Pacific Jazz Samplers [From the Archives]

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

A few years ago, thanks to the urgings of a brilliant and witty friend who mockingly refers to himself as “the sage of the Florida swamps,”  a group of West Coast Jazz fans set out to track down the Pacific Jazz label’s sampler LP's and convert them to CD.

The leadership for this task fell primarily to another friend, a kind and gentle man who heads-up a West Coast Jazz internet chat group and who is also an expert of the subject of West Coast Jazz in general and the recordings of Pacific Jazz in particular.

Frankly, without the guidance and knowledge of this quintessential Gentleman, the Pacific Jazz sampler conversion project would have been a non-starter [“today speak” for would-never-have-gotten-off-the-ground].

Some other members of said chat group contributed their expertise and materials to this non-commercial project and before long the digital conversions were taking place replete with scaled down artwork and liner notes from the original LPs.

Until he sold it to Liberty records during the mid-1960’s, the “chief cook and bottle washer” at Pacific Jazz was Richard Bock, who had founded the label about ten years earlier.

I gather from those who knew him personally during the years he owned and operated the label and from those who have subsequently made a study of his business practices that Dick Bock was a very idiosyncratic man who basically viewed Pacific Jazz as his sandbox in which he could build whatever kind of sand castles he chose to build however he chose to build them [I’m sure there is a better metaphor for this, but I can’t think of one at the moment].

The following, paraphrased paragraph from Mosaic Records’s founder and President Michael Cuscuna provides us with another view of Richard Bock’s entrepreneurial proclivities:

“Dick Bock, owner and producer of Pacific Jazz Records, had some strange habits. Among them were switching takes when a tune went from 10' LP to 12" LP. Often he would gather together anthologies of unreleased material from various artists and various sessions. On occasion, for some sessions an album was never realized. Instead, various tracks would emerge on various anthologies in the late fifties. Releasing these performances in such scattered form over time gave the session a status of almost non-existence. To make matters worse, some tunes kept reappearing on new anthologies in shorter and shorter forms through editing.”

As the name implies, a “sampler” offers the buyer a variety of audio tracks from the artists and albums available through the Pacific Jazz catalogue.

And while this was generally the case with samplers from Pacific Jazz and other record companies that issued them, with Pacific Jazz, the sampler buyer sometimes got bonus of tracks that had not been previously released or alternative tracks from previous recording sessions.

Such LP’s were often sold at a discount price to make them more appealing to the buyer. As indicated on the PJ  “Assorted Flavors” cover used as the graphic lead-in to this piece, that sampler was available for $1.98 which is probably today’s cost for the ice cream cone the little girl’s holding!

If you weren’t already familiar with the playing of certain artists or the style of  a particular group, samplers were an inexpensive way to get a first hearing.

In the case of Pacific Jazz, Richard Bock was blessed at the outset to have the brilliant photographic work of William Claxton form the basis for most of his album covert art.  Ray Avery, a contemporary, once said of Claxton work: “Some of us take photographs of Jazz musicians, but Bill does much more than that: he is an artist with a camera.”

In fairness, Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz label gave Bill Claxton a place to learn and practice his art as a photographer so the creative purposes of each were well-served through their business relationship.

Acknowledgement should also be made of the skills of Woody Woodward, who designed many of the Pacific Jazz covers, and without whose logistical and technical contributions, Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz would have been even more disorganized, and of Dotty Woodward, the firm’s accountant and the person who managed the royalties for the musicians and composers.

More of the details about the origin and development of Pacific Jazz Records are contained in the reminiscences of William Claxton that conclude this piece.

From a legal perspective, I would imagine that mid-1950's [when most of the PJ samplers were issued] and early 1960’s were a much simpler time from a copyright, music publishing and artists rights’ standpoint.

While ASCAP and BMI royalties may have been paid, I doubt that the performing artists received a great deal of additional revenue from these samplers.

And yet, the albums themselves are a treat because they provide more or different music by favorite West Coast Jazz artists and because they often contain musical surprises and revelations such a bass trumpets, cellos and flutes and oboes – all of which are fairly rare in a Jazz environment [with the exception of the flute].

Since many of these Pacific Jazz samplers are difficult to find, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has created the following YouTube with slides of many of  the album covers from the series along with an audio track from the Assorted Flavors of Pacific Jazz: A Hi-Fi Sampler.

Some of this sampler’s tracks are combined within a spoken narrative that describes the evolution of West Coast Jazz in the 1950s as represented on Pacific Jazz records.

In 1992, Hitoshi Namekata engaged William Claxton to co-author Jazz West Coast: The  Artwork of Pacific Jazz [Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppan-Sha].  Claxton wrote the following introduction for the book which he entitled: Clickin’ With Clax: A History of Pacific Jazz Records.

