Chapter One
ON THE ROAD
“This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.”
JACK KEROUAC, On the Road, 1957
An opulently upholstered private bus which twenty-four hours earlier was ferrying the England cricket team somewhere between disaster and triumph, turns the corner onto Park Lane in central London, as Dave Brubeck, the jazz pianist and composer, eighty-two years old, rests on a cushioned sofa in an alcove at the rear of the vehicle. Wearing a burgundy shirt and cream linen suit, those signature horn-rimmed glasses of the 1950s long since traded in for chunkier light-reactive spectacles, he has entered a heightened state of anecdotal nirvana. Brubeck is leading his quartet toward their next gig and reminiscing about Charlie Parker, Leonard Bernstein… and gangsters.
“When Al Capone kidnapped Caesar Petrillo,” Brubeck muses, referring to the occasion when the mob snatched the omnipotent, all-seeing head honcho of the American Federation of Musicians and held him for ransom, “it was Joe Glaser who arranged his release.”* And Dave, naturally, knew Joe Glaser, the dollar-fixated jazz and entertainment impresario whom even Louis Armstrong would reverentially greet as “Mr. Glaser.”
At the very mention of Glaser’s name, an agog wolf whistle cuts across the four-square rhythmic plod of the bus as it powers through South London, a melodic fanfare that implies, Wow, Dave, now you’re talking. After twenty years of killing time on the Brubeck band bus—a lifestyle guaranteed to test anyone’s tolerance for hearing that same story once too often—Bobby Militello, Brubeck’s long-serving saxophonist, is a lucky man. His boss is a memory bank who keeps on withdrawing nuggets of jazz history, and, with a thirsty smile, he leans in to eavesdrop.
It’s April 23, 2003. Tonight the latest incarnation of the Dave Brubeck Quartet will be performing in Brighton, the East Sussex coastal town affectionately nicknamed by its locals “London-by-the-Sea.” That the Dave Brubeck Quartet is still performing anywhere is, let’s be honest, nothing short of miraculous. The revolutions in sound brokered during the 1950s and ’60s by the Miles Davis Quintet, the Thelonious Monk Quartet, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Ornette Coleman Quartet, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, and the John Coltrane Quartet endure as defining moments in jazz history, and Brubeck’s quartet is the last surviving “name” band from that golden age still going about its business. The earliest version of his quartet carved its own first grooves into history in August 1951, when the pianist and his musicians, including alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, the player with whom Brubeck would become most associated, walked into a San Francisco recording studio and cut four tracks: George Gershwin’s “A Foggy Day” and “Somebody Loves Me” and two original Brubeck compositions, “Crazy Chris” and “Lyons Busy.”*
Those experiments with what Brubeck invariably referred to as “odd time signatures”—the work that defined him and which came to fruition on his 1959 album Time Out—were a whole eight years into the future. But already, in 1951, we hear the Brubeck Quartet refashioning the fundamentals of jazz around the leader’s own ideas about rhythm and harmony—and about how improvisation could flourish inside a music that also placed a premium on inventive composition. Time Out, which spurned the hit single “Take Five,” was released at the end of 1959 and appeared in record stores alongside Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um, and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, which were all recorded within an implausibly fertile few months during 1959.
Miles recorded Brubeck’s song “In Your Own Sweet Way” in 1957, but then he became embroiled in a spat with Mingus, fought in the letters page of DownBeat magazine, regarding Brubeck’s effectiveness as a pianist—Mingus for, Davis against.* Brubeck was embedded deep inside the heat of ongoing debates about modern jazz. The general critical mood sensed him standing outside its prevailing directions; his classicism, that fixation with odd time signatures, his ear for improvisational flow and rhythm feel, they said, were allied to some other musical project altogether; Brubeck was a shameless popularist, a one-hit wonder, the only thing wrong with his own quartet—but then the modernist heavyweights Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton testified that his idea of composition and the contours of his hands against piano keys seeded ideas about jazz that influenced their own early work. Keep calm and carry on, and explain where necessary, was how he rode these controversies, until he emerged—exactly when is arguable—as an elder statesman in charge of a significant and unique legacy. The creative relationship between Brubeck and Desmond became venerated and adored; yet something about their chemistry continues to be unfathomable and therefore endlessly alluring. And whenever Brubeck comes to town, this web of association, reaching back into the birth pangs of modern jazz, casts an irresistible spell.
The Brubeck band bus, circa 2003, is a haven of contentment. A quartet of musicians (Brubeck and Militello joined by bassist Michael Moore and drummer Randy Jones), one musician’s spouse (Dave and Iola have been married since 1942), one agent-manager (Russell Gloyd, who joined Brubeck in 1976), and a crack squad of roadies and technicians—when Dave arrives, Dave just wants to play—are settling down for the journey ahead. The Nissens, a semiretired couple from Hamburg, Germany, whom Brubeck noticed attending at every port of call during previous European tours, now travel on the band bus: as officially endorsed groupies, they streamline their working lives and plan their holidays around the Brubeck concert schedule. As Iola makes herself comfortable, Dave worries about her motion sickness, but then he marvels at the magnitude and unknowable scale of London.
Tonight’s concert will represent a return visit that few had thought likely. The Brighton Dome’s faux-Gothic splendor was on the schedule when Brubeck toured the UK five years before, in 1998, in order to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of his quartet’s first British tour. Then Brighton hung out the Brubeck bunting and the seaside air felt discernibly different—to the jazz fan at least. In a favorite café, piped Brubeck usurped the customary anesthetizing spew of Classic FM baroque jangle. Recordland, Brighton’s secondhand vinyl and CD wonderland—“We specialise in jazz—records bought, sold and exchanged”—had decked out its front display window with a wall of gig-specific merchandise—Jazz at Oberlin, Jazz at the College of the Pacific, Southern Scene, Time Out, Blues Roots, The Last Set at Newport, Paper Moon, Late Night Brubeck—like an altarpiece venerating Brubeck’s sixty-year career on record.
