Clifford Brown and Max Roach

Brown, Clifford-Max Roach Quintet

album cover

The Sound of Jazz Precision

Some jazz trumpet players paint pretty landscapes, others smear notes like they're spreading butter on a biscuit. Clifford Brown—the pied piper of post bop who was killed in 1956 at age twenty-five in an accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike—played like he was lighting firecrackers. His attack was dizzyingly precise. He placed notes exactly on the part of the beats he intended to hit.

He had the spark of great bebop and the lazy warmth of cool jazz. And whether the music moved at a technically demanding clip or was to be caressed at ballad tempo, the soft-spoken musician his friends called "Brownie" had a way of nudging things toward greatness. "He could change from a meek lamb, musically, into a fierce tiger," saxophonist Benny Golson once said of Brown, whose recording career spanned just four years. "He could play the bottom, top, loud, soft. He was playing the whole instrument."

This album, the first of several featuring a group Brown coled with drummer Max Roach (1924–2007), offers endless examples—the exquisite bebop of "Daahoud," the fanciful clip of "Parisian Thoroughfare," the slalom-like chord sequence of Brown's original "Joy Spring," which catches him doing one of the neatest bob-and-weave maneuvers in all of jazz.

Also notable is Golson's "Blues Walk," which Brown treats more like a blues chase—he keeps the trumpet in constant motion, tossing out genius lines left and right, and when he finally finishes, it feels like he's just run a marathon. And somehow carved a masterpiece of sculpture along the way.

Genre: Jazz
Released: 1955, EmArcy
Key Tracks: "Joy Spring," "Jordu," "These Foolish Things," "The Blues Walk"
Catalog Choice: Brown: The Beginning and the End. Roach: We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (see p. 647).
Next Stop: Booker Little: Out Front (see p. 450).
Book Page: 119

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