© -William Claxton, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“It was the winter of 1949. My former high school girl friend, Carol McCallson, had become a top fashion model in New York and was coming out to California, bringing a friend to escape the cold New York weather. It just so happened that Los Angeles was suffering through its worst cold winter of the century. The good aspect of her trip was that the friend she brought out was the young, somewhat legendary tenor saxophonist, Allen Eager. I was on winter holiday from college. So, the three of us spent two weeks palling around together; I showed them around Hollywood, visiting the jazz clubs where Allen introduced us to the musicians; we would stay up late listening to the records of the young Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie and, of course, Bird. I think that we wore out all of Charlie Parker's Dial recordings. We would drive around late at night in the rain and scat sing Bird's solos. Allen would tell us about Pres and Billie and what it was like playing with Dizzy, Stan Getz, Bud Powell, Tad Dameron and others at the Royal Roost on 52nd Street. It was exciting to listen to this "cool" musician while driving about in a Cadillac convertible with its owner, a sophisti­cated model.

One Sunday afternoon Allen suggested that we stop at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard to meet a couple of his musician friends. We walked into what turned out to be Woody Herman's large suite of rooms. There were most of Herman's "Four Brothers Band" sitting around casually rehearsing. There in front of my eyes were Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Bill Harris, Jimmy Giuffre and Shorty Rogers. The music was wonderful. And I'll never forget how the gold afternoon light fell across this room full of energetic, young musicians and how the sparkling reflections danced off their shiny brass instruments.

I made a vow to myself: never to be around musicians without my camera again.

We always had music around my house as I was growing up in the 40's and 50's. My mother sang in an important church choir and played piano. My older brother studied piano and would practice while imitating everyone from Eddie Duchin to the boogie woogie piano of Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. The record player (the Victrola) was always playing, as was the radio. I thought the Hit Parade was corny, but I loved the big band shows of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and, of course, Count Basie. Like most boys, I liked airplanes and automobiles and devoted scrapbooks to my favorites. Later my heroes were singers and musicians: Cab Galloway, Duke Ellington, Lena Home and Billie Holiday...never dreaming that one day I would be photographing them.

While in junior high school, a neighborhood chum introduced me to photography. I had always done well in my art classes, but photography produced a special magic for me. It was through my sister and her collection of fashion magazines, VOGUE and HARPER'S BAZAAR, that I became aware of photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon and their pure but sophisticated images of people, all kinds of people, not just fashion models. Somewhere in the back of my mind I decided that I wanted to photograph my favorite musicians in a similar style.

Jazz became more and more important to me during high school, and I began collecting records of Johnny Hodges, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young. But the skies parted for me the first time I heard Charlie "Bird" Parker. My other high school pals were shocked too, but in an adverse way. I knew Bird was a genius and bought every record he made.

On the weekends, I would borrow my father's car, pack up my 4x5 Speed Graphic camera, and head for some jazz club. I was much too young to be legally allowed in the clubs, but because I was very tall, I was rarely questioned. The clubs that I frequented were Brother's on Central Avenue, The Clef Club in Hollywood, and the Club Alabam. The first musicians that I photographed in those days were Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Ernie Royal, Buddy Collette, and Frank Morgan. Every now and then I would have a date and go to the local bars in Glendale, near my high school, and listen to the Nat "King" Cole Trio, Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart Duo, Bobby Short, and Harry the Hipster.

While a student at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) studying psychology and art and wondering how and when I would ever be able to make a living with the knowledge I might gain from these two subjects, I photographed some "exceptional" children (special because these children were intelligent but had emotional problems and were failing in their school work). The pictures were purchased by LADIES' HOME JOURNAL magazine, and I was paid rather well. It was then that I decided that photography could possibly become my career.

My passion for jazz and photography grew through my college years, and I continued to visit jazz clubs and occasionally a jazz concert when I could afford it. It was during one of these excursions that I met Richard Bock, and Pacific Jazz Records was about to be born.

In the Fall of 1952, I heard that Gerry Mulligan was going to appear in Los Angeles. I had heard interesting stories about this composer, arranger, and baritone player. I knew that he had written Jeru, Boplicity, Venus de Milo, and Godchild for Miles Davis and that he wrote for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, but the best story about him was that when he was broke and no one would give him money to rehearse his band, he took the band outside to Central Park in the middle of Manhattan. This event caused a great commotion and did just what he wanted: to call attention to his talent and ambition.

Once again I borrowed my dad's car, grabbed my enormous 4x5 Speed Graphic camera, and pointed the big Packard towards the Wilshire district where The Haig club was located. Why this tiny converted bungalow was called The Haig, I shall never know. It was so small that its capacity was only 85 people. Shorty Rogers supposedly said of the place, "If you took four steps, you had crossed the room." There have been many stories of why there was no piano in the club. One was that Red Norvo had just appeared there and had it removed, having no need for it. Another rumor was that the owner of the club, John Bennett, hadn't paid the rent on it so it was taken back by its owner. Yet one more rumor was that the piano simply was not delivered. So Gerry Mulligan did what he does best: Improvise! So, along with Chet Baker, Chico Hamilton and Bob Whitlock on bass, Gerry created the now famous "piano less quartet."

