Celebrating Dave Brubeck’s Centennial

courtesy of Play MPE

Dave Brubeck was born on December 6, 1920. His Wikipedia page describes him as “one of the foremost exponents of cool jazz;” but this may distract from his unique approach to jazz, which was decidedly cerebral without being threatening. He is probably best known for his Time Out album, on which he led from the piano a quartet whose other members were Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, Eugene Wright on bass, and Joe Morello on drums. This was the first jazz album to sell one million copies, and the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2009.

Brubeck’s family celebrated his centennial by launching a new label entitled Brubeck Editions. The full title of the first release is Time OutTakes: Previously Unreleased Takes from the Original 1959 Sessions (those sessions being, of course, the ones leading to the release of Time Out). Time Out consisted of seven tracks, each of which involved unconventional metric patterns, with the following titles:

1. Blue Rondo A La Turk
2. Strange Meadow Lark
3. Take Five
4. Three to Get Ready
5. Kathy’s Waltz
6. Everybody’s Jumpin’
7. Pick Up Sticks

All of these pieces were composed by Brubeck except for “Take Five,” which was composed by Desmond.

Time OutTakes consists of an alternate take for each of the first five of these tracks (in the same “order of appearance”). These are followed by “I’m in a Dancing Mood,” composed jointly by Al Goodhart, Al Hoffman, and Maurice Sigler and recorded by the quartet on Dave Brubeck and Jay & Kai at Newport. The final selection is the “discovery” of “Watusi Jam,” which involves a major drum solo and thematic material appropriated from “Watusi Drums,” which had been recorded in 1958 in Copenhagen for the album The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe. The final track consists of about four and one-half minutes of banter among the quartet members during the Time Out recording sessions.

Those that have played their copies of Time Out to death (or have worn out an old vinyl and replaced it with a CD) are likely to appreciate how improvisation leads the quartet players in different directions on the alternate takes on this new release. They are also likely to be impressed with how the two-beat regularity of “I’m in a Dancing Mood” gets twisted around with a pulse that defines its own odyssey over the course of a little more than three minutes. My own reaction was a bit more melancholy, regretting that my knowledge of Brubeck had been limited to recordings. MInd you, his popularity would have made it difficult for me to attend one of his concerts; but opportunity never seemed to situate me in the right place at the right time. At least Time OutTakes provides me with a point of reference for how the spontaneity of performance took Brubeck’s quartet to territories beyond what was ever released as a recording.