An article I received from cubic61052 the other day...

50 Years Later, Unmuted Awe for Clifford Brown



By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 26, 2006

There may be no sadder tale in modern music than that of Clifford Brown.
All but forgotten today outside a coterie of jazz buffs, he remains a
heart-tugging example of what-might-have-been, as musicians and critics
continue to debate the wonders he could have achieved, if only he had lived.

He was the most brilliant trumpet player of his generation, an
original and memorable composer, a dynamic stage presence and, as everyone
who knew him will tell you, a sweet and gentle soul.

"He had it all," says saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who spent seven
formative months working alongside Brown.

Listen to any of his recordings -- fortunately, there are dozens,
and they're all worth hearing -- and the liquid excitement of his trumpet
leaps from the speakers, by turns bold and bright, tender and graceful.

But it was more than Brown's music that impressed those around him.
Brown refused to use drugs, and his quiet example had begun to change the
reprobate image of musicians, for whom booze and heroin were part of the
jazz life.

For all these reasons, it was nothing less than an American tragedy
when Clifford Brown was killed in an after-midnight car accident in
Pennsylvania 50 years ago today. He was 25 years old.

Any number of rock musicians, from Buddy Holly to Jimi Hendrix to
Kurt Cobain, have died young, and classical fans have long speculated on the
extinguished gifts of pianist William Kapell, who was killed in an airplane
crash in 1953 at age 31. Jazz musician Charlie Parker was 34 when he died in
1955 after years of drug abuse, but by then he'd already made his lasting
contribution, creating (with Dizzy Gillespie) the intricate musical language
of bebop

Still, there remains something tantalizingly poignant about Clifford
Brown and his unfulfilled future. Decades later, the echoes of his barely
tapped talent leave you longing for more.

"He was just like a shooting star," says Rollins. "He's there, and he's gone."

In 1948, Philadelphia saxophonist Jimmy Heath took his group to
Wilmington, Del., to play at a club called the Two Spot. It was the first
time he met Clifford Brown.

"This young guy came up, head bowed, a very humble person, and asked
if he could sit in," Heath recalls today. "At the age of 17, he was
outstanding."

By then Brown, who grew up in Wilmington, had been playing the
trumpet for five years. From the start, he was drawn to the exuberance and
structure of jazz, and his model was Theodore "Fats" Navarro, who would die
at 26 from tuberculosis and heroin addiction. From Navarro, Brown developed
a full, or "fat," trumpet tone and learned to explore the expressive depth
of the instrument's middle and lower registers.

After two years in college -- including one at what is now the
University of Maryland Eastern Shore -- Brown was critically injured in a
car wreck in 1950 that eerily foretold his later fate. He broke both legs,
was in a full-body cast for months and underwent skin and bone grafts. When
shoulder pain temporarily forced him to give up the trumpet during his long
convalescence, he turned to the piano and was good enough to take a few jobs
playing in lounges.

After regaining his trumpet chops, Brown was quickly recognized as a
rising talent, and by 1953 he was making records in New York with top-tier
jazzmen

"When Brownie stood up and took his first solo," writer and record executive Ira Gitler once said,
"I nearly fell off my seat in the control room. The power, range and brilliance together with the warmth
and invention was something that I hadn't heard since Fats Navarro."

During the summer of '53, Brown was in an Atlantic City show band
with saxophonist Benny Golson. "He was not a likable guy -- he was a lovable
guy," Golson recalls. "I never heard him raise his voice in anger, I never
heard him swear or tell a dirty joke."

About the worst that could be said of him was that he had a weak spot for doughnuts.

In the fall of 1953, Brown was touring Europe and North Africa with
bandleader Lionel Hampton, who forbade anyone in his group to make records
on the side. Despite the prohibition, Brown and other band members --
including future music mogul Quincy Jones -- sneaked away for several
remarkable sessions at Paris studios. Hampton's manager reportedly
threatened Brown with a knife, but the surreptitious Parisian recordings put
Brown's picture on the cover of magazines and helped make him the biggest
new star in jazz. He was better known (and considered a better trumpeter)
than Miles Davis.

Brown made one of the first live jazz recordings, "A Night at Birdland,"
with drummer Art Blakey, then went to California, where he formed
the two most important partnerships of his life. The first was with drummer
Max Roach, and the other was with a University of Southern California music
student named LaRue Anderson, who was writing a thesis on why jazz was not
serious music. After meeting Brown, she changed her mind. They were married
within a few months, on LaRue's 21st birthday.

Brown and Roach formed a quintet with tenor saxophonist Harold Land,
bassist George Morrow and pianist Richie Powell (younger brother of piano
giant Bud Powell), which quickly emerged as one of the most important groups
of its time. The group helped forge a distinctive new style called "hard
bop" -- refined, fiery and hard-hitting -- that sounds as exhilarating now
as it did then.

"Hard bop is the predominant style of jazz played today," notes
historian Phil Schaap, curator for Jazz at Lincoln Center. "The bar was set
very, very high, and it certainly has not been eclipsed."

During his remarkable three-year run, Brown made more than a dozen
albums -- among them "Study in Brown," "Brown & Roach Inc.," "Clifford Brown
With Strings" and "At Basin Street" -- that are, quite simply, unsurpassed
models of the art of jazz trumpet.

Brown was not a big man. At 5 feet 9, he had a quiet, guileless
demeanor and, as a result of the car accident, walked with a limp -- yet
something about him commanded respect. When Sonny Rollins joined the
Brown-Roach Quintet in 1955, the tenor saxman was kicking a heroin habit,
but Brown never lectured Rollins about drugs, never acted superior.