It was opening night and I arrived early. After introducing myself to Gerry, I got permission to take pictures. The music was, of course, wonderful and the place was packed. While I was shooting pictures, a young man introduced himself as Dick Bock. He was recording the group and he asked if he could see my pictures as soon as possible. I asked, "Oh, do you have a record company?" He replied, "No, but I will have one by morning." He was so bright-eyed and optimistic. That was the beginning of Pacific Jazz Records.

The actual company was created by Dick Bock with partners, drummer Roy Hart and accountant-sometimes-recording engineer, Phil Turetsky. Dick Bock liked my pictures of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet and put them on the record cover. After that I shot a photograph of Harry "Sweets" Edison for Pacific Jazz's next release. Following several successful covers, Dick asked me to join the organization as Art Director and "Chief Photographer"; a month later I was made a partner in the company.

The first Pacific Jazz offices opened in a small above Roy Hart's Drum Shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. The one employee at that time was Dotty Woodward. She took care of the books, the accounts, and the royalties for the musicians and song writers. We all did a little bit of the chores, wrapping and shipping orders, etc. Later on, Dotty's husband, Woody Woodward, joined the group and became the manager and Dick Bock's right-hand man. Woody became an accomplished photographer and designer and took over much of that work when I left the group several years later.

The Gerry Mulligan records were very successful, but during the follow­ing year, Chet Baker was being looked at and listened to as a star in his own right. With his boyish good looks and his honest and direct trumpet work, he was beginning to win all the jazz polls and the popularity polls of that time. He quit Gerry's group and formed his own quartet in the Spring of 1954 with Russ Freeman on piano, Carson Smith, bass, and Bob Neel on drums.

Russ Freeman was an accomplished and well-educated musician. Chet Baker was not. He was considered a "natural." Russ became his teacher and profes­sional musician friend. Russ was responsible for much of Chefs growth as a musician.

It was during this period that Dick Bock said to me one morning, "Guess what Chet wants to do now? He wants to sing. What's more he wants me to record him!" So, he did and I photographed the event. Well, the rest is history. Chefs voice was just like the voice of his trumpet: sweet, gentle, simple, and honest. 

The first Chet Baker Sings album was very popular and was followed by two more vocal albums. Chet Baker was being pursued by movie producers and television companies to star in shows. But Chet had a drug problem, so he did not take many of his offers seriously or just ignored them.

Dick Bock was beginning to discover other new artists and to record them. Bud Shank, with guitarist Laurindo Almeida, produced some of the first Latin guitar and jazz music before bossa nova. Chico Hamilton formed his own quintet featuring Jim Hall and cellist Fred Katz. Pepper Adams did his famous Critic's Choice album for Pacific Jazz. In those early days of Pacific Jazz, Dick Bock produced some of the first and best recordings of such artists as Art Pepper, Bob Brookmeyer, Cy Touff and Richie Kamuca, Lee Konitz with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, and The Mastersounds with the Montgomery Brothers.

During much of this same period, 1954 to 1956, a few miles west of the Pacific Jazz offices, Les Koenig was recording artists for his Good Time Jazz label (mostly Dixieland) and his Contemporary label. Koenig saw my photographs and began hiring me to shoot and design his record covers for artists like Barney Kessel, the Lighthouse Allstars, Hampton Hawes, Shelly Manne and Sonny Rollins. The albums I designed for the Poll Winners series (Shelly Manne, Barney Kessel and Ray Brown) proved to be very successful, as much for the cover jackets as for the music inside.

The cover for Sonny Rollins Way Out West won several awards.

Back at Pacific Jazz, Dick Bock formed a publishing company, Linear Productions. For his first effort he wanted to publish a book of my jazz photographs. It was to be a portfolio of photographs with short articles or pieces by writers Will MacFarland, Nesuhi Ertegun, David Stuart, Woody Woodward and Herbert Kimmel, who later formed his own recording label, Jazz West. I called this first book JAZZ WEST COAST. Dick Bock decided then to release an album to accompany my book. It would be a collection or anthology of recordings of Pacific Jazz artists. We decided to give it the same name as my book. It was such a hit that it was followed by Volumes 2 and 3. The news media picked up on the title Jazz West Coast and it became "West Coast Jazz." At first, many critics and musicians on the East Coast said that there was no such thing as "West Coast Jazz." Which in a sense was true at that time. Many newly arrived jazz stars like Dave Brubeck in San Francisco, Gerry Mulligan in Los Angeles, Shorty Rogers, and Clifford Brown were from other parts of the country but happened to be in the right place at the right time. But the name "West Coast Jazz" did not go away.

In our book JAZZ WEST COAST, writer Will MacFarland stated: "The chances are, history will reveal that there is a West Coast School: a group of musicians playing calmer, gentler jazz, placing at least as much emphasis on writing as on soloing." During this period the new young arrangers, writers, players like Shorty Rogers, Bill Holman, Jimmy Giuffre, Jack Montrose, Johnny Mandel and Marty Paich blossomed into what became a whole new fresh sound. Call it what you want.

