Trumpet | 1930-1956

Clifford Brown grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, the youngest of eight children in a musical family, received his first trumpet at thirteen and was studying with his high school band director Harry Andrews before he finished school. He survived a serious car accident in 1950 that kept him hospitalised for nearly a year, emerged with his technique intact and his ambition sharpened, and by 1953 had a fully formed style that sat at the intersection of Fats Navarro's bebop lyricism and something more harmonically adventurous of his own. A European tour with Lionel Hampton's big band, a stint with Tadd Dameron, and sessions with Art Blakey preceded the formation of the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet in 1954, one of the defining hard bop ensembles of the era. The EmArcy recordings that followed, made over two years with Harold Land and later Sonny Rollins on tenor, Richie Powell on piano and George Morrow on bass, produced the jazz standards "Joy Spring," written for his wife LaRue, "Daahoud" and "Sandu," alongside landmark versions of "Cherokee," "Parisian Thoroughfare" and "Delilah." Brown was known for maintaining a clean lifestyle at a time when drug and alcohol abuse was common in the jazz world, and the directness of that discipline is audible in the clarity and consistency of his playing. He was twenty-five years old when he died in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on June 26, 1956, alongside Richie Powell and Powell's wife Nancy. Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and Booker Little all cited him as the primary influence on their own development.