"Clifford was a clean-living person," says Rollins, who at 75 is the
same age Brown would be today. "That was a tremendous influence on me, to
see that a guy who could play at that high level was clean of drugs."

He was, in other words, mature beyond his years -- and his character
and musicianship were beginning to shape the future of jazz, supplanting the
drug-fueled model of Charlie Parker, who died the year before. As Roach once
said: "He was capable of -- well, not to use an overworked word, but he was
capable of great profundity."

That unrealized potential lies at the center of a persistent mystery
about Clifford Brown. On Monday, June 25, 1956, after visiting his parents
in Wilmington, he drove to Philadelphia and stopped at Music City, a jazz
club where he often sat in on jam sessions. For years, jazz fans have been
abuzz about an amateur recording that purported to capture his final
performance.

A recording does exist of Brown playing three tunes, and he is astonishing.
Critics have called those performances "a defining moment in trumpet history."

But Nick Catalano, author of "Clifford Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter,"
says the legend of Brownie's Last Jam in Philly is just too good to be true. Citing a musician named Billy Root,
a regular at Music City, Catalano unequivocally says the jam session took place a year earlier, on May 31, 1955.

But Schaap, a jazz historian who has studied Brown's career as closely as anyone,
says there is nothing -- aside from Root's statement -- to prove that the bootleg tape was made in 1955.
Whenever the tape was made, Brown was clearly in a buoyant mood at Music City that night and reaching
for new musical heights. On the recording, he speaks from time to time and at one point complains about the heat.

If nothing else can be proved, this much can be said: On May 31,
1955, Philadelphia had a high temperature of 71 degrees; on June 25, 1956,
it was 86.

Brown packed up his horn and left Philadelphia with pianist Richie
Powell and Powell's wife, Nancy. They were headed for Chicago, where the
quintet was to perform the following night.

Sometime after midnight, they pulled off the Pennsylvania Turnpike
to buy gas in Bedford, Pa., about 120 miles east of Pittsburgh. It was
raining. Soon afterward, with Nancy Powell at the wheel of Brown's 1955
Buick, the car missed a curve, smashed through a guardrail and hurtled down
a 75-foot embankment. All three occupants were killed.

It was Brown's second wedding anniversary -- and his wife's birthday.
(LaRue Brown died last year at 72.)

In Chicago, when word arrived that Brown and Powell were dead, Roach
locked himself in a hotel room with two bottles of cognac.

As for Rollins, "I just picked up my horn and played all night."

They tried to keep the band going, but it wasn't the same.

"When Clifford left, the front line was broken," says Rollins.
"Other players came to replace Clifford, but they couldn't do it."

For years, when Rollins was struggling during a performance, he knew
a sure way to get through his problems. "When I wasn't playing too well," he
says, "I would channel Clifford. That would focus my thoughts and my
playing."

A few months after Brown's death, Benny Golson, who had known him in
Philadelphia, paid tribute by writing the darkly beautiful "I Remember
Clifford," one of the most haunting ballads of jazz.

The life of Clifford Brown may have ended in sadness, but his music endures, full of joy.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

One of the recordings mentioned in the article...



...At Basin Street (with Max Roach), I recently purchased the reissue (w/previously unreleased alternate takes).
This is the band consisting of Sonny Rollins (his only recording with the group), Richie Powell and George Morrow.

My dad had the original LP and it was usually in front where the complete cover could be seen.
I'd stare at that cover and initially became enamored of the sparkly drum set with Max Roach peering through the cymbals.


Inside the record sleeve is just simply some great playing.


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431
[Edited 7/6/06 15:31pm]

nice article.....truly a great....like Charlie Christian and Jimi Hendrix, an incredible artist who went way, way too soon....


The first albums of Clifford's I bought were these...





The second one is probably a better showcase of his great talent, but the weird thing is, it contains recordings done both at the very beginning of his career, and also a few hours before his tragic accident.....





...

paligap said:

That must be the Philly performance they discussed in the article.

The At Basin Street reissue is also on EmArcy (like your Clifford Brown with Strings) and the disc art emulates the LP's center sticker.

I didn't realize they were still an active label.


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

tA and paligap are up on it as usual.

This is currently the only Clifford Brown album I own.

namepeace said:

I gotta grab that one, and that Basin Street reissue...



...

for me my all time favorite clifford brown album is without doubt:
clifford brown: jazz immortal featuring zoot on the pacific jazz label.
(i am still not sophisticated enough to post images). in terms of composition, and playing it is a flawless album.

medoc2003 said:

tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

Good read! Of his albums, I'm only familiar (thanks to you) with the one you posted...



...and I do love it.

RipHer2Shreds said:

Glad you like it.
Now I don't have to worry about you saying, "Damn, that tA-hole made me waste my money on this b.s.!"


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

theAudience said:

Even though artists like Clifford Brown and Johnny Jenkins did not have the notoriety and fame of the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis, they did not lack for talent....it is important to glean any inspiration, technical knowledge, and dexterity you can from them by giving their music the time that it deserves.
Thanks, tA!

namepeace said:

Hey you're not fooling anybody. I read where you've been "studying".


Just layin' in the cut waiting to bust out some deadly picks.


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

theAudience said:

Yeah. I'm sandbaggin' a little bit.

But you know, I bought so much that just sat on my shelf for years that I've got to "get around to."