Those early days in the 1950's around Los Angeles and San Francisco were exciting for the jazz lover. There was so much good music to be heard, and there were so many jazz clubs like the Tiffany on 8th Street, Zardi's in Hollywood, Billy Berg's on Vine Street, and the Blackhawk in San Francisco, where Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond first played. Then there were the Oasis, the California Club and of course, Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. All this new music coincided with the advent of the Long Playing recording...the LP phenomenon. Everybody was recording... Night and day the studios were booming. It was in the recording studios that I got many of my best photographs. The musicians knew me and trusted me. I was close to them. At one late-night recording session, RCA Victor's A & R man, Jack Lewis, turned to Shorty Rogers, the composer of a just-recorded Pete Jolly Trio side, and asked him the name of the tune. Shorty shook his head, then looked up at me with my camera in hand, smiled, and said, "Hey man, how 'bout Clickin' with Clax."

My photographic covers were very successful on the Pacific Jazz, Contemporary, Good Time Jazz and Fantasy labels. But I was also shooting for the major labels like Capitol, Columbia, Decca and RCA Victor, and the dozen or so small recently formed companies that sprang up overnight. Regarding my photographic equipment, I did, indeed, graduate from that first old 4 x 5 Speed Graphic to a Rolleiflex camera to use available light. No more flash bulbs or cumbersome strobe equipment for me. In the mid 1940's, the work of Herman Leonard impressed me with its strong, crisp images and smoke everywhere. He must have used strobe lights. The musicians looked to me a little posed, but very dramatic. I wanted more freedom and never wanted to intrude on the performer. I have often wished that I could photograph someone without a camera-to use only my eyes and brain to record the image and not have that mechanism between us. Using the Light available at the time was as close as possible to my wish. But I needed faster lenses than the Rolleiflex offered, so I changed to 35mm Nikon cameras with their fast fl.4 lenses and relatively quiet focal plane shutters. There were times in the recording studios when I would shoot during the actual "takes," so I would try to click the shutter "on the beat."

Dick Bock of Pacific Jazz pushed me to come up with more and more new ideas for the record cover designs. I put Chet Baker and his quartet on a boat for Chet Baker and Crew; I shot Bud Shank and Bob Cooper with children and Bud Shank with the funny papers; I mounted Shelly Manne, Barney Kessel and Ray Brown on carousels of a merry-go-round; I put Shorty Rogers in a space helmet and up a tree house; and I shot musicians on the sandy beaches and in vintage cars... It became my signature to photograph jazz musicians in unlikely places. But what to do next ?

Photographs of jazz musicians in hot, smoke-filled clubs and studios with perspiration running down their faces were, in my mind, too stereotypical and not even honest anymore, certainly not on the West Coast. So I began to shoot clean, distinguished, rather sedate portraits of stars like Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Hampton Hawes, Art Pepper, Lee Konitz, Art Farmer, John Coltrane, and John Lewis with his Modern Jazz Quartet looking even more elegant than usual in a ballet rehearsal hall.

Around 1957, the record company executives and their advisers noticed that competition was getting out of hand. There were just too many LP records being produced. It was time to rethink package design. It was decided to put sex on the covers: beautiful females, models, and girl friends to help sell the records. Pacific Jazz was no different. Contemporary Records and everyone else did the same thing. I liked unusual looking girls, so I photographed a young dancer friend of mine named Lelia Goldoni. Lelia graced the covers of many albums, including one of the Laurindo Almeida and Bud Shank covers and a Jack Sheldon cover. In the latter part of 1958, I met a young actress named Peggy Moffitt. I photographed her in an exotic costume for the Mastersounds recording of the Broadway show Kismet. Stereophonic sound became the next new technical gimmick to inundate the LP record market. Pacific Jazz sent out a demo record to demonstrate its own brand of stereophonic jazz sound. It was called "In Both Ears!" I photographed Peggy looking very chic holding two old fa­shioned hearing aid "trumpets" plugged into each of her lovely ears. Peggy was photographed for several more covers before I suggested that she should become a fashion model. She began working with the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich-together they made fashion history. Peggy and I were married in June of 1959.

Since the name West Coast Jazz had become so firmly entrenched with the music media, I came up with an idea that would further the importance of an art movement that was going on in the Los Angeles area at that time. The art galleries were flourishing with the talents of local artists. Monday nights on La Cienega Boulevard were the showcase nights when the works of the new, young artists could be seen. Dick Bock and I commissioned several of these artists (Bob Irwin, Keith Finch, Sueo Serisawa, and John Altoon). We would either give the artist a recording of a specific jazz artist or group to work with, or we would actually have the group play for the artist at his studio to "inspire" the painter. This became known as the "West Coast Artists Series." It received a great deal of attention. And it produced some very interesting record cover art that was a departure from the well-known and successful photo-graphic covers of that period.