Midway through that 1998 Brighton concert, Brubeck casually informed the audience that they had just heard his next record, and true to his word, when that next album duly appeared a year later, under the title The 40th Anniversary Tour of the UK, a crop of freshly composed material flowered alongside a selection of jazz standards that included “I Got Rhythm,” “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and “All of Me.” “Oh You Can Run (But You Can’t Hide)” was a reimagining of the classic blues form; “The Time of Our Madness” was underpinned by a hobbling tango rhythm, a reminder of Jelly Roll Morton’s insistence on the importance of what he termed the “Spanish tinge” in jazz; while “The Salmon Strikes” was Brubeck at what Paul Desmond once called his most “wiggy,” sculpting musical form out of a leapfrogging twelve-tone row that ricocheted against the regulated plod of an orderly bass line.
Whether by accident or design, this set of new pieces laid bare two seemingly contradictory sides of Dave Brubeck’s musical makeup, a tension in which he had long rejoiced. Brubeck always had plenty to say about the blues. “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” the opening track of Time Out, spliced improvised twelve-bar blues choruses inside the structure of his most ingenious composition, while Brubeck called “Travelin’ Blues” and “Blues for Newport” whenever he wanted his musicians to preach some fundamental jazz truths.
“The Salmon Strikes,” though, was teased out from that other side of his musician brain—Brubeck the compositional thinker who, having found the great Austrian twelve-tone pioneer Arnold Schoenberg unwilling to entertain his idea of putting notes on manuscript paper simply because he liked how they sounded, found an entirely simpatico sounding board in the French composer and pedagogue Darius Milhaud, who encouraged him to make use of jazz forms in his compositions. These three pieces tell us about Brubeck’s starting point as a pianist who was immersed in the blues and in the 1920s swing piano styles of Art Tatum, Earl Hines, and Fats Waller; but they also tell us how far he advanced into what, during the latter half of the 1940s, was considered the very apex of modernism and music that you probably ought not to trust.
Despite his abortive lessons with Schoenberg in 1942, Brubeck never forgot how twelve-tone technique could be used to scatter familiar melodic patterns to the harmonic margins or move notes around like pawns in an inscrutable game of chess.* But it was Milhaud’s grounding in polytonality—in prying open conventional harmonic thinking by operating in two or three keys simultaneously—that gave Brubeck food for thought for the rest of his career. Everything he achieved in music grew from allowing the underlying principles of jazz to coexist—and fuse—with musical concepts imported from modern composition. And, now in his eighties, that irresistible spell is all the more potent because fresh ideas about how raw swing and “wiggy” modernist compositional techniques might meet each other halfway guards Brubeck’s legacy from solidifying into repertory music or escapist nostalgia.
“I often wonder,” Brubeck reflects in a quiet moment, “how much time in my life I’ve spent on coaches like this—all those hours. And there’s not much else you can do apart from getting ideas down on manuscript paper. Cities go past, new tunes stack up, and then you can take them right onstage—and play. Sometimes, on the road, the music and my surroundings kind of come together. The last orchestral piece I wrote, which I called Millennium Intervals,* was written in the back seat of a car as we traveled around Europe a few years ago. You know that the augmented fourth is the most important melodic interval in twentieth-century music, right?* Well, I’m writing this piece that’s full of augmented fourths. Now we’re in this new millennium, I thought, what can you do with the augmented fourth that’s still gonna surprise people and make them think? My mind was full of augmented fourths. Then we arrive at a town in Switzerland and I hear a siren blaring away. At an augmented fourth! So I wrote exactly the sound I was hearing and put it in the piece.”
But what about Joe Glaser taking up Caesar Petrillo’s cause with Al Capone, a different life and time altogether? Glaser put the dampers on something big, and Brubeck winces at the memory. Dave, with Iola writing the lyrics, had tailor-made his only musical, The Real Ambassadors, for Louis Armstrong. And for “one nite only” in 1962, Armstrong and his All Stars, musicians from Brubeck’s quartet, the vocalese supergroup Lambert, Hendricks & Bavan, and the jazz singer Carmen McRae clustered together onstage at the Monterey Jazz Festival to perform the premiere.* A dream ticket, you would imagine, for an extended run on Broadway. But Glaser, wily enough to make sure he had signed the bankable Armstrong and Brubeck, balked at the prospect. “Joe didn’t want Louis and me to be tied up every night because he’d lose too much money,” Brubeck explains, the injustice still clearly rankling. And then a grinning punch line to the Petrillo story arrives unannounced: “I asked Joe if he was afraid [of] negotiating, you know, with gangsters, and he just shrugged like this was a perfectly normal thing to be doing.” Much laughter. Marble Arch, a tourist spot that Brubeck celebrated with a postcard composition on his 1958 album Jazz Impressions of Eurasia, looms into view, and then the approach toward Buckingham Palace provokes an improbable discussion about the dimensions of the queen’s walled-off garden.* Those sepia flashbacks to the world of Al Capone and organized crime register as the comedy of pure incongruity as this luxury bus heads from the most famous postcode in England into suburban London.
