Walter Beasley

My fav

Every trumpet genius around him was dying young, most of them from the needle. Clifford Brown stayed clean the whole time, never touched he**in, barely drank, practiced before sunrise, went home to his wife.

Then at twenty-five he died sober in the back seat of a car on a rainy turnpike.

He barely drank. He never once touched he**in, in a decade when the drug was quietly thinning out a whole generation of jazz musicians around him.

He had loved the trumpet since before he could lift one. "From the earliest time, I can remember it was the trumpet that fascinated me," he told the critic Nat Hentoff years later, remembering his boyhood in Wilmington, Delaware.

"When I was too little to reach it," he said, "I would climb up to where it was, and I kept knocking it down."

In the summer of 1950, the man he loved most on that horn died. Fats Navarro, Brown's idol, was gone at twenty-six, his lungs ruined by tuberculosis and his body worn down by addiction.

Brown was nineteen that summer, and he was lying in a hospital bed too. The difference was how he got there.

On June 3, 1950, in the dark hours before dawn, Brown caught a ride home from a gig near Maryland State College, where he had just finished his first semester as a music student. Somewhere on the road in Princess Anne, Maryland, the car overturned.

Two of the young musicians riding with him, students from Chicago, were killed. One of them, a young man named Samuel Turner, played the trumpet too.

Brown lived, but only just.

Both of his legs were broken, there was a fracture through his torso, and the doctors had to graft skin across his damaged body.

He was a teenager being told he might never play the trumpet again. His shoulder had been hurt so badly that it would slip out of its socket for the rest of his life.

For months he could not even hold the horn up, so he sat at a piano instead and kept his hands in the music that way. He stayed in that bed for the better part of a year.

And then one day a tall man in a sharp suit walked into the room.

It was Dizzy Gillespie.

Gillespie had watched the boy play in Philadelphia the summer before and had not forgotten what he heard. He sat down with Brown and told him, plainly, that he had to come back, that he should forget about a safe degree and give his whole life to the trumpet.

A few weeks into that hospital stay, while Brown was still fighting to heal, the news came that Navarro had died. The man Brown wanted to play like was twenty-six and gone, and Brown was barely twenty and not sure he would walk right again, let alone play.

He chose to believe Gillespie instead of the odds. By March of 1952, almost two years after the wreck, he was well enough to make his first record, and from then on he did not stop.

What people remembered, once he could play again, was how hard he worked at it. Max Roach, the drummer who would soon share top billing with him, said it in the fewest words he had.

"He practiced all the time," Roach said. "As simple as that."

"He practiced," he added, "and just as important, he listened."

The saxophone player Lou Donaldson toured with him and saw it up close. Brown would be running lip exercises at six in the morning on the tour bus, before anyone else had opened their eyes, working his mouth and his breath like a man clocking in for a shift.

Brown himself believed the real work happened where no audience could see it. The most important thing a jazz musician could do, he said, was train away from the stage.

He was gentle with people in a way they never forgot. He once raced across a city to bring a friend the valve oil he needed for a gig that night, and he helped raise money for the family of a musician who had been locked up.

The playing itself stunned the people who heard it.

When the producer Ira Gitler first heard Brown take a solo in the studio, he said he nearly fell off his seat in the control room.

The flute player Herbie Mann, who recorded beside him, put the feeling another way. Being in the studio with Brown, he said, was like being on a basketball court with Michael Jordan.

By 1954 the critics had named him the best new star in jazz. He and Max Roach built a quintet that is still studied today as one of the highest points the music ever reached.

He wrote tunes that have outlived him by seventy years. "Joy Spring," named for his wife LaRue, along with "Daahoud" and "Sandu," are still played by musicians who were not born until long after he was gone.

When Sarah Vaughan heard him play, she turned to the pianist Richie Powell and said flatly, "I have to have Clifford for a record date." The album they made together became a classic.

But the thing that may matter most is something he did just by living the way he lived. In 1955, a young saxophone player named Sonny Rollins joined the quintet.

Rollins was clawing his way out of a he**in addiction that had nearly ended him. He had served time, he had gone through a federal program to get clean, and now he was trying to stay that way inside a music that made it feel almost impossible.

He watched Clifford Brown every night and saw a door he had not known was there. Long afterward, he said it as plainly as anyone has ever said anything about Brown.

"Clifford was a profound influence on my personal life," Rollins said. "He showed me that it was possible to live a good, clean life and still be a good jazz musician."

Think about what that sentence meant in 1955. The world had a story it liked to tell about jazz geniuses, that they were supposed to come apart in public, to burn themselves down on a lit stage and die young.

Brown was living proof that the story was a lie. You could be that gifted and still go home to your wife at night, still practice at dawn, still grow into an old man one day.

On the night of June 26, 1956, the quintet was scattered across the map between engagements. Brown had just finished a run of shows in Philadelphia and needed to get to the Blue Note in Chicago, where Roach and Rollins were waiting.

He got into a car with Richie Powell, the quintet's pianist and the younger brother of the great Bud Powell.

Powell's wife, Nancy, took the wheel.

She would drive through the night so that the two musicians could sleep before they had to play. That was the whole plan, that the men with the gig could rest while she carried them safely west.

It was raining on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, somewhere past Bedford. In the dark and the wet, the car ran off the road.

All three of them were killed. Clifford Brown was twenty-five years old.

By one account, it was his wedding anniversary, two years to the day since he had married LaRue.

Stop and sit with how he died for a moment. He did not die from the needle that had taken Navarro and so many of the others.

He did not burn himself down or come apart on any stage. He was asleep in the back of a car, sober, on his way to a job, being driven by someone who was trying to keep him safe.

The most disciplined man in the music, the one who had outrun the addictions and the early grave and even a first wreck that should have ended him, was taken by a rainstorm on a wet stretch of highway. There was nothing there he could have practiced his way out of.

The next night, the trumpeter Benny Golson was on the bandstand at the Apollo in Harlem, playing with Dizzy Gillespie's band. In the middle of the set, a pianist named Walter Davis Jr. came running out onto the stage.

"You heard?" he kept shouting. "Brownie was killed, he was killed in a car accident."

Golson said the whole band froze where they stood, unable to move for what felt like forever. Then he went home and wrote a ballad called "I Remember Clifford," and other musicians started to record it, and it became a standard, which is how jazz keeps its dead close.

Clifford Brown left behind only about four years of recordings.

He never became a household name the way Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie did.

But every trumpet player who came after him heard him. Lee Morgan heard him, and Freddie Hubbard, and Booker Little, and Donald Byrd, and Wynton Marsalis, and you can still hear Brown alive inside all of them.

And Sonny Rollins, the young man who learned from Brown how a person could live, did not die young. He got clean and stayed clean and played his saxophone into his nineties, carrying that lesson the entire way.

About a month before the crash, on a stage at the Cotton Club in Cleveland, somebody caught Brown on tape introducing himself to the room. No speech, no flourish, just a young man with a horn.

"I play the trumpet," he said. "My name is Clifford Brown."

That was all he ever claimed for himself. It was enough then, and it is enough now.

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Well I’m up let’s get some work done . Have a great day

Up at 3 am with these zingers from my knee replacement surgery . I know I need the sleep but I am giving thanks for the chance to live another day .

Can somebody explain to me why Senegals goal didn’t count