Dave Brubeck - Erich von Abele (summer beach reads .TXT) 📗

he inserts here and there experienced by the listener as inspired sagacity incarnate in those bass strings. One wonders whether that bass paradigm and all its variations—in rhythm and notes—were scrupulously blueprinted by Brubeck himself, or whether some of them were contributed by Wright.

Back To Earth

With this last song on side B, it almost feels like the quartet is landing and touching ground again after all the flights of temporal fancy they’ve ventured to the airwaves since the scrumptiously bombastic takeoff of Countdown

beginning side A. As Brubeck himself in the liner notes notes: “It brings all of us back to the terra firma of simple swinging 4/4 blues.”

It’s illuminating to focus in on the initial instants of the song: a bass note on the piano, a fifth down from the tonic (I think): a sharp thwack of a snare rimshot: at the same point, the first note of a wide-ranging piano arpeggio leaping high on an arc and shimmering back down. This initial instant is followed by a premonition of the heart of the song, with Morello’s deft swish of the hi-hat, alternately open and snapped shut, in a standard 4/4 jazz rhythm—not a straight 4/4 but what I remember learning in my piano lessons as a child of 12 is called a “donkey gallop” beat—adds the requisite feel and color, offset by Brubeck repeating the rocketing arpeggio parabola that began the song. Without any unnecessary ado, this makes a confident beeline into the swimmingly warm waters of the main drag: here, Morello settles into a supremely loose basis—yet in solid, unquestionable control throughout—for his ongoing accompaniment in ride cymbal, hi-hat and occasional snare hit. From there, the song cruises and coasts along, as the four members of the quartet do what they do best: Brubeck’s piano, and then Desmond’s alto sax, followed by a nice little solo by Wright on bass—concluding with a gimcrack drum solo by Morello—collaboratively ease into an effortless execution of this comfy little zenith of snazzy jazz. Masterful in their professional assurance, taking a break from their fancy experimentations in time, they just kick back to negotiate their sleights-of-hand of faultless relaxation and earthy recreation made musical. And what they’re cooking is palpable enough for us to lap up. Morello’s concluding drum solo—contrasted with little isles of the song featuring casually lilting tastes from Desmond’s alto sax—contains a couple of marvellous tricks, one manipulating markedly acute strokes of rimshots, the other drawing out the rich sibilance of the open hi-hat longer and plusher than I’ve ever heard it before or since.

Back To Earth was recorded in 1962, and one can feel particularly in this cut the breezy warmth of those halcyon days, before America’s well deserved superiority in the world became darkened with recriminating self doubts and other tragedies (and terrors) one can never expect to keep at bay forever, one supposes.

Time Changes (1963)

The songs on Time Changes

—particularly the first three on side A—were what first inspired me to write this essay, and to try to put in poetic words some of the musical quiddity and quintessence each of the songs embody. Chronologically, Time Changes

represents the last of the four albums under consideration. I’m not an expert historiographer of Brubeck, but it is my impression that the music he put out after this time rather dramatically lost the luster these four albums captured and cultivated. One can almost feel in Time Changes

the vaguely astringent caducity of seasoning, auguring decline—as one senses near autumn that summer is ending (as if the mix of sadness and brightness we’ve noted before in some of the compositions is here crystallizing into some sort of valedictory. . .)—even as it pierces the listener’s ear and heart with some of the most vital and innovative exemplars of the luminosity of its three predecessors.

Iberia

This starts off (as it ends) with the salty tang of Morello’s metallic rim-shots complemented by tom-tom artistry and something unique in a Brubeck song—maracas: laying down the fast-paced eighth notes in 6/8 time. This is hurried along breathlessly by Brubeck’s piano rolling in to get the music going—yet again in minor-tainted chord changes that endue the atmosphere with a medley of blue and yellow propensities.

What lifts Iberia

higher, and moves it deeper, however, is the phenomenal piano solo by Brubeck that forms the dominant crux of the song. It begins ordinarily enough, with a tendency for rumbling run-ons of idoneously violent arpeggios that plunge into the lower register of his keyboard, amplified sparingly with strategic bombardments of ornately dense chords. It isn’t long before these arpeggios coagulate in fascinating clusters of gummy aggregates of notes seized here and there by argute spasms, as though Brubeck were channeling Beethoven hopped up on speed and wrestling with—almost retaliating against—a pianoforte come to viscously refractory life beneath his hands which, at last, for the finale, he wrests from that fantastic mess to a triumphant reprise of its introductory order and splendor.