Through the window of the Brubeck band bus, Michael Moore, recruited two years ago as the quartet’s new bassist, spots an elderly gentleman stooped against the lashing rain, a vision of pure L. S. Lowry* pathos transformed by Moore’s improviser’s wit throwing in a local jazz link—“Look at that guy! He used to play with Humphrey Lyttelton!”* he roars. Brubeck has always aroused profound loyalty from his musicians, and Moore’s status as a player parachuted in from outside the pianist’s go-to pool of long-trusted musical associates—with his CV ranging from Benny Goodman to Gil Evans—is a source of understandable intrigue to Brubeck fans. As the bus breaks for the London borders, with the motorway to Brighton stretching ahead, Moore falls into earnest conversation with Iola Brubeck. Heads nod remorsefully, then Moore’s grotesque caricature of President George W. Bush’s nervy Texas drawl hits a manic crescendo reminiscent of an operatic mad scene.
Sitting at the next table, opposite Militello, is the man who has become Brubeck’s longest-serving sideman. Randy Jones—whom Brubeck introduces during British tours as being “from Slough, England,” which guarantees a laugh because this drab commuter town in Greater London is about the last place you’d go looking for a jazz drummer—made his first appearance on a Dave Brubeck Quartet album in 1980. On Tritonis, one tune required Jones to give the kiss of rhythmic life to a tentative sketch from Dave’s notebook, retrofitting Brubeck’s salty eight-to-the-bar boogie-woogie patterns with a funk backbeat and choked hi-hat stabs—a tune that became known as “Mr. Fats” (Waller, not Domino). The title track was a spry Brubeck composition in 5/4 time, originally conceived for flute and guitar,* which Jones nudged forward with a chamber musician’s sensibility in this reworking for the quartet. Dave Brubeck’s new drummer made a decisive, dynamic start.
Militello and Jones share history pre-Brubeck. Both men came to the Brubeck Quartet via the big band led by the Canadian trumpeter, singer, and swing-era veteran Maynard Ferguson. Ferguson spent much of the 1960s on an LSD high as a member of Timothy Leary’s druggy commune, and Jones worked with him when the trumpeter relocated to Britain in 1969. Militello’s tenure began in 1975, after Ferguson returned to the US. And although Militello and Jones never played the same Ferguson gig, they now feel the kinship. As Jones recounts the traumas of being in a car driven by Ferguson—who never quite reconciled himself to driving on the left side of the road in the UK—Militello concurs: “Although to be fair, Randy, he couldn’t drive in the US either.” Rooted in the swing principles of Count Basie, Ferguson later flirted with pseudo-Stravinskian “progressive” harmonies and, eventually, glitter-ball disco beats—a fertile boot camp for Militello and Jones before Brubeck came calling.
As Brighton heaves into view, Russell Gloyd phones ahead to make sure everything is prepared at the venue, and Dave’s alert eyes suddenly look heavy—time for a restorative nap. The bus skirts around Brighton Palace Pier and docks outside another Victorian building of note: the Grand Brighton hotel, where Team Brubeck will be spending the night. Barely an hour later the Dave Brubeck Quartet is onstage at the Brighton Dome for a sound check. Ordinarily sound checks function as the word would imply: an opportunity to ascertain whether a venue’s PA system is relaying a faithful balance of an ensemble’s dynamic levels and tonal colors to the audience. Gloyd sits behind his mixing desk and adjusts the levels, but Brubeck, having been cooped up in the bus, is itching to play, and the sound check evolves into a rehearsal and blowing session.
He begins by punching out “Limehouse Blues” with a ferocity that lets everybody know that he is already warmed up. A fan has written in asking to hear “For All We Know,” a jazz standard and a regular standby during the earliest days of the Dave Brubeck Quartet; its first appearance on a Brubeck album was in 1953 on Jazz at the College of the Pacific. Paul Desmond loved the tune as a vehicle for improvisation, but this quartet has played it only rarely, and they painstakingly loop its melodic and harmonic patterns, ensuring the nuts and bolts of the notes are sitting under their fingers so that they can properly play the music. Then something wholly unexpected happens. Militello segues into “Strange Meadow Lark,” the tune that separated “Blue Rondo à la Turk” and “Take Five” on Time Out. Inexplicably, this group has never played it, and Brubeck patiently shepherds his quartet around its harmonic trip wires. “I’ve been trying to get Dave to play that tune for years,” Militello reveals afterward, “and perhaps, finally, he’s taken the hint.”
A roadie arrives with another, hopefully more comfortable, piano stool, and as one stool is exchanged for the other, Militello launches into “Donna Lee,” Charlie Parker’s bebop paraphrase of the jazz standard “Indiana.” Militello’s fluid bop phrasing is pure Parker—but Brubeck, who in his enthusiasm to rise to his saxophonist’s challenge very nearly sends the roadie sprawling, causes a clash of styles by shadowing him with “Indiana” itself, his left hand outlining a rolling, barrelhouse eight-to-a-bar.
Following dinner at the hotel, Brubeck arrives back at the Brighton Dome at seven forty—twenty minutes before curtain up—to be greeted by a posse of fans waving secondhand LPs, concert programs, and CD sleeves. The stage door catapults open and a doorman, magnificent in his indignant fury, screams, “Give this man some space, let him take his coat off at least!” But Brubeck signs patiently, satisfying the demand for autographs, until Russell Gloyd gently apologizes to those destined to be left disappointed and ushers Dave inside. “In Europe guys—and it’s always guys—do queue for autographs,” Michael Moore explains to the doorman, “but in Britain they’ll arrive hours before and camp outside until Dave arrives. You just don’t see it the same way anywhere else.” The doorman, unimpressed, indicates that his Dave of choice is actually Beckham, not Brubeck. He’s going to be watching soccer on television tonight—“But I might pop upstairs when he plays a few of the old favorites.”
