Clifford Brown had more than music on his mind that day.
The brilliant trumpeter, already a leading light of modern jazz at 25, had just spent a rejuvenating long weekend back home in Wilmington, Delaware. He’d visited an old fishing hole with friends, bringing his catch to the family rowhouse at 1013 Poplar Street, where his sister Geneva, also home for a visit, fried it up with some cornbread and black-eyed peas.
Now it was Tuesday, June 26, 1956 — his second wedding anniversary, and the 23rd birthday of his wife, LaRue, who was in Los Angeles with their six-month-old son. In celebration (and maybe a spirit of conciliation), Brown sent her flowers, and the promise of a gift when he joined them in L.A., after a gig in Chicago with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet. Then he loaded up his Buick and drove to Philadelphia to pick up Richie Powell, the band’s pianist. Together with Richie’s young wife, Nancy, they hit the road headed for the midwest.
They made it as far as the rain-slicked Bedford Interchange, 200 miles west of Philadelphia. By that point, close to midnight, Nancy was behind the wheel, while both musicians caught some shuteye. Suddenly, while passing a semi-trailer, the car skidded out of control.
“State police said the auto struck a guard rail, throwing Mrs. Powell out, then hit a bridge abutment, jumped the barrier and rolled 75 feet down an embankment,” reported the Altoona Tribune, in a Page One story. “Brown was thrown from the car as it crashed down the embankment. Powell was pinned inside the wreckage.” All three were killed in the crash.
Jazz has rarely had a more heart-wrenching loss. Max Roach, on receiving the news in Chicago, downed a bottle of whisky in his hotel room to numb the pain. Sonny Rollins, the tenor saxophonist in the band, later remembered that he bawled like a baby, and practiced through the night in search of solace.
The rest of the jazz world joined in mourning — and in many ways, still mourns, because of the blazing promise that was extinguished that night, especially in the case of Brown, who famously steered clear of drugs and alcohol. “Clifford Brown is one of those musicians, specifically for trumpet players, that we look to as the gold standard,” Sean Jones, one of his many inheritors, tells WRTI. That Brown achieved that stature by 25, and seemed only to be getting better, sharpens the conviction that he had more landmark work ahead of him.
But in addition to a lament for what might have been, the anniversary of his death invites a reflection of what actually was — the ripple effect of Brownie’s death, and how it altered the course of modern jazz. Part of that story is speculative. Another part is observable fact, though it isn’t observed nearly enough.
The most immediate impact, of course, was an absence.
Its magnitude can only be understood by consulting the recorded evidence. Brown left a tranche of it during his brief career, turning heads with his Blue Note debut in 1953 (reissued posthumously as Memorial Album) and blowing minds with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in ‘54 (on A Night at Birdland, Vols. 1-3). His unfailingly clear articulation, even at supersonic tempos and across leaping intervals, marked a new frontier for his instrument. And as he showed on albums with Helen Merrill and Sarah Vaughan, he was also a gifted and expressive melodist.
But it was the group he formed with Roach, bebop’s chief rhythmic catalyst, that best showcased the hyperarticulate urgency and daredevil instinct that set him in a class apart. A defining hard-bop unit from its first release in 1954, the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet reached even greater heights when Rollins replaced Harold Land late in ‘55. “They were on a trajectory, man,” says Jones. “I mean, you listen to those records, and the compositions on there — and you listen to Sonny Rollins Plus Four, which is my favorite studio album that Clifford Brown was ever on. You could just tell that they were on their way to something magical.”
Speaking with Ben Sidran in 1986, with 30 years of hindsight, Roach reflected on the shock of losing Brown and Powell, and how it impacted the others. “We had been booked beyond that, of course,” he said. “So I honored some of those jobs, as much as I could.” For a handful of dates, trumpeter Donald Byrd and pianist Barry Harris filled in. Kenny Dorham also took a turn in the trumpet chair. But nothing could recapture the magic, and a cloud of grief hung over the band.
That August, as John Gennari recounts in his book The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life, the surviving members of the quintet — Roach, Rollins and bassist George Morrow — attended a historic summer concert series and symposium in Lenox, Mass. At one point during the weekend, they played Rollins’ tune “Valse Hot” as a pianoless trio. As Roach told Sidran, the sound of that format stuck with them.
“I guess that might have been the beginning of what I began to hear out of that tragedy, as we worked these trio things — and it was almost like a memorial to these two very wonderful musicians,” he said. “As we played these few jobs we had committed ourselves to without them, without Clifford and them, Sonny and George and myself, we both began to adapt to just that sound. And we tried to compensate for the fact that the piano and trumpet weren’t there. And I began to hear something else. And so did Sonny. And out of that, of course, Sonny did his first Freedom Suite with Oscar Pettiford and myself.”
Roach was skipping ahead in the timeline, because Freedom Suite came after other consequential Rollins recordings with bass and drums. He made a casual masterpiece, Way Out West, in March of 1957 with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne. That fall, he returned to a pianoless trio format for A Night at the Village Vanguard, the first album recorded in that club, and still arguably the finest. (A 3-LP Tone Poet edition of that album was released in 2024; I contributed a liner essay.)
