Chapter Three
IDEAS OF ORDER
“In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”
WALLACE STEVENS, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” 1934
“Iola! What was the name of that guy who promoted the octet, who wanted us to use my name?” The bus’s rapid approach toward the London suburbs is gathering speed, with only an hour to go before the Brubecks are dropped back at their flat in Maida Vale, West London, home from home for the duration of the quartet’s tour. Dave is trying to remember Ray Gorum’s name, but he looks around to find his wife asleep. He shrugs. “I’ll ask her when she wakes up; Iola’s much better with names than me.
But the other guy who became important around this time, changed everything in fact, was Jimmy Lyons. I think Paul [Desmond] met him first and somehow we persuaded him to act as a kind of master of ceremonies [for the Marines’ Memorial concert], which was a good idea because at the time Jimmy had his own radio show, very popular, and he helped bring people in. Jimmy himself was very taken with what he heard, probably preferring the jazz to the classical, but he understood, I think, what we were about as a group, and he began talking to people he knew at NBC. He talked about us as both a jazz and a classical group, and the people at NBC were so taken with that idea that we landed ourselves an audition. Jimmy narrated “How High the Moon,” and we also recorded my “Playland-at-the-Beach.” They liked it but couldn’t see how they could afford to pay eight musicians to play a radio show. They thought about it for a while, then asked if I could do something with a trio, which they could pay for. So I used Ron Crotty and Cal [Tjader] from the octet and we played on Jimmy’s show a few times, weekly at one stage. But always my hope was, the trio goes down well, NBC might use the octet.
Although Lyons’s intervention with NBC did not work out as planned, his proselytizing on behalf of the octet did produce some unexpected windfalls, including a plum gig opening for an acknowledged jazz master. In his 1980 essay for the Book of the Month Club, Brubeck shared fond memories of opening a concert for the Woody Herman Orchestra at the San Francisco Opera House in 1950 and being warmly applauded by Herman’s musicians as they walked off stage; “Coincidentally, just in the past year,” he wrote, “the Dave Brubeck Quartet has played three concerts followed by Woody’s youthful band; and each time my mind has raced back to that concert 30 years ago when everything seemed to ride on our acceptance.” (Lyons would also, five or six years later, save Brubeck’s life. The Brubecks were visiting undeveloped land near the Lyons home, on a mountaintop above Big Sur, near Monterey, when Brubeck sat down, very narrowly avoiding a rattlesnake. Lyons ordered him to freeze. Chris Brubeck finishes the story: “Jimmy said in a very serious tone, ‘Dave, I am about to tell you something, and it is extremely important that you do not move at all. Try to stay calm, but there is a rattlesnake right behind you. Don’t move, but when I tell you to jump off that ledge, make one quick move and jump. Do you understand?’ Then we waited a little and Jimmy shouted, ‘JUMP!’ My dad went flying off that ledge down the hill slope like he had been shot out of a cannon. The snake did strike at my dad’s back, but he was already six feet down the hill, flying through the air.”*)
But that eagerly hoped-for call requesting the octet never came, and received wisdom has supposed that the octet’s 1950 recording session was also their final hurrah—that shortly afterward the group folded without fanfare as economic realities finally overcame youthful idealism. But Brubeck’s papers reveal that his commitment to making the octet viable stretched far into 1953—after the Dave Brubeck Quartet had recorded Jazz at Oberlin and only a year before he signed with Columbia Records.
During the summer of 1953, Larry Bennett at the Associated Booking Corporation wrote a detailed response to Brubeck’s inquiries about a potential octet tour.* Associated Booking Corporation—ABC—was Chicago-born Joe Glaser’s artist management agency, with which Brubeck had signed at the end of 1950. Glaser would represent Brubeck throughout the years of the classic Dave Brubeck Quartet, their association ending only with Glaser’s death in 1969. The correspondence between Brubeck and Glaser—and Glaser’s assistant managers, Larry Bennett and Bert Block—gives compelling, in-depth insights into Brubeck’s world. Glaser, you suspect, had zero interest in polytonality and polyrhythm. The clean-cut Brubeck and his business-minded manager—whose alleged links with the mob reached as far as Jack Ruby, who, in 1963, was charged with the murder of John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald*—made an odd couple. Their written exchanges were generally warm and affable, with intermittent grumbles of mutual irritation. Unforeseen humor rippled to the surface, too, as when, in response to Brubeck’s admiring his Cadillac, Glaser dropped a line into a letter that is pure Tony Soprano: “If you ever want me to get you immediate delivery on a Cadillac, it will be a pleasure to do so or to do anything I can for you at any time.”