Otherwise, the audience waiting patiently in the elegant round of the Brighton Dome is giddy with anticipation. Gloyd is perched behind his mixing desk, and the sight of Iola Brubeck making her way into the auditorium signals that the main event is about to commence. When Brubeck arrives on stage from the wings, appearing with his characteristically deliberate gait behind Jones, Militello, and Moore, a roar of approval circles the round. Then Jones’s tintinnabulous cymbals unleash an ecstatic Latin sizzle. It’s showtime.
Another time, another continent, another road trip. The Dave Brubeck Quartet was touring the West Coast of the United States in a ten-date package with the Charlie Parker Quintet, under the auspices of jazz promoter Gene Norman* and his Just Jazz concert series. It was November 1953. Both bandleaders were thirty-two. That March, Brubeck had recorded live at the Finney Chapel at Oberlin College, Ohio, music that, when released as Jazz at Oberlin, represented his first career-defining album. In May, Parker had traveled to Toronto to perform with a bebop supergroup—Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Bud Powell (piano), Charles Mingus (bass), and Max Roach (drums)—at Massey Hall, a concert that assumed the mantle of a jazz must-listen when Mingus released a recording via his own Debut label. Parker was considered to be the very embodiment of New York bebop and modernism in jazz, the sped-up majesty of his improvisational brilliance and his lifestyle excesses helping build a mythomaniac image around him. Brubeck was, by comparison, a hick from the West Coast sticks playing an idea of jazz without any recognizable label, which, they said, was dragged down by concepts imported from the classical conservatoire. Within two years Parker would be dead, but in 1953 he was playing an extended lap of honor—Brubeck, though, still had it all to prove.
The program book issued by Gene Norman’s organization to accompany the tour made no bones about the relative status of the two musicians. Parker was the “undisputed lord and master of the Modern Sounds… the great originator that has set the pattern for all others to follow,” while Brubeck was “the newest meteor to streak across the jazz horizon… represent[ing] in a great measure the developing maturity of the Modern Sounds.” Norman’s copywriter—or Norman himself—highlighted the stark cultural divide between how Parker and Brubeck had developed their music: “Falling in league with a group of restless and inquisitive musicians who were looking for something fresh and new to say in jazz—musicians like the legendary Theolonious [sic] Monk and Dizzy Gillespie—Parker spearheaded a series of revolutionary innovations.” There are those, the notes accepted, who would likely resist progressive tendencies in jazz, but Parker’s deployment of the “flattened fifth and other more advanced harmonic patterns and the use of the poly-rhythmic beat” had elevated him to the new jazz’s “true Messiah.”
Brubeck hadn’t fallen in league with anybody—he was Ivy League. The notes told of “a young composer with an impressive academic background; he has studied personally both with Darius Milhaud and Arnold Schoenberg. Combine a trained musical mind steeped in the approach of extended serious composition with a natural knack for jazz improvisation, and you have a remarkably fresh and valid result—you have the unique and exciting music of Dave Brubeck.” We read how his initial musical experiments were undertaken with an octet and then a trio—but “feeling the need [for] a singing voice with[in] the group, Paul Desmond was added on alto. Paul himself has developed into one of the leading lights of the alto saxophone, following in the soft-spoken, ethereal tradition of Lee Konitz.* The Brubeck Quartet features Ron Crotty on bass and Lloyd Davis on drums.” Parker performed the tour with a pickup group of the finest musicians West Coast jazz had to offer. Trumpeter Chet Baker and drummer Shelly Manne were well established in their own right and on the cusp of making their debuts on record as leaders; bassist Carson Smith was identified as a member of baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan’s* quartet, while pianist Jimmy Rowles had played with clarinetist Woody Herman’s orchestra.
There was nothing unusual about a star soloist touring with local musicians, and Brubeck of course had the geographic advantage of the West Coast being his home turf, but the symbolism of Brubeck’s meticulously rehearsed quartet sharing a bill with Parker’s pickup band belied the chaos that had become the bebop star’s everyday reality. And, despite Gene Norman’s careful billing, not everybody understood the boundaries between the two groups. “Featured in Brubeck’s band are Paul Desmond, alto sax player who was named the ‘best newcomer to jazz’ by DownBeat magazine, and Charlie Parker, who is one of the instigators of bop. The entire band has been on tour of the major clubs and night spots of the country,” reported the University of Oregon’s Daily Emerald with chirpy confidence on October 30, 1953; when the paper followed up on their promotional article a few weeks later, Parker was still “Brubeck’s alto saxophone player” and Shelly Manne—“formerly with Stan Kenton and Woody Herman… and one of the top drummers in the field of jazz today”—was also tagged erroneously as a Brubeck Quartet member. The assumption that Parker was a Brubeck sideman might raise a laugh if it weren’t for the nagging suspicion that this category error might be down to unthinking prejudice. But Parker was the omnipotent presence in modern jazz, and nobody’s sideman.
By November 5, 1953, the Brubeck and Parker groups had reached Eugene, Oregon. Chet Baker sat in with Brubeck for a dulcet reading of “Lover, Come Back to Me,” and Parker’s quintet delivered high-velocity bop evergreens, including “How High the Moon,” the bebop movement’s unofficial theme song.* Captured from the wings of the stage, in Eugene or another town, a vivid action shot shows Parker’s hunched frame squashed inside an immaculate white suit; Carson Smith is hugging his bass while Shelly Manne is holding his mouth wide open in amazement, perhaps at Parker’s outrageously pacey tempo or some miraculous thing dancing out of his horn. Paul Desmond had cultivated an interest in capturing everyday life on the road with his camera, and watching Parker would have given him the perfect opportunity to photograph the preeminent influence on his own instrument—could he have taken this uncredited image? The other photograph, annotated in Brubeck’s own handwriting on the reverse side of the print, shows Ron Crotty and Shelly Manne standing by the tour bus. Bizarrely, nobody thought to take a picture of Brubeck with Bird, and no firm evidence exists to suggest that the pair played together—we can’t know whether, had Parker called “Donna Lee,” Brubeck’s instinct would have been to slip “Indiana” underneath him.
