Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Clifford Brown was born on October 30, 1930 into a musical family in Wilmington, Delaware. Organized into a vocal quartet with three of his youngest brothers buy his father, by age ten he started playing trumpet at school after becoming fascinated with the shiny trumpet his father owned. By age thirteen, he had his own trumpet and was taking private lessons.

Junior year in high school he received lessons from Boysie Lowrey, played in a jazz group that Lowery put together, made trips into Philadelphia while earning a good education from Howard High.  He briefly attended Delaware State University as a math major, before switching to Maryland State College that had a more vibrant musical environment. He played in the fourteen-piece, jazz-oriented, Maryland State Band.

In June of 1950, he was seriously injured in a car accident and during his yearlong hospitalization Dizzy Gillespie visited the young trumpeter and pushed him to pursue his musical career. Limited to the piano for months due to his injuries Clifford never fully recovered and would routinely dislocate his shoulder for the rest of his life. However, he quickly became one of the most highly regarded trumpeters in jazz.

Brownie, as he was affectionately called had a sound that was warm and round, and notably consistent across the full range of the instrument. He could articulate every note, even at very fast tempos which seemed to present no difficulty to him; serving to enhance the impression of his speed of execution. He had a highly developed sense of harmony, delivered bold statements through complex chord changes of bebop harmony and fully expressed himself in a ballad.

He performed and recorded with Chris Powell, Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton and Art Blakey before forming his own group with Max Roach. The Clifford Brown & Max Roach Quintet was a high water mark of the hard bop style with pianist Richie Powell, tenor saxophonist Harold Land, Teddy Edwards and Sonny Rollins throughout the tenure of the group.

Clifford never touched drugs and had no fondness for alcohol, however his clean living would not save him from his tragic death on the rainy night of June 26, 1956 due to an auto accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That night band member Richie Powell and his wife Nancy would also lose their lives.

At age 25 trumpeter Clifford Brown would leave behind only four years of recordings, nonetheless, he influenced later jazz trumpet players like Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw, Lee Morgan, Booker Little, Freddie Hubbard, Valery Ponomarev, Wynton Marsalis and many others. His compositions “Joy Spring” and “Daahoud” are jazz standards. He won the Down Beat critics’ poll for the “New Star of the Year” in 1954; and was inducted into the Down Beat “Jazz Hall of Fame” in 1972 in the critics’ poll.

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