Although the balance of power switched noticeably when Brubeck’s unswayable popularity eventually gave him license to call the shots, Glaser was the dominant partner during the 1950s and early 1960s. He viewed the Dave Brubeck Quartet as an investment he needed to protect, and curbing its leader’s more quixotic enthusiasms was a key concern. In his letter, Larry Bennett—presumably acting on Glaser’s instructions—stomped on the madness of thinking that the octet had any commercial promise. After opening with some good news about quartet bookings, Bennett raised the subject of the octet gently. “I am happy indeed to hear about the great success the Octet is having at the Sunday afternoon sessions,” he said, before humoring Brubeck. “I feel, Dave, you will be able to perform at colleges and concert halls with the Octet after you have firmly established yourself as a top name in the small band field. I think you need one more tour through the East with your quartet to achieve the stature in your particular field so you might return next time on a tour with the Octet.” Bennett concludes with a reminder that “the remmerative [sic] aspect must be of prime consideration because of the costs involved in transporting and paying salaries to seven top-flight musicians besides yourself.” His letter concludes with the customary “kindest regards to Oli and yourself.”*
It comes as no surprise to learn that ABC was agnostic about the money-guzzling octet, but that the group was still playing in 1953 comes as an unexpected bolt from the archives. As preparations were underway to tour with Charlie Parker and Brubeck was leading his quartet toward Jazz at the College of the Pacific, the octet was an ongoing project, with regular Sunday afternoon sessions hosted by the Black Hawk Club in San Francisco. A program booklet has survived from December 19, 1953—only five days after Jazz at the College of the Pacific—that announces, “The Dave Brubeck Octet in a benefit performance for the Emerson School Music Program. Berkeley Little Theatre. Saturday, December 19th—2.30pm.” The lineup, we’re told, “includes Dave van Kriedt, William Smith, Jack Weeks and Dick Collins, in addition to the personnel of the Quartet. Occasionally Bob Collins, brother of Dick, comes in to play trombone.” This booklet was likely standard issue across all octet concerts, with built-in generalities to account for the last-minute substitutions of players. There is no mention of Cal Tjader, who, by 1953, was enjoying successes of his own; and if this latter-day octet was essentially the Dave Brubeck Quartet (Ron Crotty, bass, and Joe Dodge, drums) with added horns, then Jack Weeks would often have found himself surplus to requirements.
The booklet also posed a crucial question. What sort of jazz would an audience member attending an octet concert expect to hear? Their style, the notes reported, had been “variously described as ‘postbop,’ ‘cool jazz’ and ‘cerebral swing,’” before Paul Desmond was called upon to provide some clarity: “At its best [the octet contains] the vigor and force of simple jazz, the harmonic complexities of Bartók and Milhaud, the form (and much of the dignity) of Bach, and at times, the lyrical romanticism of Rachmaninoff.” Desmond’s neat analysis chimed with claims elsewhere in the booklet that the octet was “probably the most serious minded group of jazz musicians on record. But jazz is a classification they protest, since their purpose is ‘to create music, not categorize it.’” Four years later, in DownBeat magazine, Brubeck set the terms of a debate about the octet’s place in the wider context of jazz history that never fully went away.*
Quizzed by the writer Ralph J. Gleason* about the Miles Davis Nonet—which recorded for the first time in January 1949 and whose collected output, released under the title The Birth of the Cool in 1957, was heralded as a radical post-bop reboot for jazz—Brubeck enthusiastically acknowledges it as “a great group. I liked it very much,” before adding the disclaimer: “I know that the octet predates that group, as far as a unit, but they recorded before us.”
The implication, in reviews and articles, that the octet had been Brubeck’s response to the influence of Davis’s nonet displeased him, and quite reasonably so. In 1946, the year the Eight had begun their experiments, Miles was still a Charlie Parker sideman, and there’s no shame in that at all—but the language and musical innovations of the Birth of the Cool sessions were a future concern. The historical lineage is, admittedly, complex. The octet made their first commercial recording in 1950, and therefore technically the Davis Nonet did record first. But Brubeck’s octet had that impressive library of student and audition recordings dating back to 1946, which, although never designed for public consumption, was eventually released in 1956. But even as late as 2000, this chronology was muddled. In The Essential Jazz Records: Modernism to Postmodernism,* the British writer Eric Thacker damned the octet with faint praise. The group was indeed deserving of wider recognition, he wrote, but only because of “their strange—perhaps uncanny—seismograph of tremors from the earliest Miles Davis Capitol nonet recordings”—a line that came loaded with misleading innuendo that the octet had borrowed liberally from the nonet.
