Brian Jackson

Gil Scott-Heron’s collaborator and more salutes Clifford Brown & Max Roach (EmArcy, 1954)

I was four or five when my parents put on Clifford Brown & Max Roach. They were always playing jazz at home and I took to it from an early age – Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis – but I distinctly remember sitting in front of my parents’ 15-inch speakers, rocking back and forth, to this: Joy Spring, Jordu, Duke Ellington’s What Am I Here For?. But the song that really stayed with me and still does is Parisian Thoroughfare, their take on the Bud Powell standard.

Their playing of it really sounds like a big city, and the fact they were able to recreate that, I was immediately enchanted by the idea that you could make music that painted a picture. Even though I had never visited Paris, the music gave me this sense of it, and that really sparked my imagination and made me want to be a musician myself. Once I started playing, I kept returning to that idea of music creating images, the visual possibilities. It was a big influence, for example, on a track such as Winter In America [from 1975’s The First Minute Of A New Day with Gil Scott-Heron]. With the flutter of the flute, I tried to paint a picture of the falling snow.

The New York Times called the band on the album, “perhaps the definitive bop group”, and obviously there’s Clifford Brown on trumpet and Max Roach on drums, but then you’ve got Harold Land on tenor sax, Richie Powell on piano and George Morrow on bass… they are intuitive, and the telepathy between Clifford and Max! His drumming also really spoke to me, and how he was at the forefront of the civil rights movement and black power as a musician.

So, I tried to follow in his footsteps. One of my proudest moments was when he came up to me after seeing me play and said how I was the real deal.

As told to Lois Wilson His first new LP in 20 years, This Is Brian Jackson, is released on May 27 on BBE Music.