Clifford Brown

In the summer of 1953 Clifford Brown was twenty-two and Blue Note recorded him twice in eleven weeks. Both dates came out as ten-inch LPs in the label's New Faces, New Sounds series: the June 9 session split the billing with Lou Donaldson, and the August 28 sextet date became New Star on the Horizon, which is about as subtle as Blue Note ever got with a title. After Brown's death the label folded the two sessions onto a single twelve-inch and called it Memorial Album. So if you have ever hunted for a Clifford Brown record called New Faces, New Sounds, this is it, and you want catalog number BLP 1526.

The June date is the rawer of the two. Donaldson was deep in his Bird phase, Elmo Hope writes and comps like the underrated original he was, and a young Philly Joe Jones drives the whole thing two years before he joined Miles. Brownie Speaks and De-Dah move at working-band tempos, and You Go to My Head is the first great Brown ballad on record. The August session swaps in a sextet with Gigi Gryce charts, John Lewis on piano, and Art Blakey pushing from behind. It sounds more composed, closer to what Brown would build with Roach a year later. Cherokee, the bebop obstacle course, gets taken at a dead run, and Wail Bait is one of the earliest Quincy Jones tunes anyone recorded.

Neither session sounds like a debut. That is the eerie thing about Brown's discography: there is no apprentice period anywhere in it. Start here if you want to hear the arrival, then follow him to the quintet records. And if you go hunting for an original 1526 pressing, read the Blue Note pressing guide first so the deadwax tells you what you are holding.

Prestige had its own pair of 1953 Brown sessions in the vault, and after June 1956 it did the same thing Blue Note did: one twelve-inch, PRLP 7055, stitched from two ten-inch dates. The timing of the first one still amazes me. On June 9 Brown cut the Blue Note session reviewed above; on June 11, two days later, he was back in a New York studio inside Tadd Dameron's nine-piece band for the date Prestige first issued as A Study in Dameronia. Same week, two labels, two classics.

The Dameron side belongs to the composer. Philly J J is a drum feature for Philly Joe Jones with the band snapping around him, Theme of No Repeat is classic Dameron elegance, and both takes of Choose Now made the LP so you can hear the solos change. Per the original liner notes, Brown and a twenty-four-year-old Benny Golson are the only horn soloists in that band, which tells you how the section players rated them. Golson's whole composer-first career is covered on his own pages. The Stockholm side comes from that September, when Brown crossed Europe in Lionel Hampton's trumpet section and sat down with the Swedish All Stars and a young Quincy Jones writing the charts. Stockholm Sweetnin' is the keeper, one of Quincy's first great tunes, with Brown and Art Farmer trading the kind of solos that end friendships in lesser bands. Lars Gullin's baritone and Arne Domnerus's alto make the case for 1950s Swedish jazz all by themselves.

As with the Blue Note memorial, the packaging is grief but the music is joy. Between the two compilations, this is the one I reach for more, mostly for Stockholm Sweetnin'. The Original Jazz Classics reissue (OJC-017) is easy to find and sounds fine.

The summer of 1954 found Brown living in Los Angeles and building the quintet with Max Roach, and in the middle of it Pacific Jazz got him into the studio with a West Coast crew and Jack Montrose arrangements. It is the only record where Brown fronts the cool-school instrumentation: Zoot Sims on tenor, Stu Williamson's valve trombone, Bob Gordon's baritone, Shelly Manne brushing instead of Roach driving. First issued under the Clifford Brown Ensemble name, it became Jazz Immortal after his death.

What makes it essential rather than a curiosity is the material. Daahoud and Joy Spring are here in Montrose's chamber settings, recorded the same season the famous quintet versions went to tape for EmArcy. Hearing Brown's two best-known tunes voiced for four horns, with counterlines moving under the melody instead of a rhythm section punching it, is like seeing a familiar building from the air. Zoot floats through everything the way Zoot did (his own run of records is reviewed here), and Tiny Capers, a Brown line that never made the quintet book, swings harder than anything else on the date.

Some collectors write this one off as Brown-lite because nobody sweats. I hear it the other way: drop the fastball tempos and you can study the tone itself, that centered, vocal sound that no trumpeter since has quite matched. An alternate-universe glimpse of a West Coast Clifford who never got to exist.

One long Los Angeles session on August 14, 1954 produced two records: Dinah Jams, the Dinah Washington date reviewed everywhere as one of the great vocal-jazz live documents, and this instrumental companion, issued as Jam Session. The premise is beautifully simple. Put three trumpet players in a room, Brown, Clark Terry, and Maynard Ferguson, back them with Herb Geller, Harold Land, two pianists, two bassists, and Max Roach, count off standards, and stand back.

Move and What Is This Thing Called Love are the trumpet battles, chorus after chorus of one-upmanship. Ferguson goes up, because Ferguson always went up. Terry is all wit and shapes. And Brown just plays, longer lines, cleaner logic, warmer sound, and politely walks off with the record. The ballad medley gives each horn a feature, and Dinah herself steps in for Darn That Dream, a small preview of the full vocal record. It is loose by design: solos run long, the ensemble is whoever wandered back from the coffee pot, and nobody is composing anything.

Three stars is not a knock; it is a genre rating. Jam sessions on record are hangs, and this is a great hang with a historic guest list rather than an album someone built. Hear it once for the trumpet summit, keep Dinah Jams on the shelf, and spend the rest of your Brownie budget on the quintet records.

Helen Merrill's debut, cut at Fine Sound in New York three days before Christmas 1954, with Quincy Jones writing the charts and Clifford Brown as the featured horn. Brown had just done the same job for Sarah Vaughan the week before (that record is reviewed on the Sarah Vaughan page), and the two albums together are the best case anyone has made for the trumpet obbligato as an art form. Seven songs, thirty-two minutes, not a wasted bar.

You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To is the one everybody knows, and it earns the reputation: Merrill smoky and close to the mic, the rhythm section walking, and Brown threading a full-chorus solo that gets quoted by trumpet players to this day. But the deep cuts are just as strong. Don't Explain is sung almost at a whisper, Yesterdays and What's New get Oscar Pettiford's cello underneath, a strange and gorgeous color, and Born to Be Blue fits Merrill's husky sound so well it might as well have been written for her. Quincy was in his early twenties here, and the charts already have that trick of sounding lush with only seven players.

Five stars because vocal jazz does not get better than this. If the record has a flaw, it is length, and wanting more is not much of a flaw. Play it back to back with the Vaughan session some winter night and hear how differently Brown supports two completely different voices.

Every 1950s label wanted its own Charlie Parker with Strings, and in January 1955 EmArcy gave the assignment to its brightest new star. Neal Hefti wrote and conducted the charts, and the rhythm section is the working quintet minus Harold Land: Richie Powell, George Morrow, Max Roach, with Barry Galbraith's guitar added. Twelve ballads, no burners, melody first.

The purist complaint has followed this record since 1955: Hefti's strings are sweetening, Brown barely improvises, it is mood music. All partly true, and it misses the point. Nobody in jazz had a tone like Clifford Brown, and this is the one album built entirely to document it. Laura and Memories of You are as close as we get to hearing the sound with nothing in the way, every note centered, vibrato applied like a finish coat. Stardust and Portrait of Jenny turn familiar melodies into brass singing. Play any eight bars and you can hear why trumpet teachers still assign this record as a tone study.

It works exactly as intended: last record of the night, lights low, glass in hand. Four stars as a jazz album, five as a sound. If you want the improvising Clifford, the quintet records are one page over; if you want to understand why musicians talked about him the way they did, start with Laura.