Like the Brubeck Octet, the Davis Nonet started as a loose collective of personalities and eventually coalesced around a figurehead. In 1947, the apartment on West Fifty-Fifth Street, in midtown Manhattan, home of the pianist and arranger Gil Evans, was the place where New York’s more adventurous jazz musicians went after gigs to debate the future of music. Evans took his open-house policy to a charitable extreme by leaving his front door permanently unlocked, and he would routinely return home to find the likes of Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, John Carisi,* Lee Konitz, John Lewis,* and George Russell* shooting the breeze about music.
Evans was paying his way, just, as the arranger and music director for bandleader Claude Thornhill, whose orchestra was famed for its silky, pastoral tone colors. Although bebop was integral to the group—Thornhill’s orchestra recorded agile reimaginings of Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” and “Anthropology”—his own lingering composition “Snowfall” typified the new sensibility that his orchestra was nurturing. Adding French horns and tuba gave the Thornhill ensemble a spongier base than the traditional big band. The French horns placed a sonic buffer between brass and saxophones, replacing big-band muscle with more ductile timbres. And it was this aspect of the Thornhill Orchestra that Evans wanted to develop inside a small-group context—a plan that immediately captured Miles’s imagination.
The Brubeck Octet had binged on Milhaud, Bartók, and Stravinsky, while the Birth of the Cool band more obviously revisited the finespun instrumental shimmer of Debussy and Ravel. Evans’s writings for French horn—played variously by Junior Collins, Sandy Siegelstein, and Gunther Schuller—and tuba—played by Bill Barber—were the most obvious manifestations of his borrowings from classical orchestration, but he also understood a deeper truth. For Debussy timbre and harmony were not separate concerns. Extended harmonies could best be appreciated by listening to an ensemble that took time to resonate. French horn and tuba bolstered the front line of trumpet, trombone, and two saxophones, giving the Birth of the Cool band extra weight and resonant depth. Gerry Mulligan’s composition “Rocker”—a reconstituted “Sleigh Ride” that wove Leroy Anderson’s melody around itself—and Davis’s own “Boplicity” were typical of the rather delicious way the front line sashayed across the rhythm section, like a dainty elephant dancing on the head of a flower. But John Lewis’s arrangement of Bud Powell’s “Budo,”* decidedly hot, acted as a reminder that the Birth of the Cool band was never about repudiating bebop—group members were interested in repositioning the harmonic and rhythmic richness of bebop inside a music where formal arrangement and composition were given equal billing to improvisation.
“Post-bop,” too, was a curious descriptor for the Brubeck Octet. Van Kriedt aside, nobody in the octet had ever been committed to bebop; and no group, surely, can be “post” a genre that it had never played. The Davis Nonet versus Brubeck Octet debate was ultimately a phony war: a battle of words long after the event over an argument that was never fought between the musicians themselves. Both ensembles imported elements from European composition and the time-signature obstacle course of Gerry Mulligan’s Jeru—4/4 interspersed with runs of 2/4, 3/4, and 6/4—was octet meat and drink. Yet both groups had arrived at their discoveries independently. The Birth of the Cool band was entirely a product of New York bebop shaking hands with French new music, mediated through Claude Thornhill. A neatness to their articulation, and a drilled precision, derived from the expertise of musicians with extensive experience working in bebop small groups and big bands. Brubeck’s octet was, equally, a creature of the West Coast. In a pattern that would replay throughout his career, Brubeck felt it necessary to defend himself. Confusions over dates was understandable, if annoying, but Brubeck could never let the suggestion that he had taken directly from Miles, with the intention of creating a lighter spin-off, stand.
