Home » Jazz Articles » History of Jazz » Clifford Brown’s Trumpet and One Summer in Atlantic City
Clifford Brown’s Trumpet and One Summer in Atlantic City
Courtesy Franz Mandigers
He was just like a shooting star: he’s there and he’s gone.
—Sonny Rollins
Clifford Brown
trumpetb.1930
In early June, Brown went to New York City at the call of
Tadd Dameron
piano1917 - 1965
Jimmie Lunceford
composer / conductor1902 - 1947
Coleman Hawkins
saxophone, tenor1904 - 1969
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
Dameron imagined Atlantic City as the incubator for better things, innovations upon show tunes while playing behind a revue of dancers, showgirls, and comedians. There would be time for more serious numbers to lead off and jam sessions after hours, even as the night stretched toward breakfast. He liked mentoring younger musicians, his conceptions for a multipiece ensemble interested Brown, and they began working together toward recording and summer performances.
First Notice
Brown began the year with a Philadelphia rhythm and blues dance band, Chris Powell and the Blue Flames. Brown never devalued that training; it schooled him in the life of a working musician. As a teenager Brown had obtained the notice of bebop masters
Charlie Parker
saxophone, alto1920 - 1955
Dizzy Gillespie
trumpet1917 - 1993
Roy Haynes
drums1926 - 2024
Fats Navarro
trumpet1923 - 1950
He was identified as having something special. As he matured, he could articulate every note even at high tempos without difficulty, enhancing the impression of speed, and express himself deeply in ballads. His sound was brilliant, warm and round, "fat" even, like that of trumpeter Fats Navarro who had influenced him, and consistent across the full range of the instrument. He had a gift for improvisation, endurance and durability without cracking, and lyrical warmth.
Brown had an indefatigable appetite for practice that never left him. His hometown of Wilmington, Delaware had a segregated school system, but there was great focus and support within the black community on the resources available, and dedicated educators. A high school music teacher, Harry Andrews, brought the discipline of having directed an army band and advanced university study. He provided after-hours tutoring for the eager student. A local sage, Boysie Lowery, taught the European musical tradition but also an analytic system for improvisation based on hearing and anticipating the chord movements of bebop. This was Brown's foundation.
City Within a City
Atlantic City had long been a place for jazz players to tune up on the outskirts of New York City. The music of the "Chocolate Kiddies" revues of bandleaderSam Wooding
b.1895Atlantic City is right on the ocean, and although it has a beach, and boardwalk, it was never any kind of low-key beach town. From the initiation of its development in the late 1800s, it was always a city. By the 1950s it was fully urban, with buses and taxis, stone and mortar hotels facing the ocean and lining side streets, backed by residential neighborhoods. Philadelphia is less than a 100 miles away, Manhattan just more than a 100. Before there was air travel, railroads brought visitors from throughout the near northeast as Americans learned to vacation. Hard labor was necessary to build the city and service its hotels.
Situated in southern New Jersey, Atlantic City was a place for black people to land immediately upon leaving the South. The Mason-Dixon Line conceptually separating North from South ran along the borders of Pennsylvania and Delaware, states adjoining New Jersey. For black people moving up the East Coast, there was work in Harlem and work in Atlantic City, so both of those places were magnets for employment. Atlantic City needed its black residents to build and service the vacation place, and a parallel city flourished for them on the "Northside," an economy with its own services, professionals, and nightclubs, like the Club Paradise and Club Harlem.
Black people were segregated onto their own beach, after white guests had complained to private hoteliers about mixed usage of their beachfront. A city-owned stretch of sand between the ocean and the government-built Convention Hall became black people's own place of enjoyment. They turned back the derogatory name "Chicken Bone Beach" by claiming it with pride and an affirming identity. A whole network of small hotels, rooming houses, and guest cottages on the Northside welcomed black visitors, listed in the Negro Travelers' Green Book, and transportation companies facilitated daytrippers with dedicated bus routes.
