The Last Music Clifford Brown Heard before His Death on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, 1955

"He showed me it was possible to live a good clean life and still be a good jazz musician."

–Sonny Rollins

Everything that happened to Clifford Brown,"Brownie," the Goodman Brown of Jazz,whose life was true and clean, happened in the spanof twenty-five years until the accident. And to hear what happened

you only have to listen to "Ghost of a Chance," a hard bop,Max Roach's drumscape, when he is back in Philadelphiain 1955, same year as my father in his Navy hat,serenading a wall of cigarette smoke at Ortlieb's, stone

sober. But what I always think of when I thinkof what happened to Brownie, dead beforeI was born, is the rain, is the rain on a stretch of the Pennsylvaniaturnpike. His wife took the wheel so he could sleep.

So he could rest his hands. So he could lay his headagainst the black Buick's window to the sound of syn-copated raindrops spattering in long flutes across the glass,before he planned to wake up, fresh, still famous, and in Chicago.