By the time of his September 1957 article for DownBeat, Ralph Gleason had already bumped heads with the Brubecks over the octet. In a letter to the magazine’s editor, Iola Brubeck complained, very much in sorrow and in anger, that Gleason had willfully played fast and loose with the facts, especially dates, in an earlier piece about the octet published on August 8 the previous year.* Another bone of contention was Gleason’s finger-wagging assertion that “critics who did not like [Brubeck] had only themselves to blame for not speaking out before he had arisen into prominence,” a blame game from which Gleason absolved himself by claiming that he had refused to endorse Brubeck. But Iola pointed to the liner notes Gleason had written for the Dave Brubeck Trio’s first record in 1949—and “everyone knows that writing album notes is tantamount to an endorsement,” she said, before aiming a kick directly at the critical solar plexus: “But then that was for a fee and perhaps integrity has a price to Mr. Gleason.” She signed off by observing that, in his review of the octet reissue, Gleason had claimed Bob Collins’s solo on “Body and Soul” was the outstanding performance—but that “particular tune did not appear on the record, but was mentioned by mistake on the jacket.” In 1961, when Brubeck appeared on Gleason’s Jazz Casual television series, neither man appeared especially comfortable in each other’s company—and now we can guess why.*
To those on the inside, the octet had long since outgrown its origins as a student workshop ensemble to become a noble cause, and one well worth fighting for. Van Kriedt’s letter to Brubeck, in which he identified an octet “nucleus,” was written only six weeks after Larry Bennett’s letter had attempted to cool Brubeck’s octet ambitions. In the context of the Bennett letter, Van Kriedt’s words could be interpreted as a request for a stay of execution—the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s remarkable success was likely to mean the end of the Dave Brubeck Octet, especially with dollar-hungry agents now in the loop.
“While you are in LA,” he wrote, “you are probably organizing views, and objectives, and are planning considerably so that your enthusiasm for [the future of the octet] is going to have a lot to do with the enthusiasm of the total group.… The more I have thought of this the more impressed I am and would like to do everything to make [the octet] a success.”* In other words, the quartet was likely to be eating so much of Brubeck’s time that the octet’s very survival depended now on the combined energy and input of everybody else involved.
Van Kriedt felt dangers lurking, he said, in the current jazz scene, to which the octet could provide a necessary antidote. “For the past 10 years ‘jazz’ has been going through a period of degeneration so that the young musicians of today lack directions and guidance,” he wrote.
Not only has it degenerated but it has also elapsed into a sort of passivity particularly caused by the overwhelming forces of our peculiar economic structure and because of the world shaking forces of conflict which effects people down to their very guts. The economic system in particular has caused people to develop a reliance on materialism which has achieved psycotic [sic] proportions. These are some of the major problems which hit at the core of jazz and which make it a vital force within the structure of this society. Each member of the octet (the nucleus) is aware and is deeply entwined in these problems and have their talents geared toward the serious attitude of trying to bring some resolution to this problem. The phenomenon of this group is indeed a miracle and even though its effects have been felt in a rather limited scope its potential staggers the imagination.
But the trail runs cold in Brubeck’s papers following the octet’s December 19, 1953, concert, which likely marked their final appearance. Van Kriedt pursued his belief in the progressive potential of jazz by joining Stan Kenton’s orchestra in 1955, and he played on Kenton’s classic Contemporary Concepts album. In 1985 he emigrated to Australia, taking the octet scores with him, and, much to Brubeck’s regret, they were damaged when his garage flooded. Following Van Kriedt’s death in 1994, Brubeck became embroiled in an argument with his estate over the octet library: “Even if it’s got ink all running, we could put it together,” he said in 2007. “But they won’t cooperate, the sons and relatives that could have done me a great favor and sent [the scores] back after Kriedt died. So we lost so many classical compositions and jazz compositions. If we hadn’t recorded, we’d have nothing.”* This unfortunate episode aside, Van Kriedt’s death brought an inevitable moment of reckoning for the surviving octet members. “It is so sad to lose David Van Kriedt,” Dick Collins wrote to Brubeck.* “Anyone who had anything to do with the Octet remains in the deepest part of my being. The late ’40s into the ’50s were one of the most exciting and beautiful times of my life. Kriedt and I (and sometimes Weeks) had fun in Paris.… I think we all heard death-bells when Dave [Van Kriedt] started sending photos, letters and tapes. I only regret the failure to see more of his music recorded or any of it published.”
As a metaphor for the octet’s improbable fortunes, the indignity of flood damage in a suburban Australian garage feels sadly apt: the octet had always been a commercial washout, and opportunities for the octet’s material to live, breathe, and develop during live performance were so rare that the group was never able to discover what might have been.