By the Spring of 1958, I was photographing for virtually every record label, and I was also branching out into other fields, doing special photography on major movie productions for the major magazines. Dick Bock offered to buy my part of the partnership, and I agreed. Dick became more and more interested in the mystical aspects of East Indian philosophy. My only interest in that subject was the recordings of Ravi Shankar. I photographed him for his first two World-Pacific recordings.

The art of the LP cover, I'm afraid, has pretty much vanished with the arrival of the Compact Disk (CD) product. It is a bit more difficult to make an exciting package with that small 5x5" format. I long for that big 12x12" space where an exciting visual image could be put that would do justice to the artist on the recording and "turn on" the potential buyer.

I've never given up my love for jazz and, of course, for photography. The international language of jazz has delighted and moved me, and it has allowed me to speak to people all over the world through the international language of photography.

William Claxton

Beverly Hills

1992”

The audio track on the following YouTube is fairly representative of the music available on these samplers, this one featuring Cy Touff’s bass trumpet with an octet arrangement of Johnny Mandel’s Groover Wailin’.

Clifford Brown on The Left Coast: The Origins of the Max Roach - Clifford Brown Quintet

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Rumsey's real coup, however, was in bringing bebop legend Max Roach to the club as Manne's replacement. For the next several months Roach served as the unlikely drum-keeper of the Lighthouse flame — a period that proved exciting not only for inimitable percussion work, but also for Roach's many friends who sat in with the band. "When Max Roach came in from New York to take over Shelly Manne's drum chair," Rumsey relates, "he drove up with Charles Mingus and Miles Davis in the car with him."' Roach's arrival signaled a reversal of compass points from west to east. During the drummer's brief tenure, the Lighthouse hosted some of the brightest jazz stars from the East Coast scene. Rumsey continues:

Miles was just starting to play again after a long sabbatical back home in St. Louis. He hung around for a while, stayed at my home for a week, and did a couple of guest shots at the club. . . . Mingus never played bass for me, but he sat in several times as intermission pianist. As for Max, he set the whole town on fire. Out of his stint I developed long-lasting friendships: Dizzy, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker. …”

- Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960

Max Roach came to California in the fall of 1953 to replace Shelly Manne as drummer with Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars.

He arrived by car with Miles Davis, who, due to his heroin addiction, was looking for a change of venue, and bassist Charles Mingus, who was originally from Los Angeles.

At the time, Max and Mingus were business partners as co-owners of the Debut recording label which they left in the capable hands of Mingus’ wife Celia who remained in New York to oversee its operation while they sojourned to what geocentric New Yorkers disparagingly refer to as “The Left Coast”.

Many Jazz fans are not aware that one of the forerunners of the Hard Bop style of Jazz - the Max Roach - Clifford Brown Quintet - a style of Jazz usually associated with New York City - had its origins in sunny, southern California

In his definitive treatment of West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960 [pp. 308-311], Ted Gioia offers the following narrative about how the Max Roach - Clifford Brown Quintet became a reality, albeit, tragically, a short-lived one.

“Despite his growing reputation as the outstanding exponent of modern jazz drumming, Roach had been working almost exclusively as a sideman. He had recorded as a leader for Debut—the label he had founded with Charles Mingus—but, by his own admission, had not yet "got seriously involved in bandleading." In California, he was asked by jazz impresario Gene Norman to start a group of his own. Promised an extended booking at the California Club, Roach agreed to form a quintet. His next move was to send for a young trumpeter from back east named Clifford Brown. These two musicians, one already famous in the jazz world and the other soon to be so, were about to become the most prominent members in one of the finest — if not the best — jazz combos of the early 1950s.

Brown's work in jazz was as striking for its architectonic structure as for its emotional immediacy. And this quest for order was as much a part of Clifford's life as it was integral to his music. Studies of highly gifted youngsters have revealed that in three areas of human endeavor — music, mathematics, and chess — talent becomes apparent at an especially young age. Clifford Brown's biography (as well as those of many other jazz musicians) substantiates the view that these three highly structured ways of seeing the universe may be correlated. Brown showed early ability in all three disciplines. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 30, 1930, he revealed, first and foremost, a prodigious musical talent. In addition to quickly mastering the trumpet, which he began in his early teens, he pursued studies in piano and arranging while still in high school. When he entered Delaware State College, he started as a mathematics major, only switching to music after transferring to Maryland State. Brown's complementary skills as a chess player have been attested to by, among others, his bandmate Max Roach. And Roach should know: He was a fine player in his own right, who made the all-city chess team when still back in Brooklyn. By his late teens, Brown's career as a promising musician had come to overshadow these subsidiary interests. Even so, the ordered universe of mathematics and chess may have found its way into the trumpeter's music. At its best, his playing combined the raw passion of jazz with the precision and logic of composed music.