One piece of evidence, though, does point to this tour being a happy one, despite Parker’s habit of disappearing into the night until just before he was due to play. When he played a weeklong residency at the Hi-Hat Club in Boston in January 1954, the city’s local radio station, WHDH, broadcast an interview with Parker structured around his own key recordings, about which his comments were sought—in conversation with Desmond. Given that the two men were recently on the road together, the obvious warmth and ease of their personal relationship is touching. Parker never pulls rank on Desmond, who, although palpably starstruck, is not afraid to aim some searching questions at Parker about the nature of his art. (“That is very reassuring to hear,” he says as Parker details the history of his exacting practice regime, “because somehow I got the idea that you were just born with that technique and never had to worry too much about it, about keeping it working.”)
As they discuss his innovations and career, Parker tells of the pleasure he takes in discovering younger musicians. “I enjoy working with them when I have the pleasure to [and] if I might say you, yourself, Paul.” Desmond swells with pride and thanks him for the tribute, and then Parker continues, “I’ve had lots of fun working you, that’s a pleasure in a million. David, Dave Brubeck, David Brubeck—lots of other fellows have come along since that particular era [1942, when Parker and Gillespie recorded “Groovin’ High,” the record under discussion]. It makes you feel that everything you do wasn’t for naught.”
With the conversation turning toward his own future, Parker tells Desmond about meeting the composer Edgard Varèse* in New York City: “He’s a classical composer from Europe, he’s a Frenchman, very nice fellow, and he wants to teach me.” And far from dismissing the Brubeck Quartet on the grounds that they were failing to conform to bebop orthodoxies, therein, you feel, lay the attraction for Parker. The cult of Parker was such that he was surrounded by paler imitations of his own innovations, and Desmond embodied an all-too-rare example of a saxophonist prepared to chance a whole other sound and method of improvisation. Inside Brubeck’s compositional approach to jazz, had Parker heard traces of those modern composers he admired—Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, Bartók, all of whom had inspired Varèse—and recognized a hinterland between composition and improvisation that he, too, wanted to explore and inhabit? During an earlier interview on WHDH, recorded in June 1953,* Parker was asked about Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan, and he said he found plenty to satisfy head and heart in what he had heard: “Well, the two men you mentioned [are] extremely good friends of mine, [but] even if they weren’t friends of mine I’d find their music very, very interesting, not only from an intellectual standpoint—it’s very intelligent music, and it’s very well played, it’s got a lot of feeling and it isn’t missing anything. It’s definitely music, one hundred percent.”
The music Parker and Brubeck played on tour may largely be lost today, but the ghosts of those evenings on the road can be resurrected, together with an image of what those West Coast audiences likely heard, by investigating the records that they made immediately before and, in Brubeck’s case, after the tour. “No modern musician has ever had more things of special interest to say than Dave Brubeck. He’s here to say them tonight!” Gene Norman’s program notes gushed—and, as Brubeck said them, no one could doubt how far his vision of jazz stood from the emotional temperament and technical conventions of bebop.
When Mingus decided to issue Jazz at Massey Hall on his Debut label, two practical problems needed to be addressed: his own bass lines were inaudible in the mix, and Charlie Parker was already signed to jazz impresario Norman Granz’s Verve Records but Mingus was not minded to pay Granz a fee to borrow Parker. The first difficulty was overcome by Mingus’s overdubbing a fresh set of bass lines, together with a completely new solo on “All the Things You Are,” and the second by listing Parker on the record sleeve as “Charlie Chan”; “Chan” was Parker’s wife’s name, although you didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out the true identity of “Charlie Chan.” This one-off meeting of five bebop pioneers marked the last time that Parker and Gillespie were captured together on record, and the billing Mingus gave his record—“the Quintet”—reflected its historical consequence. This was a summit meeting; there was no—could be no—leader.
As the group stampeded through “Wee,” “Salt Peanuts,” “Hot House,” and “A Night in Tunisia” (and the standards “Perdido” and “All the Things You Are”), their rhythmic Russian roulette cracked the foundations open again—this was restless, open-ended music. The urgent dispatch of the melody line and the rhythmic abandon of Parker’s improvised solo on “Wee” looked forward to how Ornette Coleman’s elasticity of rhythm would give the structure of a piece infinite stretch. Parker wholly inhabited the idiom of the music, his concrete certainty about what bebop was unearthing new freedoms. Had Parker played with anything like that degree of raw energy during the Gene Norman tour, Brubeck and Desmond could only have looked on from the wings in slack-jawed wonder.