Synchronous thinking would, soon enough, lead to many octet techniques and sounds becoming fixtures within the lingua franca of modern jazz. The Modern Jazz Quartet was anchored around pianist John Lewis’s fascination with Bachian counterpoint, likewise Gerry Mulligan’s so-called pianoless quartet with Chet Baker. The emergence of a so-called third stream during the late 1950s—the term coined by Gunther Schuller to describe a synthesis of jazz and compositional techniques like polytonality and twelve-tone music—was documented on the Columbia Records releases Music for Brass (1957) and Modern Jazz Concert (1958), albums that showcased long-form compositions involving improvisation. John Lewis, J. J. Johnson, George Russell, Charles Mingus, and Jimmy Giuffre found themselves sharing the albums with the post-Schoenbergian purist twelve-tone composer Milton Babbitt and the more Stravinskian-minded Harold Shapero. The Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, then music director of the New York Philharmonic, shared the conducting duties with Schuller. But this trend arrived too late for the octet, whose experimental music had needed a sympathetic environment to grow, and that, in the San Francisco of the early 1950s, had proved impossible to find.
However, seeds were sown in the minds of Dave and Iola Brubeck that new audiences needed to be found—and that younger, more receptive minds, open to the idea of serious listening, could be found, perhaps, on university campuses. Inspired by the octet’s concerts at Mills College and College of the Pacific, and an appearance at the University of California, Berkeley, Iola decided to write to every university and college within drivable distance of San Francisco, offering the services of the quartet. She included a list of the quartet’s modest requirements and waited to see if anybody would bite. But in the meantime Brubeck’s own father, Pete, had inadvertently given the octet warning of the hard times ahead when, emerging from their College of the Pacific concert in 1949, he barked to a newspaper reporter, “That’s the damnedest bunch of noise I ever heard.”*
These days, 3255 Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland, California, tries hard not to draw any attention to itself. Blinds, lowered behind the window in the front door, block out the light, while a curtained hexagonal window set inside a spherical facade that encircles the front of the building guards against any opportunistic peeking. Lakeshore Avenue skirts Lake Merritt and today comes with all the expected trappings of gentrification; number 3255 sits adjacent to an artisan bakery.* But seventy years ago this part of town was considered undesirable and 3255 Lakeshore housed the Burma Lounge jazz club, where, beginning in December 1949, at “almost every midnight,” as the posters put it, the Dave Brubeck Trio played “sensational jazz concerts.”
A regular gig at last, and another reason to be grateful to Jimmy Lyons. “Things had been tough, really tough,” Brubeck recalls as the bus weaves through central London, with Maida Vale in the near distance.
There was no chance of work with the octet, but, especially with kids, you got to work. Then one day Jimmy called and told me about the Burma Lounge in Oakland, and that he could get me a job there with the trio. The money wasn’t great—they paid what they called “scale”—but it was steady work. We were originally booked for a couple of weeks, then they kept us on for six months. And because we were playing every night,* the trio began to cohere as a group. You play the same set of tunes night after night, that’s when they change and develop; you can’t play them the same way each time.
The Burma Lounge was a small, dark room. Clint Eastwood used to come down when he was underage and he said they never troubled him because he was tall and because it was so dark nobody could really see him. Some months later, Jimmy got us a job at the Black Hawk in San Francisco, and this felt like a step up. Jimmy’s radio show was popular with the navy, and some nights at the Burma Lounge I’d look into the audience and it was like On the Town—sailors everywhere. But the crowd in San Francisco was, I guess, more in tune with modern jazz than in Oakland. Dixieland was very popular there, Turk Murphy* and all those guys, but then guys like George Shearing had begun to open things up, and perhaps, without Shearing, those audiences would not have been so receptive to a small group led by a pianist playing modern jazz.
After the Burma Lounge, the Black Hawk felt at first like a vast concert hall, but actually, it wasn’t that big. It had been a local deli or neighborhood store, something like that, then they turned it into a club by making a small stage and putting chairs around. It had been a comedy club, but my trio played the first night the Black Hawk opened as a jazz club. The money was slightly better than at the Burma Lounge. We’d play a few months at a time, every night, then take some months off, and during that time I’d try to figure out some new music and how to develop the group.