In a macabre foreshadowing. Brown was injured in an automobile accident in June 1950. For almost a year his promising musical career was placed on hold. His comeback was slow at first, and his first record date, with Chris Powell and His Blue Flames, did not take place until March 1952, almost two years after the accident. Only six weeks later, however, Brown was back in the studio again, this time with a much finer band consisting of Lou Donaldson, Elmo Hope, Percy Heath, and Philly Joe Jones. From this point until his tragic early death in a second auto accident in June 1956, Brown would record and perform regularly with the finest musicians in jazz. His few recordings are among the most important jazz legacies from the 1950s.

By the time of his fateful journey to California, he had already impressed many with his precocious skills on the trumpet. Both Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were strong supporters of the young musician: Parker's glowing recommendation had convinced Art Blakey to add Brownie to his band for a brief period earlier in 1954, while Gillespie had been among the first to tell Max Roach about the extraordinary talent of this future colleague. In addition to these illustrious connections, Brown had already gained valuable experience recording and playing with Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton, J. J. Johnson, and Gigi Gryce. These early sideman sessions, as well as a few dates as a leader from this period, demonstrated that Brown had already achieved a mature, poised style and a polished virtuosity well before his twenty-third birthday.

Perhaps the most striking element of this provocative trumpet style was Brown's distinctive sound. When many aspiring bop trumpeters were willing to sacrifice tonal clarity in order to play fast, Brown proved that it was possible to have it both ways: One could (or at least Brown could) play complex, rapid-fire melodic lines while still maintaining a warm, well-rounded tone. Building on the legacy of Fats Navarro, Brown could boast of the purest, cleanest sound of any of the young bebop trumpeters.

One could well imagine Brown playing the classical trumpet repertoire — much as Wynton Marsalis would do a generation later — without having to alter his basic musical conception. (Nor is it a coincidence that Marsalis's earliest jazz work showed the strong influence of Clifford Brown. Brown was the perfect role model for this latter-day master of both the classical and jazz idioms.) This keen sense of sound provided the foundation for Brown's other musical virtues: his melodic creativity, his speed of execution, his sense of phrasing and dynamics.

The Brown/Roach group was perhaps the strongest working jazz band of its day, the ensembles of Parker and Gillespie notwithstanding. At first, however, the personnel of the band underwent a number of changes. Roach's initial choice for the saxophone chair. Sonny Stitt, made the trip out west with Brown, only to leave the band after a few weeks. Stitt's replacement was Teddy Edwards, a powerful tenorist who had made a name for himself on recordings with Howard McGhee and Dexter Gordon a few years before. Edwards was playing in the San Francisco area during the summer of 1954 but returned to Southern California when Roach asked him to finish out the group's engagement at the California Club. … “

Although Edwards did not remain with the group when it went on the road a short while later—by then Harold Land had taken his place— he participated in the group's first recording for Gene Norman. … , by the time the Brown/Roach group returned to the studio in early August, the side-men had changed to the very successful combination of Harold Land, Richie Powell, and George Morrow.

In the interim, Brown had participated in a very different session for Richard Bock's Pacific label. Tenor saxophonist Jack Montrose was called in as an arranger and proceeded to create a distinctive setting for Brownie's horn, one very different from the hard bop orientation of the Roach group. Montrose's tight, medium-groove arrangements were typical of the "West Coast sound," but to counterbalance this tendency toward the cool, Montrose wisely drew on some of the more hard-swinging musicians in the area to complement Brown's energetic style. Zoot Sims and Bob Gordon both proved to be compatible front-line foils for the young trumpeter.”

These Pacific Jazz recordings by the Roach - Brown 5tet are included in Clifford Brown: The Complete Blue Note and Pacific Jazz Recordings [CDP 7243 8 34195 2 4] for which its producer, Michael Cuscuna provided the following notes about Brownie and the tracks he cut for Pacific Jazz.

“It was just four years. One presidential term. The interval between Olympic contests. No time at all. Virtually everything we know about trumpeter Clifford Brown — who at age 26 was killed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in an accident that also claimed the life of pianist Richie Powell — comes from what he recorded in one incredibly narrow four-year window.

Of course Brown's storybook transformation took a bit longer: In less than a decade, he went from semi-unknown to jazz royalty, from student to master stylist. With the methodical dedication of a professional athlete, he established himself on the jazz scene of his hometown, Wilmington, Delaware, and then nearby Philadelphia, and then the world. Before he'd finished his first year of college, the network of musicians on the East Coast were buzzing about this unusually proficient young talent—Charlie Parker was so enamored, he told Art Blakey not to bother bringing a trumpet player to a gig in Philadelphia. How quickly did Brown ascend? One year he was making his recording debut with R&B bandleader Chris Powell and his Blue Flames, the next he was doing sessions with established

bebop trombonist Jay Jay Johnson and leading a date that featured MJQ pianist John Lewis, By 1954, when the Downbeat critics poll identified him as the new trumpet star, he was already co-leading the group with Max Roach that ushered in and helped delineate the bebop-derived music that became known as hard bop. Two years later, he was dead. Jazz artists traditionally expect to get a few years to develop; Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis and others established their musical identities over decades. Listening to Clifford, any Clifford, it's obvious he never counted on that. Every solo was the one for the books. His phrases carried an irrepressible fight-to-the-finish urgency, and his tone practically demanded attention. A mathematician and chess player, he cared about clarity more than any jumble of notes. He did develop in the short duration of his recording career, but even his early solos sound poised, carefully thought-out, complete.

