As with Parker, his influence on others was inescapable for a good ten years, with Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan, Booker Little, Freddie Hubbard, to name a handful, all showing deep roots in his style. The whole of the jazz world was put into shock by Brown's death in a car crash in 19S6. His and Max Roach's quintet with Sonny Rollins on tenor was the hottest small group in jazz, striking a balance between the old bop madness and a more poised, melodic approach. A player with incredible technique, limitless imagination and a tone so gorgeous you want to kiss it, Brown became the player everyone wanted to sound like. Trumpeter Clifford Brown, who had played with both men as well as with Lionel Hampton's big band, seemed more likely than anyone in the early 50s to be 'the future of jazz'. Most of the later hard boppers came out of their bands. Yet by 1956 the original Messengers had split, with Silver taking most of the band and forming his first group, while Blakey (who also had a passionate interest in African music) held onto the name and found new players. For Silver this was an easy assignment: he could come up with earthy, hummable tunes until the cows came home. These men shared a belief in the great truths of modern jazz, its connections with earlier black musical forms - blues, r&b, spirituals - and this necessity to communicate these truths about their music to a new and modern audience. For a brief time in the early 50s many of these men worked in the same groups, Horace Silver and Art Blakey even co-leading the original Jazz Messengers. The greatest impetus for this came in the early 50s from a nucleus of late-comer boppers such as Horace Silver, Clifford Brown, Art Blakey, Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins (who was in the Clifford Brown group after Harold Land) and Kenny Durham. The tough guys on the East Coast had the same problem as the West Coasters and the Cool School: what do you do after Bird? A number of New York-based leaders and shakers came up with a similar answer: go back to the roots.
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