In the 1950s many of the greatest jazz musicians believed genius required a life of self-destruction. Clifford Brown shattered that myth before his 26th birthday, playing with a precision that stunned Miles Davis and Charlie Parker while never touching drugs and having almost no interest in alcohol. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1930, he sang in a family vocal quartet, fell for his father’s trumpet at 10, got his own horn and private lessons at 13, and commuted to Philadelphia for advanced instruction while still in high school. He enrolled at Delaware State as a math major before transferring to Maryland State College for its 14-piece jazz band.

This episode explores how a mathematically inclined mind mapped onto bebop’s rapid-fire chord changes, the June 1950 car crash that left him unable to form an embouchure for months and brought Dizzy Gillespie to his hospital bedside, and the climb through R&B bands, Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton, and J.J. Johnson to a live Birdland recording with Art Blakey that needed almost no retakes. It follows the 1954 move to Los Angeles to co-lead a quintet with Max Roach, designing the sound in a rented studio by swapping instruments, the three wedding ceremonies with LaRue Anderson, the albums Study in Brown and At Basin Street, and the rainy night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in June 1956 that killed him, pianist Richie Powell, and Powell’s wife Nancy.

• How playing with blazing speed and a fat, warm tone at the same time seemed physically impossible
• Lou Donaldson’s account of the relentless lip and mouth exercises behind the effortless-genius myth
• The difference between cerebral bebop and the groove-anchored hard bop his quintet pioneered
• How his sober example helped Sonny Rollins step away from heroin
• Sandu, Joy Spring, Daahoud, Benny Golson’s I Remember Clifford, and the single surviving video of him playing