Billboard : 09/29/1956
Score of 80

Two sessions cut in 1953 and issued originally on two 10-inch LPs are coupled on this disk. The late Brown blew as well here as on most of his later, successful sets, and this set now should enjoy a long, healthy sales life. One side co-features Gigi Gryce, Charlie Rouse, John Lewis, Percy Heath and Art Blakey. Flip has Lou Donaldson and Philly Joe Jones. An excellent outgoing modern program.

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Cash Box : 10/13/1956

As a memorial to the late trumpeter Clifford Brown, Blue Note has assembled two previously released ten inchers for this package. The session were recorded in June and August of 1953 when Brown was 23, and are impressive reminders of the jazzman’s creative spark. Others in the cast include Lou Donaldson (alto sax), Percy Heath (bass) and Art Blakey (drums). Jazz admirers of Brown will form the set’s impressive audience.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

It seems that in jazz the good, especially if they play trumpet, die young. Lost in their twenties or early thirties were Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berigan, Freddie Webster, Sonny Berman, Fats Navarro. When Clifford Brown’s automobile skidded off the highway in the small hours of June 26, 1956 he was just four months short of his twenty-sixth birthday. The man most musicians considered the greatest new trumpet talent of the new generation was killed outright.

It was Blue Note that had given Brownie his initial glimpse of fame by recording his first sessions only three years ago; by an ironic coincidence it was en route to another Blue Note, a night club in Chicago by the same name, that his career was cut short. Musicians all over the world mourned a loss that was all the more tragic in that it had taken the life of a man who, unlike so many artists of popular fiction and social fact, had lived cleanly and honorably, had remained studious and ambitious, had never done anything physically to destroy himself.

Combined on this record are the two sessions, originally released separately on ten inch LPs, that did so much to make Brownie a name to be reckoned with in jazz. It might be appropriate here to recall the biographical details of his brief span. Born Oct. 30, 1930, in Wilmington, Del., he received his first trumpet from his father on entering senior high school in 1945 and joined the school band shortly afterward. It was not until a year or so later that the mysterious world of jazz chord changes and improvisation began to shed its veil for Brownie. A talented musician and jazz enthusiast named Robert Lowery was credited by Brownie for the unveiling.

The teen-aged trumpeter began playing gigs in Philadelphia on graduating in 1948. That same year, he entered Delaware State College on a music scholarship, but there was one slight snag: the college happened to be momentarily short of a music department.

Brownie remained there a year anyway, majoring in mathematics, and taking up a little spare time by playing some Philadelphia dates with such preeminent bop figures as Kenny Dorham, Max Roach, J.J. Johnson and Fats Navarro. He acquired considerable inspiration and encouragement from Navarro, who was greatly impressed with the youngster’s potentialities.

After the year at Delaware State, Brownie had a chance to enter a college that did boast a good music department, namely Maryland State. They also had a good 16-piece band, and he learned a lot about both playing and arranging until one evil evening in June 1950, when, on his way home from a gig, he was involved in the first of three automobile accidents, the last of which was to prove fatal.

For a whole year in 1950-51, Clifford Brown had plenty of opportunity for contemplation but precious little for improving his lip. It took just about a year, plus some verbal encouragement from Dizzy Gillespie, to set him back on the path from which he had been so rudely sideswiped.

He had his own group in Philly for a while, then joined the Chris Powell combo, with which he was working at Café Society when the date with too Donaldson was cut. There followed a stint with Tadd Dameron in Atlantic City, after which he joined Lionel Hampton, touring Europe with him in the fall of 1953. In 1954 Brownie won the Down Beat critics’ poll as the new star of the year. Moving out to California, he formed an alliance with Max Roach that was to last until death broke up the team.

On the first side of the present record Brownie is heard in the company of Gigi Gryce, alto sax and flute, a colleague in the Hampton band at that time; Charlie Rouse, 32-year-old Washingtonian whose tenor sax was heard in the bands of Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington; John Lewis and Percy Heath of MJQ fame, and the ubiquitous, euphonious Mr. Blakey at the batterie.

A briskly performed original by Gigi Gryce, Hymn Of The Orient, opens the side. The second and third choruses of this minor-key work illustrate strikingly Brownie’s capacity for creating long, flowing phrases and executing them impeccably. This passage, 65 seconds long, was to us a major highlight of the entire LP. Note also the solid underlining of Percy Heath and the fine contribution, both in solos and sectional work, of Art Blakey on this item.

An immediate contrast is offered by the lovely standard tune Easy Living, showing Brownie at his most elegant in the ballad mood. The Lewis keyboard provides a fragile, sensitive introduction before the sextet outlines Brownie’s moderately paced Minor Mood. This paves the way for the racehorse pace of Cherokee. The Ray Noble standard, soaring off at a wild tempo, provides an energetic challenge to Brownie, who is later spelled by Blakey in some fours. The side ends with Wail Bait, a melodic-style bop theme, which has a fine chorus split between Gigi and John Lewis and some of Brownie‘s most eloquent thoughts in a full chorus, plus 16 bars of Charlie Rouse followed by some neatly-etched ensemble playing.

On the second side are the products of a session featuring Clifford with Lou Donaldson, the alto sax wizard, who was born in 1926 in Badin, N.C. The rhythm section is made up of Elmo Hope, who has been heard in his own LP, BLP 5029; Philly Joe Jones, a favorite drummer of most modern jazzmen, and Percy Heath again on bass.

Appropriately, it was on Brownie Speaks that the gifted youngster shone most brilliantly during this session. After exposing his own theme to the usual opening chorus workout, he set sail for three choruses of unflagging improvisation in a peppering staccato style that bore the stamp of an individual personality.

At the time of the original release of Brownie Speaks, I commented in the notes: ”Clifford’s melodic contours at times are reminiscent of Miles Davis, yet his tone and attack are blunter, more emphatic, and his harmonic imagination is in a class with that of the late, great Navarro. The continuity of his solo lines is astonishing, placing him at the very top rank of contemporary trumpet stylists.”

The other five items in this set give Brownie Speaks plenty of competition. Each displays one facet or another of the style of this enterprising youth, then just 23 years old, who already had escaped from the narrow channels of imitative playing into the wider stream of musical originality.

De-Dah, like most of these performances, provides an overdue reminder of a fact that had escaped many musicians: the simple small-band format that made Dizzy and Bird famous just trumpet and alto unison theme, solo choruses, and theme to close – is still not stale. If it’s done right, it can be as fresh and as stimulating as when bop brought it into being.

Cookin’, after an introduction featuring Philly Joe, offers a 12-bar theme that departs from the conventional harmonic structure of this formula before easing into the solo passages. During the latter Donaldson, Hope, Brownie and Heath all show in turn that they are indeed “cookin'”.

You Go To My Head illustrates how both Donaldson and Brown managed to blend their ideas with those of the writers of this timeless ballad. Finally Carving The Rock makes an interesting comparison with the version Elmo Hope recorded at another session, as a solo, also for Blue Note. Whether you heard it or not, you’ll hear for yourself that this quintet version swings madly right up to the final flatted fifth.

Fortunately, it need not be said that Clifford Brown died unhonored or unsung. During his last two years, he enjoyed a degree of recognition almost commensurate with what he deserved. To point out that this recognition could have brought him to the pinnacle of jazz fame in a few years is to stress the obvious. Without pausing for platitudes, we prefer to pay a final sad homage to Clifford’s memory by listening once again, many times again, to these eloquent recorded testaments of his undisputed talent.