Sonny Clark - Sonny's Crib [LP]

Recorded on September 1, 1957 at Rudy Van Gelder's home studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, and released in March 1958, "Sonny's Crib" is a jazz album released by Sonny Clark when he was just 25 years old. He had moved from Pittsburgh to the West Coast and then New York in the early to mid-1950s and he immersed himself in bebop and when he'll give his personal touch to the sounds emerging from the birthplace of hard bop. Albums from this period often featured "dream teams" of musicians and "Sonny's Crib" is a prime example. It's his second album as a leader (after "Dial "S" for Sonny") and the band it's notable because it features a fantastic lineup musicians as Sonny Clark himself, Donald Byrd, Curtis Fuller, Paul Chambers, Art Taylor and John Coltrane (in his pre-Blue Train period which was recorded just a few weeks later in 1957). The performance it's phenomenal, a true result of hard bop with some blues and modal elements: on "Sonny's Crib" Sonny Clark is real at the heart of the action. A recording that open the door to hard bop a must-have in the ideal jazz discography that show Clark become one of the best jazz piano talents of that period.