The year 1953 also happened to be a vintage year for the Dave Brubeck Quartet on record. It began with Jazz at Oberlin in March and ended, a month after the Parker tour, with another live on-campus recording, issued as Jazz at the College of the Pacific. The lesser-known Dave Brubeck & Paul Desmond at Wilshire-Ebell,* which Brubeck considered below par and which he actively blocked from being reissued during his lifetime, was recorded in July ’53; and Jazz at the Black Hawk pulled together eight tracks captured during various West Coast engagements during 1952 and ’53. By anybody’s reckoning this was a prolific outpouring of material. Jazz at Oberlin’s “Perdido” and “How High the Moon” dealt in off-the-leash swing; “Stardust” and, from Jazz at the College of the Pacific, “For All We Know” presented early examples of the group’s idyllic approach to balladry; while “Let’s Fall in Love” and “All the Things You Are” from At Wilshire-Ebell rained down dazzling, luminous counterpoint. In contrast to Charlie Parker in 1953, the Brubeck Quartet in the same year feels like an exploratory work in progress, with multiple avenues of investigation opening up, waiting to be pursued. What the music could become is as intriguing as what it already is.
Anybody arriving at these early records with the dapper vamps and smart metric chess moves of Time Out as their only point of reference might recognize a distant cousin of something familiar. Brubeck and Desmond’s telepathic understanding; Brubeck’s knack of scooping up an ostensibly innocent turn of phrase from the closing moments of a Desmond solo to re-present it as a loaded question; and the sense that, together, the two men made a sum greater and deeper than their individual parts—all were already fully formed.
But at this stage the Dave Brubeck Quartet was, in reality, Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond supported and accompanied by a bassist and a drummer—only rarely did the dialogue cut four ways. The vanguard of modern jazz drumming reverberated somewhere between the hands, sticks, and feet of Max Roach, whose lashing impetus and nests of cross-rhythms powered the Massey Hall concert forward. Lloyd Davis was, in comparison, a capable enough practitioner, but his playing showed only a negligible awareness of Roach’s state-of-the-art percussion theories. On Jazz at Oberlin and At Wilshire-Ebell, he proved most effective on the up-tempo numbers, where he bedded down inside the groove and faithfully maintained time, but ballads exposed his imaginative and technical limitations. Both albums feature “Stardust,” and on each occasion Davis’s tickling pulse lets the side down. And with Brubeck’s solo gathering momentum on “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)” on Oberlin, Davis is perversely noninterventionist and aloof, doing little to help shape the music, preferring instead to stay resolutely out of harm’s way.
The evolution of thought that occurred within the Dave Brubeck Quartet between 1953 and 1959—the ideas that would lead Brubeck toward Time Out—involved a reevaluation of how bass and drums might contribute something more meaningful than just the outline of a song’s harmonic and rhythmic grid. Ron Crotty, on bass, retained his place in the quartet while, immediately after the Parker tour, Davis bowed to the inevitable. When the quartet reconvened on December 14 to record Jazz at the College of the Pacific a new drummer was in place, and Joe Dodge’s rhythmic assertiveness raised the tone of the percussion discussion. But, as he confessed during a 1992 interview, his technique would have struggled to keep account of Brubeck’s increasing predilection for “odd,” asymmetrical time signatures.* And if even Dodge balked at the prospect of navigating his way around those odd time signatures, the sort of composer that Brubeck would become—basing compositions like “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” “Three to Get Ready,” and “Unsquare Dance” around asymmetrical meter—could never have been served by the cautious, plodding Lloyd Davis.
Missing conspicuously from Brubeck Quartet albums of the early 1950s was the leader’s contributions as composer. “How High the Moon,” “Crazy Rhythm,” and “All the Things You Are” were, as it happened, also staples of the bebop repertoire. Benny Goodman’s “Lullaby in Rhythm,” Jerome Kern’s “Why Do I Love You?,” and Harold Arlen’s “Let’s Fall in Love” were more personal enthusiasms. His early-1950s set lists were drawn overwhelmingly from Tin Pan Alley standards, the go-to source for most jazz musicians. But the group’s musical evolution would prove inseparable from changing ideas about repertoire.
At the end of 1956, Dodge’s exit led Brubeck toward Joe Morello, the most gifted drummer Brubeck had hitherto engaged: an exemplary technician who also delivered style, imagination, and prodigious swing. In 1958, when Brubeck hired Eugene Wright, a bass player from Chicago who was proudly rooted in the swing traditions of Count Basie (in whose orchestra he had played for two years), the final ingredient that made the classic Dave Brubeck Quartet cook fell into place. Brubeck had acquired an intriguing blend of musical personalities and all the tools he could need to fully develop his quartet’s potential, and this fresh-look quartet would inch toward a new collective identity by uniting around the leader’s compositions.
But Brubeck’s knack of having that composerly part of his brain transform material co-opted from popular songs was already, in the early 1950s, drawing clear lines of differentiation between his jazz and Parker’s bebop.
By 1953, “Perdido” was woven into the fabric of popular music as a jazz standard. It was recorded for the first time by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra on December 3, 1941,* and written by his Puerto Rican–born trombonist Juan Tizol, and the Duke clothed Tizol’s composition in the instrumental splendor of his orchestra so convincingly that many people assumed Ellington was the composer: “Perdido” became a piece of Ellingtonia by proxy. The seductive glide of the melody line allied to a Latin groove had obvious attractions for Ellington—and Parker and Brubeck obviously concurred. They both recorded the piece in 1953—Parker, masquerading as Charlie Chan, as a member of the Quintet on Jazz at Massey Hall, and Brubeck on Jazz at Oberlin—recordings that are musically poles apart.
The Quintet’s rethink, faithful to the principles of bebop, emphasized their prowess as superhero improvisers over the intricacies of Tizol’s composition. Max Roach basted the heat with a roasting Latin rhythm. Parker set the scene with a radiantly executed précis of Tizol’s theme; the rationale instead was to illuminate the melodic and harmonic tics of “Perdido” through improvisation. Parker, Gillespie, and then Bud Powell soloed before the performance climaxed with a more developed reading of Tizol’s composed line that incorporated aspects of the original Ellington orchestration.