As a jazz venue, the Burma Lounge is lost to history—no recordings made there have been officially released. But the Black Hawk, which closed in 1963, remains an indelible and vital part of modern jazz mystique, a name that, like the Village Vanguard in New York City, has attached itself to an imperial batch of classic live jazz on record: Thelonious Monk Quartet Plus Two at the Blackhawk, Shelly Manne’s At the Black Hawk (volumes 1 to 4), and the Miles Davis Quintet’s In Person Friday Night at the Blackhawk (and a Saturday night sequel).* The Brubeck Quartet album released in 1953 under the title Jazz at the Black Hawk (subsequently retitled Two Knights at the Black Hawk) only contained one track (“Jeepers Creepers”) actually recorded at the venue, but from Sunday afternoons with the octet to extended residencies with his trio and eventual appearances by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, the Black Hawk would be crucial to Brubeck’s career.
By May 1947 matters had become so desperate that the Brubecks—Iola heavily pregnant with Darius—had put out feelers about a possible move to Alaska. Writing on May 13 to Lloyd Herberlee,* the secretary of the local musicians’ union in Anchorage, Brubeck (who politely enclosed a self-addressed stamped envelope) inquired about “the prevailing wage scale for members of a small combo—piano, sax and bass, for example? What is the usual salary for a pianist, playing singles? Is there a demand for musicians in your area?” Brubeck ended his letter by asking about work opportunities in other areas of Alaska and how “musician’s wages compare with the present cost of living in Alaska”—more information than necessary for a casual working visit.
But biding his time in San Francisco, hoping for better times ahead, would ultimately pay off. Among the get-rich-slowly schemes Brubeck initiated in the meantime, before Jimmy Lyons’s phone call, was the sandwich delivery business he ran with David Van Kriedt. Brubeck’s interest in having Van Kriedt on board was purely pragmatic: the saxophonist’s brother owned a truck, meaning there was no need to pound that hot San Francisco pavement. “Unfortunately, though, Kriedt’s brother was a terrible driver,” Brubeck says. “He’d accidentally hit the accelerator, or mess up the gear change, and all the sandwiches and orange juice would spill out on the floor [and] we’d have to dust them off before we arrived at the next office building.” File under Steve Reich and Philip Glass’s furniture removal firm, which was how they made a living before minimalism became all the rage.
Abandoning San Francisco would also have meant leaving behind his colleagues from the octet: times were hard, but at least Brubeck was surrounded by pairs of sympathetic ears that understood his predicament. Bill Smith and his then wife shared living space with Dick Collins and his wife (the Smiths upstairs and the Collins on the bottom floor) in a building described by Brubeck in his notes as being “over a fish store and behind a Chinese laundry.”* For a while the Brubecks lived in an apartment downstairs from Denise McCluggage, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who would later find fame as the first successful woman race car driver, and Brubeck would regularly borrow her piano for practice sessions.*
And he had plenty to practice. For the only sustained period in his life, Brubeck was taking piano lessons to finesse his keyboard technique. His teacher was Fred Saatman, a local concert pianist with a repertoire rooted in Debussy, Ravel, and Isaac Albéniz. In the 1920s Saatman had lived in England, where he played “hot” music in Bert Ralton’s Savoy Havana Band. Brubeck studied with him from the end of 1947 to the beginning of 1949 and lessons were, it seems, often focused around Chopin. He considered this period of study to have been very beneficial, but, in 2000, Brubeck responded to a complaint from an LA-based correspondent that Saatman had been willfully airbrushed out of his biography. “Fred’s name was always mentioned [when I was first performing],” he wrote. “[But] as the bio grew and the audience reading it was no longer just the San Francisco Bay area, somehow it was dropped, not by any bad intention on my part, but probably because whoever it was at Columbia Records or Associated Booking writing my publicity blurbs simply didn’t know who Freddie was and omitted it. As the years went by, it didn’t seem to matter to anyone except perhaps Freddie or me.”* Brubeck explained that when his bassist Norman Bates joined the quartet, “he also studied piano with Fred. So the respect was great throughout the jazz community.”
Brubeck also explained that his decision to discontinue his piano lessons had coincided with Milhaud’s return to California, after his year in Paris: “[I] decided that I would concentrate on my piano playing rather than composition in Milhaud’s absence. When Milhaud returned to Mills the following academic year, I returned to lessons with him. The simple fact is that I could not afford both teachers.” Brubeck concedes that Saatman must have been hurt by his decision—why else would he have mentioned it to his correspondent? “Obviously, it bothered him.… I’m sorry for that.”
