Clifford Brown & Max Roach - Clifford Brown & Max Roach (1983 Japanese EmArcy Mono Vinyl LP)

Clifford Brown & Max Roach - Clifford Brown & Max Roach (1983 Japanese EmArcy Mono Reissue EVER-1007 Vinyl LP)

This is the record that made the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet. Cut by the first version of the band, with Harold Land on tenor, Richie Powell on piano and George Morrow on bass, it gathers the group's earliest and most enduring studio work. Two of Clifford Brown's own tunes are here in their first versions, and both became standards: "Joy Spring", named for his wife Larue, and "Daahoud", each a lesson in how much melody a bebop line could carry. The quintet also gives Duke Jordan's "Jordu" the reading that fixed it in the repertoire, turns Bud Powell's "Parisian Thoroughfare" into a small piece of theatre complete with imitated traffic, and stretches Victor Young's "Delilah" past eight minutes. Brown plays throughout with the warmth and accuracy that made other trumpeters despair, and Roach drives it all with a lightness that never loses its edge. 

The band recorded only a handful of studio albums before it ended. This one and Study in Brown came from the same period with Harold Land, and At Basin Street followed in 1956 with Sonny Rollins in his place, all of it made before Clifford Brown and Richie Powell were killed in a car crash that June. Brown was twenty-five. What survives is a small, near-flawless body of work, and this album sits at the front of it.

This copy is the 1983 Japanese mono reissue on Mercury and EmArcy, part of the Ever Bright Collection, manufactured by Nippon Phonogram and cut from the original MG-36036 master, catalogue number EVER-1007.