Seeing that this is his third appearance, you may think I'm rolling in Clifford Brown recordings, but in fact this pretty much cashes me out. As mentioned before, Brown has a very short career, with all his recordings dating from 1952 to 1956 including sideman gigs. Max Roach, on the other hand, recorded in every decade from the 1940's to the first decade of this century.
A short career is a mixed blessing. On one hand, when you die at 26 you leave so many questions behind about what you could have done if you made it even to just 40 or 50. On the other hand, it doesn't give you any burnout time or room for mistakes, so, in Brown's case, it's hard to find a bad recording featuring his trumpet playing. This also make it hard to rate Brown against his peers, especially somebody like Miles Davis who had a decades-long career and explored numerous subgenres in jazz, some more successfully than others. Brown stuck to hard bop, very much in its ascendancy in 1955, and did it really well. Study in Brown and the plainly titled Clifford Brown & Max Roach are standout examples of the genre and almost always appear together on lists of top jazz albums.
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