Rare Clifford Brown Video from the Soupy Sales Show, 1955

 

From Bret "Jazz Video Guy" Primack.

Lady Be Good, Memories of You.  Max Roach and Clifford Brown, 1955, Soupy Sales Show on ABC-TV.

Clifford Benjamin Brown (October 30, 1930 – June 26, 1956) was an American jazz trumpeter and composer. He died at the age of 25 in a car crash, leaving behind four years' worth of recordings. His compositions "Sandu", "Joy Spring", and "Daahoud" have become jazz standards.[5] Brown won the DownBeat magazine Critics' Poll for New Star of the Year in 1954; he was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1972.

Brown was influenced and encouraged by Fats Navarro. His first recordings were with R&B bandleader Chris Powell. He worked with Art Blakey, Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton and J. J. Johnson, before forming a band with Max Roach.

One of the most notable developments during Brown's period in New York was the formation of Art Blakey's Quintet, which would become the Jazz Messengers. Blakey formed the band with Brown, Lou Donaldson, Horace Silver, and Curley Russell, and recorded the quintet's first album live at the Birdland jazz club. During one of the rehearsal sessions, fellow trumpeter Miles Davis listened and joked about Clifford Brown's technical ability to play the trumpet. The live recording session ultimately spanned two days with multiple takes needed on only a couple of the tunes.

Max Roach's stature had grown as he recorded with a host of other emerging artists (including Bud Powell, Sonny Stitt, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk) and co-founded Debut, one of the first artist-owned labels, with Charles Mingus.  The band's creation began when the two bandleaders rented a studio in California. With Brown able to, in addition to the trumpet, play the piano and drums, Roach and Brown were able to experiment with these instruments extensively at the studio. They settled upon the standard bebop quintet of trumpet, saxophone, piano, bass, and drums, with saxophone, piano, and bass players needed. With first choice Sonny Stitt choosing his own direction for his music, the bandleaders settled upon former Count Basie bassist George Morrow, unconventional pianist Carl Perkins, and tenor saxophone player Teddy Edwards as the first group, although this line-up was short-lived.[1] The group that had formed "sent shock waves throughout the jazz community" according to Sam Samuelson.

An early session of the Brown/Roach Quintet, featuring its new lineup, was titled Clifford Brown & Max Roach and featured several of Brown's new compositions. Samuelson referred to the album as a "nice gamut between boplicity and pleasant balladry". Other albums during the Brown/Roach collaboration included Brown and Roach, Inc. and Study in Brown.

The experiments in bop continued in the 1955 session Study in Brown, such as use of instrument sounds to mimic an inner-city environment in "Parisian Thoroughfare" and "international flavor" in "George's Dilemma". Jazz critic Scott Yanow referred to the album as "premiere early hard bop" and noted the quintet's "unlimited potential."

A 1955 live performance by Clifford Brown with Billy Root and Ziggy Vines, sometimes mistakenly thought to have been recorded just before Brown's death a year later, was released on tape in 1973. Following this live session, the group, with Blakey temporarily replacing Roach at one point following a car accident, toured, visiting Chicago and then Rhode Island for the Newport Jazz Festival. Roach returned for this performance and jam session at Newport.

In June 1956, Brown and Richie Powell embarked on a drive to Chicago for their next appearance. Powell's wife Nancy was at the wheel so that Clifford and Richie could sleep. While driving at night in the rain on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, west of Bedford, she is presumed to have lost control of the car, which went off the road, killing all three in the resulting crash. Brown is buried in Mt. Zion Cemetery, in Wilmington, Delaware.

Jazz historian Ira Gitler said of Brown, "l’m sorry I never got to know him better. Not that it necessarily follows that one who plays that beautifully is also a marvelous person, but I think one can discern in Clifford Brown’s case that the particular kind of extraordinary playing was linked to an equally special human being... Photographs of Clifford Brown reveal some of that inner self; the shots in which he is depicted in a playing attitude show his intensity, that utter concentration and total connection with his instrument.

In the 1990s, video from the TV program Soupy's On (starring comedian Soupy Sales, who was a big jazz fan and booked several top musical stars for his show) was discovered of Clifford Brown playing two tunes. This is the only video recording known to exist of Brown.[2]