Its title suggests a live recording (Basin Street East was a popular jazz club, where the group had in fact performed many times), but this is actually the final studio album released by the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, recorded in January and February of 1956, just four months before the trumpeter’s and pianist Richie Powell’s deaths in a car accident. By this point, tenor saxophonist Harold Land had been replaced by a young up-and-comer named Sonny Rollins, and he’s swinging like mad throughout this album, his tone hoarse and gritty and his lines leaping up and down the horn. The opening, nearly eight-minute version of “What Is This Thing Called Love” is one of the great jazz performances of the 1950s, everyone on fire and sprinting toward the horizon. “I’ll Remember April” features some particularly brilliant drumming from Roach, but the real surprise is the gentleness and delicacy of Powell’s playing — all three of the original pieces on the album (“Powell’s Prances,” “Time,” and “Gertrude’s Bounce”) are his, and he arranged all the music, leaving himself space for solos that seem to lower the temperature in the room five degrees, then bring it back up when it’s time for Brown and Rollins to resume.