Product Code Database
His trips to Philadelphia grew in frequency after he graduated from high school. Brown briefly attended Delaware State University as a math major before he switched to Maryland State College. He played in the fourteen-piece, jazz-oriented Maryland State Band. In June 1950, he was injured in a car crash after a performance. While in the hospital, he was visited by Dizzy Gillespie, who encouraged him to pursue a career in music.
Brown was influenced and encouraged by Fats Navarro. His first recordings were with R&B bandleader Chris Powell. He worked with Art Blakey, Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton and J. J. Johnson, before forming a band with Max Roach.
One of the most notable developments during Brown's period in New York was the formation of Art Blakey's Quintet, which would become the Jazz Messengers. Blakey formed the band with Brown, Lou Donaldson, Horace Silver, and Curley Russell, and recorded the quintet's first album live at the Birdland jazz club. During one of the rehearsal sessions, fellow trumpeter Miles Davis listened and joked about Clifford Brown's technical ability to play the trumpet. The live recording session ultimately spanned two days with multiple takes needed on only a couple of the tunes.
A week at Club Harlem in May 1952 featured alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and Brown. Brown later noted that Parker was impressed by his playing, saying privately to the young trumpeter "I don't believe it."
Just before the formation of the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, journalist Nat Hentoff and Brown interviewed for a DownBeat article titled "Clifford Brown – the New Dizzy".
The band started when Brown and Roach rented a studio in California. With Brown able to play piano and drums in addition to trumpet, the co-leaders could experiment extensively with these instruments in the studio. They settled on the standard bebop quintet of trumpet, saxophone, piano, bass, and drums, with sax, piano, and bass players needed. When first choice tenor player Sonny Stitt chose his own musical direction, the bandleaders settled on sax player Teddy Edwards, former Count Basie bassist George Bledsoe, and unconventional pianist Carl Perkins. Though the lineup was short-lived, the group "sent shock waves throughout the jazz community," according to Sam Samuelson.
As the band was still deciding on its personnel, Brown and Roach met alto player and multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, who had his own apartment where he hosted jam sessions. Among the jam sessions' musicians were future quintet members Harold Land and George Morrow. Bud Powell brother Richie arrived in the L.A. area around this time and was recruited as the quintet's pianist. The band accepted recording session offers and Brown composed several tunes that were adopted by the new quintet. Meanwhile, a larger, fully arranged band was organized for one of the upcoming recording sessions by Jack Montrose of Pacific Coast Jazz Records. The session "embraced West Coast cool" with "immaculately performed charts," according to reviewer Gordon Jack of Jazz Journal.
An early session of the Brown/Roach Quintet, Clifford Brown & Max Roach, featured the new lineup performing several of Brown's latest compositions. Samuelson referred to the album as a "nice gamut between boplicity and pleasant balladry." Other albums featuring the Brown/Roach collaboration included Brown and Roach, Inc. and Study in Brown.
Brown also recorded albums outside the quintet including the Pacific Coast Jazz session and two albums with jazz vocalist Dinah Washington. Both were recorded from a jam session setting and featured other jazz trumpeters including Maynard Ferguson and Clark Terry. Following the Dinah Washington recordings, Brown slowed the pace of his recordings and returned to the East Coast, recording an album with Sarah Vaughan in December 1954.
The experiments in bop continued in the 1955 session Study in Brown, such as use of instrument sounds to mimic an inner city environment in "Parisian Thoroughfare" and "international flavor" in "George's Dilemma". Jazz critic Scott Yanow referred to the album as "premiere early hard bop" and noted the quintet's "unlimited potential."
A 1955 live performance by Brown with Billy Root and Ziggy Vines (sometimes mistakenly thought to have been recorded just before Brown's death a year later) was released on tape in 1973. Following this session, with Blakey temporarily replacing Roach following a car accident, the group toured, visiting Chicago and then Rhode Island for the Newport Jazz Festival. Roach returned for this performance and jam session at Newport.
Released in 1956, At Basin Street – the quintet's final "official album" – introduced Rollins. The album was called a "hard bop classic" and "highly recommended" by Scott Yanow. While previous quintet albums included original compositions, this one consisted mainly of jazz standards, although it did include a couple of Richie Powell compositions.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"
/a>; ;
Brown stayed away from drugs and was not fond of alcohol. Rollins, who was recovering from heroin addiction, said that "Clifford was a profound influence on my personal life. He showed me that it was possible to live a good, clean life and still be a good jazz musician." Brown's enthusiasm for practicing the trumpet was noted by Lou Donaldson, who said Clifford would "do lip exercises and mouth exercises all day."
In the 1990s, video from the TV program Soupy's On (starring comedian Soupy Sales, who was a big jazz fan and booked several top musical stars for his show) was discovered of Clifford Brown playing two tunes. This is the only video recording known to exist of Brown.
Brown's nephew, drummer Rayford Griffin (né Rayford Galen Griffin; b. 1958), modernized Brown's music on his 2015 album Reflections of Brownie. Brown's grandson, Clifford Benjamin Brown III (b. 1982), plays trumpet on one of the tracks, "Sandu".
Benny Golson composed "I Remember Clifford" in 1957 as a tribute to Brown, and Jon Hendricks added lyrics. Dizzy Gillespie, Art Farmer, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, and Golson himself used the song to pay tribute throughout subsequent years. Arturo Sandoval dedicated an album, I Remember Clifford, to Brown in 1992.
Posthumous releases
Box set
|
|
