Collection: Clifford Brown

Clifford Brown received his first trumpet at thirteen, was sitting in for Benny Harris in Dizzy Gillespie's big band at eighteen, and had a fully mature style by 1953 when he was twenty-two. He survived a serious car accident in 1950 that hospitalised him for almost a year and came back playing better than before. He toured Europe with Lionel Hampton's big band in 1953, recorded with Art Blakey, and in 1954 co-founded the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet with Harold Land on tenor saxophone, Richie Powell on piano and George Morrow on bass. In two years of recording for EmArcy, the quintet produced a body of work that established what hard bop could be at its most rigorous and most melodic simultaneously. Brown wrote "Joy Spring" for his wife LaRue, "Daahoud" and "Sandu" for the rest of the world, and all three became jazz standards. He was known for avoiding the drugs and alcohol that were endemic in the jazz world of the 1950s, and Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and Booker Little all cited him as the primary influence on their own playing. Sonny Rollins played alongside him on "Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street" (EmArcy, 1956), which many consider the quintet's finest hour. On the morning of June 26, 1956, Brown, Richie Powell and Powell's wife Nancy were killed in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Bedford. Brown was twenty-five years old and had been recording professionally for four years. Benny Golson, who had toured with Brown in Lionel Hampton's band, wrote "I Remember Clifford" in tribute. It became a standard itself.