Clifford Brown & Max Roach - Clifford Brown & Max Roach

This self-titled album compiles material from two sessions by the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet: five tracks recorded at Capitol Studios in Hollywood in August 1954 and two additional tracks from a February 1955 New York session. Originally released as a 10-inch LP on EmArcy Records, it was expanded to 12-inch format in 1955. The quintet — Brown on trumpet, Harold Land on tenor saxophone, Richie Powell on piano, and George Morrow on bass, with Roach on drums — plays with a combination of bebop precision and hard bop warmth that the New York Times later called "perhaps the definitive bop group." Brown's originals dominate the program: "Daahoud" and "Joy Spring" both entered the jazz standard repertoire and remain closely identified with his legacy. Village Voice critic Gary Giddins named their arrangement of Victor Young's "Delilah" the top jazz track of 1954. Bud Powell's "Parisian Thoroughfare" and Duke Jordan's "Jordu" round out the standards. The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and is regarded as one of the strongest hard bop studio recordings of the era, capturing Brown's brilliant tone and effortless technical command less than two years before his death in a car accident at age twenty-five.