Clifford Brown - Clifford Brown With Strings (1971 Japanese Mercury Mono Vinyl LP)

Clifford Brown - Clifford Brown With Strings | Vinyl LP - 1971 Japanese Mercury Mono Reissue (15PJ-2014, Nippon Phonogram)

In January 1955, in the middle of a run of hard-bop quintet dates, Clifford Brown spent three days in New York making a ballads record. He was set in front of a small string section, six violins, two violas and a cello, arranged and conducted by Neal Hefti, with his own rhythm section of Richie Powell, George Morrow and Max Roach filling in behind and Barry Galbraith on guitar. The programme is twelve standards, "Yesterdays", "Laura", "Stardust", "Willow Weep For Me", "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" and the rest, and Brown mostly stays close to the melodies, letting that famous warm, round tone carry the weight. It sits in the lineage of Charlie Parker with Strings, though Hefti's writing is a touch sweeter, and Brown sounds completely at ease inside it.

Opinion has always split on it. Some hear the strings as too sweet and wish Brown pushed harder against them, while plenty of others count it among the most beautiful records anyone made in the jazz-with-strings vein. What nobody argues with is the playing. It was cut about seventeen months before the car crash that killed both Brown, at twenty-five, and Richie Powell, which leaves it among the last and most tender things he recorded.

This is the 1971 Japanese pressing on Mercury, manufactured by Nippon Phonogram as number seven in its Clifford Brown Collection, a mono pressing with Japanese liner notes by Shoichi Yui.