Brubeck and Desmond, too, wanted to flex their improviser muscles, but sprinting through Tizol’s theme as a launchpad for improvisation was not Brubeck’s style. He needed to figure out how “Perdido” could be brought inside the sound world of his quartet, which meant imprinting Tizol’s melody line with his own compositional fingerprints. To that end, Brubeck turned the flow of strong and weak beats around—not only making the weak beats strong but accenting them with a ferocity that was pure Rite of Spring—which created a distorted mirror image. Those weak beats, now obliged to carry a heavier rhythmic load, kick-started the quartet’s version. Relief from the rhythmic tension came in the middle section of the tune, which restored the natural order of strong and weak beats with a straight-ahead swing feel. But whenever the opening strain of Tizol’s theme returned, so did Brubeck’s rhythmic hiccups: “In my version,” his arrangement told listeners, “the division between composition and improvisation is finely balanced; both elements are simultaneously in play.” Brubeck was discovering that manipulating time and meter could open up line, form, and rhythm in a multitude of unexpected ways.
Following their improvised solos, rather than head back to the “Perdido” theme directly or via the same linking passage commandeered by Parker and Gillespie, Brubeck and Desmond dealt a quartet calling card: piano and alto saxophone improvised spontaneously overlapping lines, the contrapuntal principles of J. S. Bach made an ongoing concern in modern jazz. Elsewhere on the album, Brubeck’s ingenious arrangement of Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight”—from the 1936 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Swing Time—wrapped the principle theme around its own linking bridge. Brubeck and Desmond played these contrapuntal lines with liquid speed, making Kern’s tune dance once again.
As early as February 1950, in an article entitled “Jazz’s Evolvement as an Art Form,” published over two editions of DownBeat magazine under the byline “David Brubeck,” Brubeck talked up the allure of jazz’s emotional heat as being inseparable from improvisation. “I will not go as far as to say that jazz ceases to be jazz once it is written,” he argued. “But I do say that improvisation is the criterion by which all jazz, written or unwritten, is judged.” Brubeck opened part two of his article by equating the process of improvisation to a mountain climber treading with care to avoid the plunging rock face below: “He is protected on one side by the mountain of tradition and exposed on the other to the abyss of the unknown. Progress is possible only by the use of a strong rope which anchors the climber to the mountain, while at the same time it gives him a greater freedom of movement than if he had no security.”
This smart analogy was, unfortunately for Brubeck, undermined by what the magazine published directly opposite the first installment of his article: a dismissive review of a recent Brubeck appearance at the Burma Lounge jazz club in Oakland. “Dave’s bunch, extremely competent musicians,” wrote the uncredited reviewer, “play a type of thing which must be heard rather than seen, to be appreciated. They are extremely popular right now with the crewcut set from California, who can get down there for 11 cents on the bus. The group does not swing and is, frankly, entirely too earnest for these ears, but a difference of opinion is what makes horse races and jazz scraps. To those who like him, Brubeck is God and [club promoter Jimmy] Lyons* is his prophet.”
As his philosophy of what he wanted jazz to be glanced across the page at words that expressed another view altogether, Brubeck received an early taste of the phraseology, and the general puzzlement, of the many critical lashings he would endure over the next thirty years. Brubeck was introduced to DownBeat readers as “a twenty-nine-year-old Californian [who] has been causing considerable comment in recent months for his efforts in behalf of modern music,” but you can’t help wonder how many readers were troubled by one perplexing inconsistency in his article.
His claim that jazz had emulated European harmony to the extent that it had “unfortunately lost a great deal of the rhythmic drive which African music offers” ignored the reality that Mother Africa was embedded deep inside bebop, in both the notes themselves and as a point of proud cultural reference. The multilayered rhythmic finery of hard-core bop drummers like Max Roach and Kenny Clarke had left far behind the European marching band tradition in which drummers of the previous generation, typified by Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, had been versed. In 1947, Gillespie had met the Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo, who revolutionized the trumpeter’s thinking about rhythm and introduced him to a string of new kinks in the beat. Gillespie’s 1942 composition “A Night in Tunisia” demonstrated that his ears were open already to Africa, but his creative partnership with Pozo—which blossomed before the percussionist was murdered in New York City at the end of 1948—pushed his interest to the next level. Together they wrote pieces like “Tin Tin Deo” and “Manteca,” and the term Afro-Cuban jazz was born.
Brubeck’s oversight was unfortunate and might well have landed him in hot water had the rest of his article not been so diligently argued. Any white musician taking the wider jazz community to task for neglecting Africa, while overhauling standards with rhythmic sleights of hand developed out of his interest in Milhaud and Stravinsky, was opening himself up to accusations of racial insensitivity. In his DownBeat article, Brubeck wrote, “The jammed-to-the-exploding-point thirty-two-bar chorus,” a typical jazz form, needed to expand and become structurally more pliant—which, he added, would be done “naturally and logically by the composers of the future.”
But, just as fears were raised that Brubeck was stumbling into that unpardonable sin of cultural misappropriation by implying that only classically trained composers were equipped to develop jazz, a stunning and unexpected twist: “Since jazz is not provincial, regional, nor chauvinistic, but as much an expression of our people as our language, it is the natural idiom for the American composer,” he stated. “I firmly believe that the composer who will most successfully typify America will have been born into jazz, will have absorbed it in his early years unconsciously, and will probably be an active participant in shaping its future course.” For Brubeck, jazz had rendered contemporary definitions of the word composer useless. If musicians trained in the techniques of jazz and classical music were prepared to step into each other’s worlds—if symphony orchestra musicians would equip themselves to feel the rhythms and phrasing of jazz, and jazz musicians could learn to read complex musical notation—only then might an authentic “new” American music emerge.
