brown first discovered those drums owned by his brother's friend at the age of 12. He went on to play snare in the school band at Bearden Junior High, where he was fortunate enough to learn from the late Chet Hedgecoth, the band teacher and instructor who took Brown under his wing and offered him private lessons.

After graduation, he attended the University of Tennessee, starting out in the classical music program but switching to the jazz program when it was first founded. He would become the program's first jazz graduate, and at the time, the Knoxville music scene was primed to explode. That was right before the 1982 World's Fair, and Brown found his education continuing there and along the musical haunts up and down the Cumberland Avenue "Strip."

"It was a real broadening of horizons," he said. "There were several educations going on for me. At UT, I was going to classes and playing in ensembles, and at night I was playing and listening to music. Listening is just as much a part of a musician's education as what they study."

As the only drum instructor at Pick 'n' Grin Music in Knoxville, he befriended fellow employee Qirko, who taught guitar and was just off a successful stint with local Western swing outfit the Lonesome Coyotes. Qirko wanted to start a blues band to get back to his roots -- he had played in Chicago with Lonnie Baker Brooks -- and he recruited Brown as the band's drummer. Qirko would introduce him to local poet/playwright/singer-songwriter Morris, who added Brown to his band, The Irregulars, for a year; Brown also served as a member of the World's Fair Band and substituted in the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.

At the same time, his hunger for music grew. He remembers buying a Nonesuch sampler and hearing, for the first time, music from Africa and Mexico -- true field recordings, he said, of indigenous music from around the globe. His downstairs neighbor, a young, hip concert promoter and deejay named Ashley Capps, turned him on to such modern jazz legends as Terry Riley and Philip Glass, and Brown soon found himself as a co-deejay with Capps on his WUOT-FM jazz program.

Throughout it all, he was writing his own music. Not prolifically; only when inspired, he said, but as the years have gone by, he's realized that his own compositions were deserving of their own audience.

"The drums are an expressive instrument, but a lot of emotions like romance and tenderness, you can't express on the drums," he said. "I started exploring different compositions and taking all of the things I was exposed to over the years and filtering them through my own sensibilities."

The liner notes to "Within" read like a who's-who of some of East Tennessee's most talented musicians. In addition to Qirko, there's bassist Rusty Holloway, pianist Bill Swann, guitarist Mark Boling, sax player Dirk Weddington and many others. According to Brown, that caliber of talent made the recording process fairly painless.

"With minimal rehearsal, they just went in and nailed this music," he said. "To get these songs out of my head and hear musicians of this caliber interpret them is a dream come true for me."

It's not a straight-up jazz album, by any means. Brown says its idiosyncrasies make it impossible to categorize; the jazz foundation is there, but Indian ragas and the idea of an African drum choir rotating around the bass line are just a couple of examples of the album's free-wheeling exploration of style and substance. The title track itself is a 10-minute monster that swirls and circles and twists back around on itself, revealing layers of tone, texture and timing that seem almost impossible to recreate live.

And there again is some of the joy that Brown and his colleagues hope to translate to the "Alive After Five" audience, he added.

"At the KMA, people will hear all of the music that's on the CD, plus two songs that didn't make it on there," he said. "It'll be very similar but they'll have so much more free-wheeling improvisation in terms of letting go and the players taking as much time as they want to develop a solo and that sort of thing. It's much more loose and free."

"Within" is on sale (or will be soon) at Disc Exchange and Border's in Knoxville and online at iTunes, CD Baby and CD Universe.