Clifford Brown/Max Roach: Study in Brown (Acoustic Sounds Series) [EMARCY]

Why you'll love it

This Acoustic Sounds Series pressing is remastered from the original analogue tapes and pressed on 180g vinyl in a deluxe gatefold jacket. It catches the Brown/Roach Quintet in 1955 with Harold Land, Richie Powell and George Morrow, tearing through "Cherokee" and "Take the A Train."

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Remastered from the original analogue tapes
• Deluxe gatefold jacket
• Verve Acoustic Sounds Series

About the album

Max Roach was already a bebop legend when he went looking for a trumpet player to build a band around, and he picked a young man from Wilmington, Delaware, called Clifford Brown. The quintet they formed in 1954 settled on Harold Land's tenor, Richie Powell's piano (he was Bud Powell's younger brother) and George Morrow's bass, and by the time they cut Study in Brown in 1955 they played like a single, very fast-thinking organism.

"Cherokee" opens the album at a breakneck clip and the band never really lets up. Brown's trumpet is all warmth and precision, Roach plays the kit like a second melody instrument, and Land matches them chorus for chorus. "Jacqui" and "Sandu" swing hard on the blues, "George's Dilemma" shows off the band's clever arrangements, and "Take the A Train" sends everyone home grinning.

Brown died in a car accident in 1956 at the age of 25, so the quintet's records are all we have of him, and they still sit near the top of any hard bop shelf. Trumpet students have been studying it for seventy years; to be fair, the title did warn them.

Also at Kops: more Clifford Brown on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On EmArcy / Verve, a reissue of the 1955 album.