Clifford Brown & Max Roach - At Basin Street (1974 Japanese EmArcy Mono Vinyl LP)

Clifford Brown & Max Roach - At Basin Street | Vinyl LP - 1974 Japanese EmArcy Mono Reissue (BT-1326, Immortal Clifford Brown Collection, Nippon Phonogram)

At Basin Street is the last studio record the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet made, and it caught the band with a new voice up front. Harold Land had gone home to California to care for his wife, and in his place stood Sonny Rollins, twenty-five and about to become one of the most important saxophonists alive. The two horns could hardly be more different, Brown warm and flowing, Rollins hard and muscular, and the contrast lifts the whole record. The three standards that open it, "What Is This Thing Called Love?", "Love Is A Many Splendored Thing" and "I'll Remember April", are taken at pace and dressed in Richie Powell's crafty arrangements, full of sudden intros and shifts of rhythm. Powell, Bud's younger brother, also contributes three originals, the springing "Gertrude's Bounce" among them, and Tadd Dameron's "The Scene Is Clean" rounds it out. It is one of the essential hard bop records, and it never lets up.

Read now, the record is impossible to separate from what came next. Four months after the February sessions, Clifford Brown and Richie Powell were both killed in the same car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and the quintet was gone. This is the last studio album it made under the Brown and Roach name, and one of the last things either man recorded. Sonny Rollins recorded Saxophone Colossus that same June, days before the crash, and went on to a career that ran another sixty years, which only sharpens the sense of how much ended here.

This copy is the 1974 Japanese mono reissue on EmArcy, part of the Immortal Clifford Brown Collection series, manufactured by Nippon Phonogram, catalogue number BT-1326.