Everyone who heard Clifford Brown in the early '50s remembers him being fully ready, even as a very young man. Jimmy Heath, active in Philadelphia jazz at the time, says he can still hear the way "this shy kid" sounded when Brown sat in with Heath's group at Wilmington's Two Spot in the late '40s: "He came in and wiped everybody out. He was already polished. It was pretty unexpected coming from this gentle introverted person."

It is this unexpectedly wise-beyond-his-years attitude that makes "early" Clifford Brown—the first few years of his recording career, as opposed to the last few—so important. These discs, which collect his contributions to Blue Note as both sideman and leader, suggest new angles from which to view this firebrand. They're the oft-overlooked back pages of a man who's influenced everyone who followed him in jazz trumpet. More than footnotes, they're the stuff he recorded in the midst of building his reputation, and as such, they capture an artist laying the foundation, developing the vocabulary, and beginning to test the limits. Like many who sought to utilize the language of bebop, he worked out on its difficult slalom courses nightly, and understood that mistakes were part of the cost of doing business. If 1955 and '56 represent Brown's mature zenith, then 1953 and '54 were his crucial formative time, a period of explosive growth and near-constant financial worries. Brown could scarcely afford to turn down work, as the critics understood: writing about Brown's first date as a leader (disc one, known as the Clifford Brown Memorial Album), Down Beat's Nat Hentoff ended his 4-star rave by announcing "Brownie has really arrived; now let's hope he can get some steady gigs."

In 1953, the Blue Note stable was a logical point of entry for jazzmen in pursuit of steady work. After signing Thelonious Monk in 1947. the label somehow missed bebop's other pioneers, and played catch-up by documenting the work of a large group of younger, bop-influenced players. The leaders changed depending on the day, but the quality of musicianship and the spirit of the sessions remained consistently high. It made sense for an emerging artist like Clifford Brown, then just entering the close-knit circuit of New York musicians, to get a call from Blue Note. Alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, who co-led a June 9 session with Clifford that was the trumpeter's first appearance on the label, remembers the atmosphere this way: "Everybody was real compatible, both personally and musically. It just happened that in New York at that time, there were a lot of like-minded musicians — situations where it almost didn't matter who you got, everybody could play."

By the time Brown got his first call to record, he could certainly play. Born in Wilmington on October 30, 1930, he became fascinated by the look of a trumpet his father, a multi-instrumentalist, had around the house. He started playing at age 13, when his father bought him his own horn. While in junior high, he studied music with Robert Lowery, a musician whose clinics and jazz band rehearsals were well-known in the community. Lowery remembers Brownie as a "serious" student: "He really wanted to get out of it everything he could, that's why he stood out more. Not right off the bat, after he learned exactly how to hear. I have a method, and when you learn that method you can actually hear what you're going to play. He got it."

Marcus Belgrave, who followed Brown through Lowery's classes, often heard Clifford practice. "When he played, everything was scientifically laid out. He was into writing ideas down, he would always tell me to write things down. He'd play everything through the keys." Belgrave remembers that even after Brown began playing jazz gigs, he'd still show up at this weekly community marching band whenever he could. "I asked him why he bothered to show up to play these circus-type tunes, and he said "I like all kinds of music," and from that point on, I delved into everything I could get my hands on. That one thing he said really turned me around."

By the dawn of bebop. Brown had already identified his inspiration: He loved the crisp articulation and intricate phrases of the ill-fated trumpeter Fats Navarro, Max Roach recalled that in every interview situation, Brown would always mention Navarro first. He met his idol in 1949, on a gig in Philadelphia, and was encouraged by the bebop master, who died the next year from tuberculosis that was complicated by narcotics addiction. After attracting the attention of Dizzy Gillespie and others, Brown then had his own trouble: He was in a car accident in June 1950, and spent most of the year in the hospital, recovering. Among his visitors was Gillespie.

When he was back in action, he played with Bud Powell in Philadelphia, then with bandleader Chris Powell (no relation), and then in 1953, landed a job with Tadd Dameron's band playing the summer season in Atlantic City. That summer he also managed to record twice—with Jay Jay Johnson and in his first date as a leader. In the fall of that year, he did a European tour with Lionel Hampton's band, where he met, among others, the trumpeter and arranger Quincy Jones—who contributed some compositions to his first date, and supervised some recordings Brown made while in Europe with Hampton. In November, Brown found himself in New York, employed by Art Blakey; the two Live At Birdland discs were recorded in February 1954, and featured future Jazz Messenger Horace Silver on piano.