One can imagine having been alive in Atlantic City then, spending the day at the beach, walking the boardwalk, returning to a hotel or lodging house pre-air conditioning, taking a nap on an iron-frame bed while salty rustling ocean breezes set the curtains in gentle motion, then showering and getting dressed to go out to a kind of Cotton Club, a "sepia revue" as Club Harlem's neon sign announced, amid the shifting codes of northern segregation, a parallel universe in the black part of town.
North Kentucky Avenue with the Club Harlem was the center of the Northside entertainment community. Club Paradise was just a few block away on North Illinois, and the musicians visited each interchangeably, especially for afterhours jam sessions. These were black clubs, with black management, black entertainers, and mostly a black clientele, but for all the separation on the beaches these were also places where the races mingled. The music was so popular that people began to care less about color and more about just having a good time, according to Cheryl Woodruff-Brooks who published a photographic retrospective of Atlantic City's black beach and nightlife scene.
Nelson Johnson, author of Boardwalk Empire that inspired the HBO television series, wrote in his history The Northside: African Americans and the Creation of Atlantic City that there was a kind of cooperation between black and white worlds that existed separately and together within the same 48 blocks. Atlantic City needed, and profited from, the commerce that black people drew to their own businesses. There was a necessity that everyone succeed at varying levels for overall economic benefit and growth. Black people were mostly left to live their own lives, based upon hotel service positions, but also supporting commercial and professional services within their own community. To Nelson, the black community was indispensable. "If you remove the black experience from Atlantic City, the town never even comes to exist. Pull them out of the picture and what do you have? You don't have a resort."
One Star Ascending
Amidst the preparatory work with Dameron before the move to Atlantic City,
Lou Donaldson
saxophone1926 - 2024
Elmo Hope
piano1923 - 1967
Percy Heath
bass, acoustic1923 - 2005
Philly Joe Jones
drums1923 - 1985
Gigi Gryce
saxophone1927 - 1983
Benny Golson
saxophone, tenor1929 - 2024
Dameron's band started strong at the Club Paradise. An octet of somewhat reconfigured personnel went to Atlantic City after the Prestige date: the core of Tadd Dameron, Clifford Brown, Gigi Gryce, Benny Golson, and Philly Joe Jones; with
Johnny Coles
trumpet1926 - 1997
Jymie Merritt
bass1926 - 2020
Cecil Payne
saxophone, baritone1922 - 2007
Quincy Jones
arranger1933 - 2024
Lionel Hampton
vibraphone1908 - 2002
On a Monday after opening at Club Paradise, Brown made a quick trip up from the Jersey shore to Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack for a June 22 recording date for another Blue Note release. The Eminent Jay Jay Johnson, an alternate spelling for trombonist and leader
J.J. Johnson
trombone1924 - 2001
Jimmy Heath
saxophone, tenor1926 - 2020
John Lewis
piano1920 - 2001
Kenny Clarke
drums1914 - 1985
Milt Jackson
vibraphone1923 - 1999
Brown had stepped up into exalted company, in which he excelled. Jimmy Heath recalled to biographer Catalano the richness and variety of Brown's inventions in solos across several takes for the Johnson session. Many musicians could play fast, Heath knew, but were limited in constructing inventive lines. Brown kept dishing out new bursts of creativity.
Before the end of the summer, August 28, Brown created his own sextet for an album New Star on the Horizon, as Blue Note anointed him. He called upon people he had worked with earlier that summer: Gigi Gryce on alto sax and flute, Percy Heath again on bass; John Lewis, piano, with the addition of
Charlie Rouse
saxophone, tenor1924 - 1988
Art Blakey
drums1919 - 1990
Max Roach
drums1925 - 2007
Dameron's vision, however, was not to last. Philly Joe appeared to have brought drug habits with him, and that affinity put a fright into Dameron, disrupting the band. As the Dameron effort collapsed, Brown did go with Lionel Hampton, from August to December in a trumpet section that included Quincy Jones and
Art Farmer
flugelhorn1928 - 1999
Benny Golson stayed behind to assist Dameron in completing the summer, but it was a damaged and disappointing effort. Dameron retreated into narcotics again, disappearing back to his home haunts of Cleveland, Ohio for another lost period. Drugs would continue to bedevil him over the years, but it would be Clifford Brown and Max Roach who pulled him out of Cleveland in 1956 to return with them to New York where they were scheduled at the club Basin Street East, with a new member, saxophonist
Sonny Rollins
saxophoneb.1930
Drugs presented no enticement to Clifford Brown; he was scrupulously clean in an era where players thought heroin was the necessary gateway to jazz heights explored by Charlie Parker. Brown's example had impressed upon Sonny Rollins, fresh from rehab at a federal prison hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, that it was possible not to take drugs and still be a jazz musician of the first order. "Clifford was a profound influence on my personal life," Rollins stated. "He showed me that it was possible to live a good, clean life and still be a good jazz musician."