Being a twenty-nine-year-old Californian, the jazz hub of New York City, the milieu of East Coast bebop, and developments like Afro-Cuban jazz were not part of Brubeck’s daily experience. But he had been imbibing African music through other sources. Issued on the Commodore label in 1950, The Belgian Congo Records of the Denis-Roosevelt Expedition* anthologized field recordings collected between 1934 and ’35 in the Belgian Congo by the documentary makers (and husband-and-wife team) Armand Denis and Leila Roosevelt. The forty-minute album was a collection of ritualistic dances, songs, and chants, precisely the sort of record to which the innately musically curious, and especially a young musician with an appetite for off-kilter rhythms, was liable to be drawn.
Brubeck listened avidly. One of the pieces, “Royal Watusi Drums,” threw up a ribbon of melody that later he would fashion into a drum feature for Joe Morello, which, given the title “Watusi Drums,”* would act as a climactic concert set piece before “Take Five” had been recorded. And as he listened, Brubeck experienced a whole new way of calculating rhythm: he was hearing rhythmic motifs building into larger structures by spontaneously dividing, multiplying, and combining like blood cells on the move, creating rhythmic twists and eddies through the process of performance.* Strong beats collided with weak beats, and they overlapped in ways not likely to add up to neatly countable patterns of four or two. In DownBeat, had Brubeck managed to link this discovery back to the innovations of bebop drumming, his argument would have undoubtedly been strengthened. But the basic point stood—as jazz musicians were stretching the harmonic and melodic basis of their music, could there be more to rhythm than 4/4 time?
When he told DownBeat readers that “since the jazzman plays the double role of creator and interpreter, there is no disparity between conception and performance,” he was speaking of his belief in treating improvisation and composition with the same seriousness of purpose, one bleeding through into the other. “Within one generation,” he concluded, “the jazzman’s harmonic comprehension has expanded to the point where he is now capable of understanding the choice that is offered to the serious composer. Two great musical minds of the century, Milhaud and Schoenberg, have already blazed separate paths. True to his tradition, the jazz musician has attempted to follow these new trials and is at this moment exploring in his improvised choruses the realms of polytonality and atonality at least to the limits of his understanding.”
Jazz at Oberlin offered the tastiest demonstration yet of how these theories sounded when put into practice. The first piece on the record was an action-packed six-and-a-half-minute excursion around “These Foolish Things” that, with unmistakable clarity, laid out how the dialogue between composition and improvisation operated on Brubeck’s senses. Following on the heels of such a devastatingly astute solo as Desmond’s, which ended with torrents of notes double-timing the pulse, presented Brubeck with a challenge. Now was not the time for routine patterns, and Brubeck painted the canvas with a giddy assortment of impetuous mood swings, pianistic colors and styles. Multiple key centers built grinding tension. Brubeck’s left hand challenged his right with a niggling harmonic question that bubbled over into an eloquent two-part discussion. Densely compacted brutalist chords, pecked at with stabbing clusters, were answered in the next chorus by cascading, Romantic arpeggios. Brubeck’s lessons from Milhaud and Schoenberg spilled over into the improvisation.
Elsewhere the striking dynamism of the harmony prevented the arranged elements of “Perdido” or “The Way You Look Tonight” from feeling overly schooled; written ideas vaulted off the manuscript paper with a freshness that was entirely authentic to the spirit of jazz, and those fortunate enough to experience the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the road with the Charlie Parker Quintet in November 1953 heard two musicians passionately engaged in improvisation but otherwise taking a radically different perspective on jazz. Multiple meanings of compose were at play in Brubeck’s music. Composed music had altered his perspective on the art of improvisation. His “These Foolish Things” solo at Oberlin was composed of a multitude of materials and approaches, elegant melodic shapes wrenched apart by the joyous physicality of bulky block chords, unpredictable in their direction and defining possible points of resolution. Teasing incompatibility, the prospect that not all loose ends in a solo would, or could, be resolved, would prove a source of endless fascination for Brubeck.
But improvisation for Parker was intimately tied to the raw physics and Romantic heritage of his horn: he heard—and experienced to the point of self-destruction—the world through his alto saxophone. He had been alerted to the potency of the saxophone during a well-spent misspent youth in Kansas City, a place that, unlike Brubeck’s Californian hometown of Concord, where surely everyone went to bed on time, had a thriving and distinctive jazz scene all of its own. When the Count Basie Orchestra was in residency at Club Kaycee, an underage Parker would sneak into the balcony above the bandstand to hear his favorite musicians; and it was Lester Young,* Basie’s tenor saxophonist, who captured the young boy’s imagination.*
And everything Parker intuited from Young about freeing up rhythm and harmony instilled within him a sense of purpose. As Parker unpicked complex relationships between chords, creative possibilities accumulated exponentially. He channeled what he had learned back through his instrument, and the more he played and improvised and scrutinized the patterns of his own playing, the more liberated his ears, technique, and imagination became, as his solos darted forward with the force of an arrowhead.
Brubeck’s compositional approach to improvisation—and his interest in making distinct types of material coexist, or contradict each other—counted against that inexorable forward motion at which Parker excelled. Where Parker’s close, idiomatic bond with his instrument had helped form his view of bebop, Brubeck reversed that loop. His absorption in composition, the various ways in which composed music intersected with his unassailable belief in the urgency of improvisation, formed his approach to the piano—and the instrument became a laboratory in sound for this composer who improvised and improviser who composed.