Later that year, Max Roach, who was leading a group at the Lighthouse, flew East to propose a partnership. Brown accepted, and that summer, the group worked the L.A. circuit while Brown was engaged by producer Richard Bock  play on a West Coast-style date—the Jazz Immortal Featuring Zoot Sims session found on disc two. A week later, the Brown/Roach band hit the studio, and one of the great Synergies of jazz was born: From the summer of '54 until Brown's death in '56, there was no band that more skillfully combined the breakneck tempos and harmonic excitement of bebop with more relaxed and musical textures that would become hard bop. (This music, as well as Brown's later solo records, is chronicled on the 10-CD set Brownie: The Complete EmArcy Recordings Of Clifford Brown, issued in 1989.)

Brown had a few advantages over some of his peers. He was a disciplined man—his wife, LaRue Brown Watson, remembers squeezing in time with Clifford between his practice sessions. He was also drug-free at a time when musicians leaned on narcotics the way baseball players rely on chewing tobacco. Says Lou Donaldson: "Back then, a lot of guys were strung out. But Clifford was strong. There was nothing to get in his way. He was powerful, the guy who could play all night and never split a note."

Brown was a leader well before he became a bandleader. He led with his instrument, with his innate ability to place phrases so they'd sting, or caress. He had enviable command of the instrument, but was no mere button-pusher; his strength was the rare ability to give technically demanding passages a human heart. He announced himself with terse fanfares — he had a knack for starting his solos with phrases that snapped listeners to attention — yet never relied solely on the herculean feats. Trumpet players gush in admiration over his gifts: Belgrave said that at one point, he had to stop listening to Clifford Brown, because Brown "made you feel so inadequate you'd want to put your horn in the trash." Art Farmer, already somewhat established on the scene at that time, said much the same thing in an interview shortly after Brown's death: "...He was such a sweet and warm human being, I was forced to like him even though he made things very difficult for me as a trumpet player."

Brown emulated a few Navarro-isms, most notably the beboppers' articulation. Where most trumpet players grouped their thoughts by Slurring notes together, Brown, like Navarro before him, used his tongue more frequently, creating clipped, machine-gun lines in which every note was crisply delineated. For Wynton Marsalis, this remains one of Brown's signatures: "It's real hard to play the trumpet and tongue that much," Marsalis says. "That was the way he phrased. If you play a Charlie Parker solo on the trumpet, it sounds like Clifford. He had them fingers, too."

Brown also possessed an unerring knack for drama. With one off-balance phrase or a sudden reversal of direction, he could suggest sweeping mood changes; where many musicians operated at one volume, he'd establish a quiet mood, then abandon it in favor of a celebratory shout. Saxophonist Benny Golson, who worked with Brown in Dameron's band, admired the trumpeter's control of resources, particularly on ballads: "He could change from a meek lamb, musically, into a fierce tiger. He could play the bottom, top, loud, soft; he was playing the whole instrument."

Not incidentally, these elements of his musical personality helped non-musicians respond to what Brownie did on the bandstand. Jimmy Heath tells the story of a gig he played with Clifford at Spider Kelly's club in Philadelphia. "It was a little place on Mole St., near Market, and a woman who was completely out of her head, you know intoxicated, came up to the bandstand after the set. We'd been playing all the bebop heads we heard Dizzy and them play, and this lady comes up and says “I don't know what it is that you guys are playing, but you" — and she points right at Clifford — "are playing the hell out of it." Clifford had his head bowed in his usual humble way, and we were laughing. She didn't know what it was, but she knew he was doing it well."

…

“The last eight tracks on disc two come from the summer of 1954, when Brown met up with Max Roach and they were beginning to work in Los Angeles. Producer Richard Bock proposed a West Coast-style four-horn session featuring Clifford, with arrangements by Jack Montrose; Clifford, always looking for new challenges, agreed to it. Montrose remembers spending day and night with Clifford: "Art Pepper and I had a group that was playing opposite Brown and Roach at the Tiffany Club. For a couple of weeks there, I would go to his hotel room during the day and go over his tunes, and then we'd play at night." Montrose says he worked up charts on a few Brownie originals—"Daahoud," "Joy Spring," "Tiny Capers," "Bones For Jones"—and then was told by Bock to write arrangements for "Blueberry Hill" and "Gone With The Wind." "I don't think they were Clifford's choice, so I had to make something good out of them." Montrose also had to bridge the stylistic difference between Brown's searing-hot mode of operation and the more laid-back West Coast style. This was another challenge, Montrose recalls: "It wasn't the kind of thing he'd been into— everything he'd played had more fire. But his tunes were terrific, and everybody was surprised by how warm he was. I think he was less hung up by the style than by the fact he'd never played with those musicians before. But he got over that. It was a really happy date."

What was most striking for her, LaRue Brown Watson says, was the way Clifford was able to keep the different styles separate. "This was something so totally different from anything that he had ever done or would do again. I always thought it was strange that he could go into the studio during the daytime and play the kind of music that came out of Pacific Jazz, and at night turn around and play something totally different with Max."

As Michael concludes: “These moments and others, are not just the work of a clever button-pusher. They’re the product of a true thinker, an artist who was serious about communicating through his improvisations.”