Opportunity Terminated
Upon Clifford's return from Europe, he began work with Art Blakey toward live recordings in February 1954, A Night at Birdland, Vol. I and II. Those sessions became landmarks, heralding the birth of what would become Blakey's Jazz Messengers and modern jazz for decades to come. By mid-year, Brown went to the West Coast at the invitation of Max Roach, who had liked Brown's work on the J.J. Johnson recording.Clifford Brown's light burned brightly but briefly, illuminating a new direction that might have changed the entire arc of subsequent jazz. Many believe Brown was a better player than
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Clifford was denied that. Three years after that summer in Atlantic City, on another night in June, Brown died a passenger in an automobile accident en route from Philadelphia to Chicago. He was 25. Sonny Rollins had recorded his major work Saxophone Colossus just days before Clifford's death, with Max Roach in the drum seat. Rollins and Roach individually stayed up alone and grieving through the night at the news of Clifford's death, Rollins playing out his pain through his horn, Roach drinking through the dark hours.
Harold Land
saxophone, tenor1928 - 2001
Rollins felt the spark of creativity in the Brown/Roach alliance die with Clifford: "He was just like a shooting star: he's there and he's gone."
Kenny Dorham
trumpet1924 - 1972
With Brown's death, Miles Davis was the remaining dominant trumpeter. How much more might Brown have been is one of the great unknowables of jazz. It is possible that Miles and Clifford might have each created two separate streams of jazz, Clifford brighter and joyous, Miles intense and moody; two different personalities, two different avatars.
What Might Have Been?
The liner notes for Verve's Master Edition re-issue of the EmArcy Clifford Brown and Max Roach state speculation about what Brown might have achieved had he lived is "pointless." That assertion is qualified with a "however": that based on the legacy Brown left behind, "there is no doubt that his contributions would have immeasurably enriched not just the standards for his instrument, but the whole of jazz."Even though Brown is from an earlier period now almost seventy years ago, his playing still sounds fresh, and is not merely archival. It is not avant-garde nor free jazz nor fusion nor the iterations that followed. The clarity of Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw, Wynton Marsalis, and now Jeremy Pelt continues the heritage of Clifford Brown.
A documentary film by music professor Don Glanden, Brownie Speaks, considers Brown's placement. (Read our coverage) Wynton Marsalis praised Clifford as proof of the power of the art form of jazz trumpet itself. Trumpeter and educator
Donald Byrd
trumpet1932 - 2013
Roy Eldridge
trumpet1911 - 1989
Some question whether Brown would have been as innovative as Davis, but overlook the innovations of which Brown had already been a part. Certainly, refining hard bop out of bebop was an innovation. Brown was present at the birth of hard bop, the 1954 Birdland sessions of Art Blakey and
Horace Silver
piano1928 - 2014
Davis and Brown came up through the same time in the early 1950s, but began in different eras. Miles had been a member of Parker and Gillespie groups in the late 1940s; Clifford caught just a few encounters with them. At every point, being six years older, Miles had a head start, and after Clifford's death more time in which to keep working, with his "Prince of Darkness" persona and the marketing support of Columbia Records.
For all that, they were comparable within the same time frame, running alongside each other even if not in direct competition. Both appeared at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival. The Brown/Roach quintet was a Saturday headliner, Clifford only 24 years old. Davis, age 30, was a Sunday afternoon add-on; his legendary "Round Midnight" performance restored his standing after years of drug-related wandering and earned him the Columbia contract.