In January 1949, Milhaud invited the Brubecks for dinner to celebrate his return, and during the evening Brubeck asked him about private study. Milhaud purportedly offered to tutor him free of charge (“Just do not tell anyone”),* which does not square with Brubeck’s account of events in 2000, although we can’t know whether Brubeck took Milhaud up on his offer of pro bono lessons. Confined to a wheelchair due to incapacitating arthritis, Milhaud was also complaining of discomfort in his arms and, although only fifty-seven, told Brubeck that he felt ready to die. This was the only time he saw his mentor downhearted, Brubeck reported*—but Milhaud would, in fact, live until the age of eighty-two to enjoy every moment of his star pupil’s dizzying success. Brubeck peppered his notes about this period with other tantalizing snapshots.* We learn that, with Bill Smith and David Van Kriedt, he played an audition for the swing-era vibraphone veteran Red Norvo, who once recorded with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and had recently moved to the West Coast; and also that a friend with connections to Mills, identified as “Grutzie,” performed a piano piece of Brubeck’s for the modernist composer, conductor, and polemist Pierre Boulez (who had recently completed his landmark Piano Sonata no. 2) during a visit to Paris. Neither situation led anywhere, but finding Brubeck caught somewhere between swing and modern composition feels spot on—a portent of things to come.
When the Dave Brubeck Trio entered the Sound Recorders Studio in San Francisco later that year, one day in September, they seized the moment… or tried to. As the recording engineer struggled to set the speed of a previously untried brand of tape, most of their three-hour session was wasted, and the trio ended up recording four tracks during the remaining thirty minutes. Octet arrangements limited the scope for soloing, but now Brubeck properly stretched out, his polytonal thinking given extra edge thanks to Fred Saatman’s buffing up of his piano technique. In the evening the trio played either the Burma Lounge or the Black Hawk, and in the daytime they recorded over five sessions, producing a set of twenty-four standards that were refashioned and harmonically rerouted through Brubeck’s increasing mastery of polytonal harmony.
One night at the Burma Lounge, Cal Tjader transformed the trio into a quartet when, much to Brubeck’s surprise, he turned up with a vibraphone (later in his career Tjader was celebrated more as a vibraphonist than as a drummer). Brubeck quickly realized the musical potential of this new instrumental setup, figuring that if a piano-vibraphone front line could prove a hit for George Shearing’s quintet (in which Marjorie Hyams played vibraphone), then some of that stardust might rub off on his group. The trio’s second studio session, in March 1950, introduced a trademark piece of choreography: as the final flourish of a vibraphone solo rang in his ears, Tjader would jump to his drum kit and start playing time behind Brubeck—without ever missing a beat. In an early sign of Tjader’s burgeoning interest in Latin percussion, bongos and congas also became a constituent part of the Dave Brubeck Trio sound.
Shearing’s raffish quintet had leaned heavily on the phraseology and the repertoire of bebop—“bop relaxing in the lounge with an aperitif,” as the jazz writer Richard Cook memorably put it*—but Brubeck had no interest in stock bop phrases, and sometimes no one sounded more surprised at where his harmonic detours were leading him than Brubeck. The ghost of Art Tatum’s 1940s trio can be heard benevolently haunting those long, winding arranged lines around which some pieces are pinned. Brubeck and Tjader (on vibraphone) executed “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Undecided,” and “Too Marvelous for Words” in flawless unison, in a manner indebted to the quicksilver fingerwork of Tatum and his guitarist, Tiny Grimes—a fluidity of line that anticipated Brubeck with Desmond.
“Tea for Two,” “Body and Soul,” “Too Marvelous for Words,” “Avalon,” and “You Stepped out of a Dream” could have been Tatum’s set list, too, although Brubeck obstinately nudged these pieces into the future.* “Laura” was recalled from the octet book, and those same six thunderbolt clusters were incorporated into an expanded vision of his 1946 solo, complete with quarreling tonalities churning up unease. In the notes Brubeck wrote for a concert in San Jose that saw the trio opening for the octet, he revealed the complexities, emotional and musical, of his relationship with the tune: “I first heard ‘Laura’ overseas [in the army],” he wrote. “I liked the melody very much, but as we could not get copies of sheet music or records and the score never seemed to use the same chord progressions twice, I remembered the melody and the chords you hear… are an approximation of the original.”*
The three other pieces cut that same day, “Blue Moon,” “Tea for Two,” and “Indiana,” have nothing of the menace of “Laura” and bathe instead in pastoral warmth and an occasional wink of whimsy, although the relentlessly probing harmony counts against any too-easy sentiment. “Blue Moon” launches with Brubeck’s polytonal thrusts juddering against the rhythm section. A dramatic interjection from Tjader’s drums propels Brubeck into an eddy of swirling block chords as Ron Crotty’s bass holds the harmony firm underneath. The theme, when it reappears, makes landfall in a wholly unexpected key, leaving our sense of tonal perspective gleefully disoriented. “Indiana” begins with the aw-shucks daydream of a leisurely introductory piano soliloquy before Brubeck changes gear, accelerating toward a roaring improvisation in which urgently hammered repeated notes are hit against rapid-fire flurries. Brubeck’s arrangement of “Tea for Two” skillfully balances the lesser-known verse against the famous chorus, and his improvisation weaves together strains from both.