There’s no doubt that Rollins would have eventually found his way to working with just bass and drums, because of the harmonic freedom he savored in that setting. But had he still been busy working with the Brown-Roach band in 1957, there’s a good chance he never would have recorded these particular albums. Were they in some way his reaction to the loss? It’s probably not as simple as that, but there could easily be a correlation. And with Freedom Suite, one of jazz’s earliest outright statements in the nascent civil rights movement, Rollins reunited with Roach, a moment that must have stirred up memories of Brownie and Richie. As Aidan Levy suggests in Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins: “To Sonny, they were not gone, but in a sense, the pianoless trio carries the ache of a phantom limb.”
Clifford Brown, Jr. was six months old when his father died.
His mother, the former LaRue Anderson, had a formidable intellect — she met Brown through Roach, whom she’d interviewed for her masters thesis at the University of Southern California — and he grew up in a household that prized education. Because he had no memory of his father, it was up to him to construct one.
“I knew that anyone around the music spoke so reverently about my father, who was no longer around, who my mom would always tell me was in heaven,” Brown, Jr. tells WRTI. “And there were always musicians around the house — from local L.A. cats to well-known people. Lee Morgan was around the house a lot when I was little. Donald Byrd, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson. They were good friends of my mother’s, and they took an interest in me. But I didn’t understand why they treated me so differently. I was well into elementary school before I started to get it.”
But by age six, he was on his way. “I would lay in front of this big record player that we had that was built into the bottom of a TV set, and I would listen to that Clifford Brown & Max Roach album over and over again, particularly the song ‘Delilah,’” he recalls. “At that young age, I just loved that song. It really, really spoke to me, and that was pretty much the beginning of my love affair with this music.”
That interest led him to a career in jazz broadcasting: he took radio classes at Los Angeles City College, and got his first job at a station at 21. “Here I am at 70 — so, not quite 50 years in radio,” he marvels. He has spent more than 20 of those years at KCSM Jazz 91, a Bay Area jazz station, formerly as program director and now as a host of two programs that run back-to-back on Sunday mornings, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific Time.
For those who did know Brown, especially the musicians who worked with him, celebrating his legacy took many forms. By far the most enduring was an elegy by tenor saxophonist Benny Golson, who knew Brown from the Philadelphia scene. He composed “I Remember Clifford” in 1957, and it quickly became a jazz standard, recorded by everyone from Donald Byrd with Gigi Gryce to Dizzy Gillespie to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
In ‘58 the song appeared on Benny Golson and the Philadelphians, with Lee Morgan on trumpet, Ray Bryant on piano, Percy Heath on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums. (More than 30 years later, it would provide the title track for a Grammy-nominated album by Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.)
There were other timely gestures, like a 1958 album titled A Tribute to Clifford Brown, by vibraphonist Lem Winchester with the Ramsey Lewis Trio. Blue Note reissued Brown’s two 10-inch LPs from 1953 as a single LP titled Memorial Album — a celebration of his early promise, alongside peers like alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson and pianist Elmo Hope.
Jazz branched into a number of directions in the decades just after Brown’s passing, and it’s tempting to speculate about how he might have navigated those pathways. How might Clifford Brown have responded to the new frontier of the early 1960s? What would he have sounded like as a modal improviser? Could he have embraced free jazz, or other disruptions in form? The answer of course is unknowable, though the work of trumpeters in his wake, from Morgan and Byrd to Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw, suggests a few possible outcomes. “He clearly had his ear to the pavement,” affirms Sean Jones. “It seems to me that he was going to explore a variety of different directions.”
For Jones, who holds the chair in Jazz Studies at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, the more enticing hypothetical involves Brown as an ambassador and spokesperson for the music, like Dr. Billy Taylor, or Wynton Marsalis after him. “I think that perhaps the narrative of the music — and its purpose, aligned with American culture — would have been more available for public consumption,” Jones says, drawing on the articulacy of Brown’s available interviews. “I see him as someone who potentially could have gotten into various institutions and created jazz programs a little earlier than we saw in the industry.”
What we can say definitively is that Brown’s legacy lives on in myriad ways, and not only among jazz trumpeters. Earlier this year, Peter Keepnews wrote a New York Times obituary for him, as part of the paper’s series Overlooked No More. “Clifford Brown’s reputation has grown since his death,” he noted, “and his legacy has been enhanced with the release of previously unissued recordings and the discovery of a 1955 performance on a Detroit television show hosted by the comedian Soupy Sales — the only known video footage of Brown in action.”
Brown is fondly remembered in Philadelphia, where he made so many of his early strides — he even has a plaque on the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame. But his stature approaches that of a dignitary in his hometown. “His spirit is very much alive in Wilmington,” attests drummer Jonathan Whitney, who manages production and booking for the Clifford Brown Jazz Festival, a summer institution; its 39th edition will take place Aug. 2 through 8, with a lineup yet to be announced.
“I think it’s wonderful that they continue to honor their native son, and try to help instill the values that my dad represented,” says Clifford Brown, Jr., whose family granted the city the rights to use the name Clifford Brown in perpetuity. In 2012, the City of Wilmington also erected a historical marker for Brown, in Kirkwood Park.
Whatever form it takes, our memorials for Brown will always celebrate both his staggering musicianship and his sterling character, the two seemingly inextricable. As Rollins once remembered: “I came to terms with his death on an emotional level by rationalizing that he was too good a person to be in this world. He was really a beautiful human being.”