That same year, Brown recorded an orchestral album with
Neal Hefti
trumpet1922 - 2008
Count Basie
piano1904 - 1984
Woody Herman
band / ensemble / orchestra1913 - 1987
Gil Evans
composer / conductor1912 - 1988
Within the same time period, Brown and Davis had similar repertoires, both conventional in nature but each innovative in their respective styles. Clifford offered such as "Someone to Watch Over Me," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "One for my Baby," and "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing," romantic, bright, with a range extending to smooth highs that Miles rarely sustained. The albums Workin', Cookin', Relaxin' and Steamin' that Miles generated in 1955 revisited bebop classics "Salt Peanuts" and "Well You Needn't," Broadway show tunes "It Never Entered My Mind" and "If I Were a Bell," and popular standards such as "When I Fall in Love" and "My Funny Valentine." On all of those Miles albums, the drummer was Philly Joe Jones, the same as on Brown's early recordings.
Would Kind of Blue have been assembled in 1959 without a living Miles? Would Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Tony Williams have coalesced as they did without a Miles to bring them together? Similarly, the subsequent history of those who played with Clifford Brown, for all their accomplishments, whether they changed the direction of jazz or simply became greater expressions of themselves, cannot accurately estimate what might have been accomplished with Brown's unifying presence and leadership. His departure was a loss.
Listening across the many samples of Brown's works, there is a characteristic purity to his sound. Signature songs are "Joy Spring," "Daahoud," and both his trumpet and Roach's drum solos on "Cherokee." His pairing with saxophonist Harold Land on "Delilah" is impeccable for each. Brown's early work from A Study in Dameronia and some of the European recordings made during the Lionel Hampton tour, originally under the title Clifford Brown—Art Farmer and the Swedish All Stars, are contained in the reissue compilation Clifford Brown Memorial Albums by Prestige/Original Jazz Classics. The sessions under Lou Donaldson and Brown's leadership in 1953 both are contained in the different but similarly-titled Memorial Album by Blue Note. Many reissues present the work with Max Roach, among them Study in Brown (EmArcy), and Clifford Brown and Max Roach (EmArcy/Verve). The period with Sonny Rollins, and Dameron's arrangements, is documented in Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street (EmArcy/Verve); also, with different material, on Sonny Rollins Plus 4 (Prestige). Later-discovered rehearsal sessions from the early sessions with Dameron through later with Roach are contained on Clifford Brown: The Lost Rehearsals 1953-1956 on the European RLR label. Enthusiasts can go deeper for other available live, outtake, and rehearsal material.
Wilmington, Delaware for 34 years has remembered its son with the Clifford Brown Jazz Festival, now with additional related concerts throughout the year. Atlantic City's Chicken Bone Beach Historical Foundation has created a music teaching facility on the Northside, keeping the spirit alive. It also presented concerts throughout the year in the grand Claridge Hotel of the Boardwalk Empire era, and weekly concerts on Thursday evenings in July and August on the boardwalk at Missouri Avenue, the site of the old segregated beach. The concerts, and the beach, are open to anyone.
Tags
History of Jazz
Clifford Brown
Arthur R George
United States
New Jersey
Atlantic City
New York City
Tadd Dameron
Jimmy Lunceford
Coleman Hawkins
John Coltrane
Philadelphia
Charlie Parker
Dizzy Gillespie
Roy Haynes
Fats Navarro
Wilmington
Sam Wooding
Newark
Lou Donaldson
Elmo Hope
Percy Heath
"Philly Joe" Jones
G.G. Gryce
benny golson
m; Johnny Coles
Jymie Merritt
Cecil Payne
Quincy Jones
Lionel Hampton
J.J. Johnson
Jimmy Heath
John Lewis
Kenny Clarke
Milt Jackson
Charlie Rouse
Art Blakey
Max Roach
Art Farmer
Sonny Rollins
Miles Davis
Saxophone Colossus
Harold Land
Kenny Dorham
Donald Byrd
Roy Eldridge
Neal Hefti
Count Basie
Woody Herman
Gil Evans
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