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

Clifford Brown & Max Roach - Study in Brown | Vinyl LP - 1983 Japanese EmArcy Mono Reissue (195J-10, We Remember Clifford series, Nippon Phonogram)

Study in Brown is one of the high points of hard bop, made by a group that had only a couple of years together and made the most of every one. The Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet recorded it over three days in February 1955, with Harold Land on tenor, Richie Powell on piano and George Morrow on bass. Brown was the reason people stopped in their tracks. His tone was full and singing, his technique complete, and he could play at any speed without ever sounding rushed, which is the whole point of the opening "Cherokee", taken here at a tempo that should not be possible. He wrote four of the tunes, among them the blues "Sandu", which every trumpeter since has had to learn. Max Roach drives the date with the crispness that made him the most musical drummer of his generation, and Harold Land, often overlooked next to Brown, holds his own throughout.

The record carries a shadow it could not have known at the time. Sixteen months after these sessions, in June 1956, Clifford Brown was killed in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, along with Richie Powell and Powell's wife. He was twenty-five, did not drink or use, and was already spoken of as one of the greatest trumpeters jazz had produced. What he might have gone on to do is one of the music's great unanswerable questions, and it is why Benny Golson wrote "I Remember Clifford", the elegy this reissue series nods to in its name.

This copy is the 1983 Japanese mono reissue on EmArcy, remastered from the original Mercury master tapes and manufactured by Nippon Phonogram, catalogue number 195J-10, with OBI and insert.