Brubeck was also furthering his ideas about time. Tjader’s accompanying “That Old Black Magic” and “Perfidia” on bongos and congas rotates strong and weak beats around the bar as if he was stirring together a whole pot of mambos and sambas, and Brubeck luxuriates in the rhythmic carpet being rolled out underneath him. These arrangements have a conceptual looseness that suggests they had at some point been worked out on the fly, while “Singin’ in the Rain,” “’S Wonderful,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Undecided,” and “I’ll Remember April” had clearly been figured out meticulously on manuscript paper. Newly written heads, extrapolated from the original melody lines, have the air of well-ordered chamber music. Brubeck creates the impression of different perspectives on a song that are occurring simultaneously as sped-up versions of lines are overlaid against slowed-down melodic loops.*
“I’ll Remember April” knits together two superimposed readings of the melody: Brubeck outlines a version at the actual tempo, while Tjader’s vibes double the note values. “Singin’ in the Rain” begins innocently enough at a bright tempo, the melody line splashed with an occasional polytonal chord. But then Brubeck and Crotty double the tempo, running the theme in counterpoint between them, with displaced accents wrenching the music out of 4/4 and into shell-shocked bars of 6/8. “Too Marvelous for Words” splutters into life inside a metric no-man’s-land; Brubeck and Tjader (on vibes) slither around beats, leaving Crotty’s bass to catch the “one” of the next bar like a conductor catching a ballet dancer midleap. The familiar melodic hooks of “Sweet Georgia Brown” are similarly chewed over, then pulled around the beat like strands of chewing gum.
Time was moving further out, and Brubeck’s polytonal alchemy had positioned him as a pianist with a unique approach and sound; meanwhile, an alto saxophonist named Paul Desmond was preparing himself to reenter the story. Brubeck’s trio records hint of this quartet future. The harmonic patterns behind his version of Rodgers and Hart’s “Spring Is Here” sound like a preparatory sketch for one of his most famous compositions, “The Duke,” while Brubeck’s trading lines with Tjader on the fugal finale to “How High the Moon,” based on the octet arrangement, is a direct antecedent of the quartet. Brubeck takes the title of “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” literally as his introduction bends and distends time, the beat a bullet dodged. After the systematic, compositional approach of “I’ll Remember April” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” Brubeck is playing with the fiber of sound itself.
And people were listening. In a letter dated November 15, 1950, Brubeck responded to an offer from Cliff Aronson, a West Coast representative of the New York–based Associated Booking Corporation, an offer that, after all the hardships of the previous two years, ought to have been irresistible. “I have just received the contract and your letter asking me to sign… for a period of three years,” he wrote. “I am flattered by your apparent faith in me, but I do not wish to make jazz my career unless I see the possibilities of becoming a top name in the country.… If the national future of the trio does not look promising, I intend to return to San Francisco, teach in some college and be a ‘local boy almost made good.’”*
Brubeck added that he understood the desirability of being represented by a booker who also handled Shearing, Norvo, Parker, Hampton, Armstrong, et al., but he hoped that the corporation wouldn’t be committed to “pushing those established groups first. I feel at present I am equipped with a library and the musicians to become a top name in American jazz with my octet and trio, if handled correctly.… I absolutely will not sign a three year contract with ABC, but I will sign for one year with the intention of renewing the contract after each year that has been satisfactory for both parties. I hope you can understand my position on this matter. Yours sincerely, Dave Brubeck.”
Given that Brubeck had few bargaining chips—a trio, a local success only, and an octet without any consistent track record of work—his reply to America’s leading talent agency demonstrated full-on confidence and self-certainty. He wanted success, but only on his own terms. Foraging an existence as a middle-ranking local player, making the round of the same old, same old gigs, held few attractions for him. It was time to make this thing work properly—or live some other life altogether.