Hmm, why not try "The Definitive Clifford Brown" - the standout track there is "I've Got You Under My Skin" which features Dinah Washington on vocals and Brownie just going off in a "hell if I care" riff. It's not a bad way to get introduced to him, and it also has his classic "Cherokee" on there.
And if you Like the Duke...
"In July 1956, Ellington received an invitation to the Newport Jazz Festival, then a festival for mostly well-to-do suburban whites in the posh Atlantic resort town of Newport, Rhode Island. He composed a Jazz suite especially for the occasion, and gave his band a rare pep talk before the show, as if knowing the importance of the moment before it happened. The show went well, but not fantastically, until the final number. As his final number, and as the audience was rumored to be filing out of the stands, he played a staple of the Ellington Big Band at the time: Diminuendo and Crescendo in D; a song blending two songs that Duke had originally recorded on flip sides of a 78-record in 1937.
Duke lazily introduced the song to a quiet, mulling audience that even "sounds like" it was filing out of the stands at the beginning of the song. The band struck, and much of the audience returned to their seats, inspired by the amazing ensemble work of the Diminuendo half of the song and the up-beat Swing rhythm. Four minutes into the song, Paul Gonsalves began what would become one of the most famous saxophone solos in Jazz history. Duke had seen Golsalves develop into that particular solo over the past months of performance, and let him loose that night. What began as an ordinary solo for a few bars developed into a rousing 27-chorus, 7 minute saxophone solo.
The song tapped into many of the elements of Duke's music throughout his career, as if condensing his entire career to that point into one song: the forward-leaning but relaxed and intoxicating Duke-Swing rhythm, the almost-dissonant but still strikingly-awesome and harmonic tenor of his piano and horn section ensemble, and the individually-talented musicians that nobody but Duke could harness in a big band, the blend of complex harmonic arrangement and "old-old school" dixieland-style trumpet solos. A legendarily-anonymous young, blonde woman in a black dress (a Marilyn Monroe "wanna-be") jumped up and started dancing in the audience and then onstage. The previously-sedate, silent, mulling crowd of mostly young white suburban kids--most of them born after Duke had finished his stint at the Cotton Club in the late-1920s; divided by time, class, and culture from those early Harlem crowds at the Cotton Club--was lifted into a frenzy that called for four encores. You can even hear the roar of the crowd clearly develop into a frenzy through Gonsalves solo on the recording.
That performance, and the best-selling album of Duke's career ("Ellington at Newport," pictured above) that followed from it, re-ignited Duke's career, without which he might have faded away into being just another legacy of the Swing Era. It re-ignited youthful interest in Jazz, turning early Rock-and-Roll kids onto the music of their parents."
