TO PUT Dave Brubeck in a box was an unwise thing to do. He’d just jump right out again, big, broad and strong, with those horn-rimmed glasses and that crazy, slightly cross-eyed smile. Call him cool, and he’d tell you that many of his jazz arrangements were so hot, they sizzled. Lump him with players of white west-coast jazz, and he’d object that he felt more black than white. Suggest he was influenced by the pelting, intellectual strain of bebop that took over jazz in the 1940s, and he would say nope, he didn’t listen to it; he only ever wanted to do his own thing. Call him the usher of a new jazz age, put him on the cover of Time magazine, where he landed in 1954, and he was crestfallen. Duke Ellington deserved all that, he said, but not him.
His contrarian ways went further. Give him a few bars of Beethoven, and he’d weave a jazz riff through it; but put him in the middle of a jazz set, and he would come up with classic counterpoint as strict as the “Goldberg Variations”. Sing him a tune in C, and his left hand would play it in E flat; give him a jazz line in standard 4/4 time and he would play 5/4, 7/4, even 13/4 against it, relentlessly underpinning the adventure with big fat blocks of chords. He was a jazzman who struggled to read notation and who graduated on a wing and an ear from his college music school; and he was also, in later years, a composer of cantatas and oratorios who was proud to have written a Credo for Mozart’s unfinished “Mass in C minor”.
The musicians he picked for his quartet, which dominated the popular jazz scene from 1951 to 1967, were chosen because they could break out of the box like him: Paul Desmond on feather-light, floating alto sax, Joe Morello razor-sharp and witty on drums, Eugene Wright rock-solid on bass. Their greatest success, an album called “Time Out” (1959) that sold more than 1m copies, was a collection of breezily poly tonal pieces in wild time signatures, centring on a Desmond piece called “Take Five” written in teasing 5/4, and “Blue Rondo à la Turk”, devised by Mr Brubeck after hearing street musicians playing in 9/8 in Istanbul. These two pieces alone consolidated the quartet’s fame on campuses and in clubs all over America; but Columbia Records refused to release the album for a year, just baffled, said Mr Brubeck impatiently, by the fact that it broke so many rules. It did, but hey, it sounded good.
Whenever he sat down at the piano— an instrument as satisfying, to him, as a whole orchestra—his aim was to get somewhere he had never got before. It didn’t matter how tired he was, how beat-up he felt. He wanted to be so inspired in his explorations that he would get beyond himself. He liked to quote Louis Armstrong, who once told a woman who asked what he thought about as he played: “Lady, if I told you, your mind would explode.” In his own words, he played dangerously, prepared to make any number of mistakes in order to create something he had never created before.
TO PUT Dave Brubeck in a box was an unwise thing to do. He’d just jump right out again, big, broad and strong, with those horn-rimmed glasses and that crazy, slightly cross-eyed smile. Call him cool, and he’d tell you that many of his jazz arrangements were so hot, they sizzled. Lump him with players of white west-coast jazz, and he’d object that he felt more black than white. Suggest he was influenced by the pelting, intellectual strain of bebop that took over jazz in the 1940s, and he would say nope, he didn’t listen to it; he only ever wanted to do his own thing. Call him the usher of a new jazz age, put him on the cover of Time magazine, where he landed in 1954, and he was crestfallen. Duke Ellington deserved all that, he said, but not him.His contrarian ways went further. Give him a few bars of Beethoven, and he’d weave a jazz riff through it; but put him in the middle of a jazz set, and he would come up with classic counterpoint as strict as the “Goldberg Variations”. Sing him a tune in C, and his left hand would play it in E flat; give him a jazz line in standard 4/4 time and he would play 5/4, 7/4, even 13/4 against it, relentlessly underpinning the adventure with big fat blocks of chords. He was a jazzman who struggled to read notation and who graduated on a wing and an ear from his college music school; and he was also, in later years, a composer of cantatas and oratorios who was proud to have written a Credo for Mozart’s unfinished “Mass in C minor”.The musicians he picked for his quartet, which dominated the popular jazz scene from 1951 to 1967, were chosen because they could break out of the box like him: Paul Desmond on feather-light, floating alto sax, Joe Morello razor-sharp and witty on drums, Eugene Wright rock-solid on bass. Their greatest success, an album called “Time Out” (1959) that sold more than 1m copies, was a collection of breezily poly tonal pieces in wild time signatures, centring on a Desmond piece called “Take Five” written in teasing 5/4, and “Blue Rondo à la Turk”, devised by Mr Brubeck after hearing street musicians playing in 9/8 in Istanbul. These two pieces alone consolidated the quartet’s fame on campuses and in clubs all over America; but Columbia Records refused to release the album for a year, just baffled, said Mr Brubeck impatiently, by the fact that it broke so many rules. It did, but hey, it sounded good.Whenever he sat down at the piano— an instrument as satisfying, to him, as a whole orchestra—his aim was to get somewhere he had never got before. It didn’t matter how tired he was, how beat-up he felt. He wanted to be so inspired in his explorations that he would get beyond himself. He liked to quote Louis Armstrong, who once told a woman who asked what he thought about as he played: “Lady, if I told you, your mind would explode.” In his own words, he played dangerously, prepared to make any number of mistakes in order to create something he had never created before.
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