Flute maestro Herbie Mann, who also played on the album, told Brown’s biographer Nick Catalano that joining the young trumpet player in the studio was a “defining moment” for him. When singer Sarah Vaughan heard him play, she told Powell, “I have to have Clifford for a record date.” She persuaded him to record with her on the EmArcy Records album Sarah Vaughan (sometimes referred to as Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown), which is considered a classic and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1985. Brown also recorded with Jay Jay Johnson for Blue Note and appeared on “A Study in Dameronia” with Tadd Dameron for Prestige Records. Word soon spread about the trumpet prodigy’s talent and over the next 18 months, Brown played with Lionel Hampton’s band and Art Blakey’s Quintet, with whom he recorded his debut album for Blue Note called New Star On the Horizon. Listen to Clifford Brown on Apple Music and Spotify. I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t believe it.’” “One night he took me in a corner and said, ‘I don’t believe it. “Bird helped my morale a great deal,” Brown later told Hentoff. In May 1952, Brown got the chance to sit in with Charlie Parker for a week at Club Harlem in Philadelphia. Donaldson said all the hard work strengthened Brown’s lips and enabled him to play three sets a night and still be firing after hours on stage. “We would have breakfast and Clifford would practice… he would do lip exercises and mouth exercises all day,” Donaldson told Jazz Wax.īrown himself always said that “the most important thing” a jazz musician could do was train away from the stage. The esteemed Blue Note saxophone player Lou Donaldson, who recorded and toured with Brown at this time, recalled that the trumpeter would be perfecting his skills all day, even at six o’clock in the morning on a tour bus. It says so much for his fortitude that Brown, who was on crutches for months, also began to play the trumpet again during a difficult convalescence at his parents’ home.īy March 1952, Brown was well enough to play in his first recording session – with Chris Powell and His Blue Flames – and he became almost zealous in his devotion to practice. Although problems with his shoulder socket made supporting the trumpet almost impossible in the early months, he gradually returned to playing music by practicing at the piano.
#I REMEMBER CLIFFORD SKIN#
He needed skin grafts all over his damaged body.īrown always spoke of his gratitude towards trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who visited Brown during his recovery and insisted that he had to return to playing one day. Brown was severely injured, suffering broken bones in both legs, and a fracture in his torso.
#I REMEMBER CLIFFORD DRIVER#
After the driver swerved to avoid hitting a deer, the automobile overturned and two of the fellow musician passengers were killed. On June 3, 1950, in a macabre foreshadowing of his later fatal accident, 19-year-old Brown accepted an early morning lift home from a gig at a house party in Maryland. He even overcame an automobile disaster in 1950 on his way to fulfilling that dream. Recovering from a car crashĪlthough Brown studied as a mathematics major at Delaware State University, he had his heart set on a career in music. “There is always ‘Pops’, Louis Armstrong, the father so-to-speak, and I was very inspired by Roy Eldridge’s playing on ‘Let Me Off Uptown,’” recalled Brown. “When I was too little to reach it, I would climb up to where it was, and I kept knocking it down.”īrown gave few broadcast interviews in his life, but in one conducted in 1956 by Willis Conover for Voice of America, Brown said his main influences were trumpeters Fats Navarro, Louis Armstrong, and Roy Eldridge. “From the earliest time, I can remember it was the trumpet that fascinated me,” Brown told jazz critic Nat Hentoff. Brown started on trumpet at the age of 13. Musical beginningsĬlifford Benjamin Brown was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 30, 1930, the youngest of eight children in a musical family that included his opera singer sister, Geneva. “I believe that a hundred years from now, when people look back at the 20th century, they will look at Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dizzy Gillespie as our Mozarts, our Chopins, our Bachs, and Beethovens,” Jones told New Orleans Public Radio in 2013. Quincy Jones even described Brown as one of the most important musicians of all time. Clifford Brown was only 25 when he died in a car accident in 1956, yet the rich body of work he left behind sealed his reputation as one of the greatest trumpet players who ever lived.
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