Unisphere

Here, Brubeck extends 5/4 time into 10/4 time, thereby doubling the listener’s pleasure per measure, as it were. This is another one of those sun-dappled windshield on a suburban drive excursions by Brubeck/Desmond, only now it seems they’ve matured, like a spruce and slightly fruity chardonnay. Before the closing bars, the alto sax and piano exchange genial pleasantries that coax all the amicable honey latent in the song, into full, yet unassuming, flower.

Shim Wa

This little novelty makes our acquaintance on a sly, almost comical sound, lilting limpingly into the room in a kind of broken 3/4 waltz. Once again, however—as with Iberia—Brubeck soon transforms the song, through the long piano solo that forms its bulk, into a wholly other beast that arouses our admiration for his offbeat musical mind. This time, his solo proceeds by dogged—almost perversely fanatical—increments of intensifying abuse of the underlying rhythmic pulse of 3/4 set by Morello’s drums and Wright’s bass, with his left hand—ostensibly a stabilizing force of bass notes-cum-chords—becoming almost demonically unhinged in its insistent, jerky opposition to the beat it is supposed to be carrying.

World’s Fair

If Take Five

’s 5/4 time was novel at the time, and then Unsquare Dance

’s 7/4 time was even cooler—with Desmond’s Eleven Four

expanding our minds even further—World’s Fair

at 13/8 time really takes the cake. Over its perplexing yet assertively decided ictus set by Morello’s drums and Brubeck’s piano, Desmond soars in his alto sax—yet not at so lofty an altitude that he loses his breath of a dulcet nightingale: always, rather, within swooping distance of a bluesy embellishment and other means to cavort with the ears of us earthlings. Brubeck’s solo, meanwhile, is not as phantasmagorical as those of the preceding two songs, but it delivers what is needed, like a glass of fine red wine to the pleasantly famished stomach of someone resting from his journey. Towards the end, his impelling chords stealthily counter the ploddingly direct—albeit inherently anomalous—rate in 13/8, upheld with Daedalian fidelity by Morello.

Cable Car

There is not much to remark about Cable Car (which, again, does not mean it is not immensely pleasing), other than that it’s nice to hear Morello toy around with the tintinnabulary acumen elicited by the mucronated apex of his cymbals, as he does here so sportively, mostly in the beginning and at the end.

Epilogue

In 1969, at the age of 13, I went to Woodstock—Woodstock, Virginia, that is; not Woodstock, New York. My mother took me there to spend a couple of months in summer camp, in a pleasant rustic setting outside of town. She finagled my free registration by becoming the camp nurse. Anyway, a few months prior to attending that camp, I had somehow discovered Brubeck, and had already the first two of the four albums mentioned above in my collection—enjoyed on a cheap turntable with a cheesy monaural sound system. I came to camp armed with at least one of these albums (I think it was Time Out

), and impressed the two camp counselors (older guys in their late teens, maybe early 20s) there—particularly one of the guys, a young Jewish palooka from Brooklyn or the Bronx. They in turn turned me on to Iron Butterfly’s InAGaddaDaVida

(as well as, incongruously, Sugar Sugar

by The Archies). It was at that summer camp, too, where during an arts and crafts class I constructed a little bench and then proceeded to paint it blue superimposed with abstract splotches of bright colors, reminiscent in my precocious age of a Jackson Pollock I hadn’t yet even heard of. Not too long after, when I saw the abstract art on the cover of Brubeck’s Time Changes

(painted by the lesser-known modern artist Sam Francis), it reminded me of my little bench. The camp counselor, some guy in his 20s, had the sense to give me an "A" for my creation; and when another kid protested that I had produced mere junk, the counselor stood by his grade and said it showed creativity.

Not long after that, I purchased the two later Brubeck albums, and for years following, I listened to them countless times, rarely daring to play along with them on percussion or acoustic guitar—as I did with other music I liked (Paul McCartney, Santana, Paul Simon, James Taylor)—with the possible exception of bongo-drumming along to Unsquare Dance. Only recently have I learned the chords to Castillian Blues, and have been enjoying immensely working out a kind of bass line on the deep strings of my acoustic guitar to that.

§ § §

This quartet of albums by the Dave Brubeck Quartet has always held a special place in my heart, and will as long as I can listen to music and snap my fingers. Putting into words, as something of a wordsmith of late, the magic of their music is my muse’s way of offering a lyrical appreciation to those four gentlemen and statesmen of the silver age of jazz who spun pure gold for their, and our, posterity.