Description
Originally released in 1953, prolific jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown is joined here by Gigi Gryce, Charlie Rouse, John Lewis, Percy Heath, and Art Blakey.
"The early 1950s were an interesting, if largely unsatisfactory, time for jazz. There had been a revolution in the 1940s with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie juggling all the ingredients of jazz into a new order. By the early 1950s there was a new generation of musicians, the disciples of Parker and Gillespie, who were trying to find their own voices. A few years later hard bop would bring a new, tougher aesthetic, but in the early 1950s the move was towards something more restrained, something cooler. Miles Davis was the iconic figure pushing towards the new style, but Clifford Brown was another imaginative force and it is interesting to compare him with Davis. This album was Brown’s first release as solo leader. The overall sound is remeniscent of Davis’s Birth of the Cool sessions: A certain richness in the horn sound, in the layering of harmonies."
