Stan Kenton, “Artistry in Rhythm” (1944)
I hadn’t stopped buying pop records but by the time I was a senior, jazz was my music of choice, the music with which I wanted to be identified. I started with Stan Kenton, then became a Dave Brubeck nut. My senior year, I talked about jazz monomaniacally to all my friends.
I drove my parents batty playing Kenton. His orchestra was brassy and reed and horn heavy. It never played soft when it could play loud and the music screamed a lot. It was more than a little bombastic, definitely wasn’t subtle, but then neither was I at that age.
By the time I went to college, I was over Kenton and I haven’t listened to him for years now, except to evoke nostalgia. Listening now, the music seems puffed up, pretentious, sorely out of date. It doesn’t startle me any more. But it was the Kenton band where I first heard Lee Konitz, Art Pepper, Bill Perkins and Bud Shank (saxophonists), Conte Candoli (trumpet) and Frank Rosolino (trombone), Eddie Safranski (bass), Shelly Manne and Stan Levy (drums). All were musicians of talent and in the case of Konitz, Pepper, Rosolino and Manne, even some genius. Kenton also gave two of my favorite arrangers their start: Gerry Mulligan and Bill Holman wrote for him.
Dave Brubeck Trio, “Indiana” (1949) -Brubeck, p; Ron Crotty, b.; Cal Tjader, dr.
I have won several prizes as the world’s slowest alto player and a special award in 1961 for quietness. (Paul Desmond)
In 1953, Dave Brubeck was just becoming known outside the West Coast. I bought my first record by him that year, The Dave Brubeck Trio. It was on the Fantasy label — a ten-incher. I liked it so much I went out and bought another album by his drummer-slash-vibes player-slash-bongos, Cal Tjader. Eventually, I dumped both albums, along with two Kenton albums I owned and two not terribly good recordings by Kenton alums Frank Rosolino and Al Belletto. I don’t regret getting rid of the Brubeck or the Kenton and Belletto albums but I wish I’d kept the one by Rosolino: the group and arrangements weren’t that good but Rosolino was a formidable player who did things on the trombone that no one else could match, not even J. J. Johnson, the archetypal bop trombonist.
Sixty years on, I seldom listen to Brubeck. I don’t greatly like his playing or composing but at seventeen oh, did I love him! His playing struck me as intellectual but swinging, and sounding intellectual was important to me, to my self-image. It may not have been classical music that Brubeck’s group played but it was classics-colored, Classics Light with a pulse. It seemed a bridge to classical music, which I felt I should appreciate but still knew nothing about.
Most of all, I loved Brubeck’s saxophonist, Paul Desmond. I loved his sound, which one critic labelled “martini-like,” and I loved the fugue interplay between horn and piano that ended many quartet pieces. Today, it sounds too tidy to me, almost timid, but at seventeen I wore out his records listening to them. I reached the point where I could sing along with both Desmond and Brubeck, not just the ensemble parts but their solos. I grooved on Brubeck’s rhythm experiments, though now they strike me as stiff and derivative. When I listen to Brubeck now, he bores me, but at seventeen, oh did I need him!
(My high school classmate Chuck Mustain wrote: “In addition to choir, you had that near obsession with Dave Brubeck’s music. You were frustrated because you lacked the vocabulary to explain to me what it was that was so special about it.”)
In 2010, I reviewed a retrospective collection of Brubeck pieces from the 1940s through the early 2000s. Here’s what I wrote:
I cut my eye teeth on Dave Brubeck, the early octet and trio sides and the early Brubeck-Desmond quartet before drummer Joe Morello joined the group. Part of the reason I played Brubeck so much at home was because it infuriated my Dad. He would come into my bedroom and say to me, “Why are you playing that doodley doodley stuff all the time? Play something with a melody!” Ah, memory! It was with anticipation that I purchased this collection, which unites the early Fantasy cuts from the late 1940s to early 50s, with cuts from the 80s to very early 2000s, recorded for Concord Records. I thought I’d like it better than I did. I wish I did because Brubeck’s groups played an important role in my early education in jazz. But I don’t.
I still like Desmond and I’ve always liked clarinetist Bill Smith who plays well though not at all originally on this album, including a lovely version of Brubeck’s composition, “Koto Song”. Alto saxist Miltello, Brubeck’s latest partner, is competent though unexciting, and none of Brubeck’s rhythm sections from the 80s on matches the duo of Eugene Wright and Joe Morello in the 50s (Time Out appeared in 1959) for excitement or crispness.
The problem is Brubeck. It struck me while I was listening that while Brubeck has written some lovely tunes, the best renditions of his music I’ve heard have been played by other musicians. Gil Evans arranges and Miles Davis plays “The Duke” and there’s a lovely version by Joe Pass; Miles and Sonny Rollins do “In Your Own Sweet Way,” also Bill Evans and Kenny Werner (even Ray Barretto). Then there’s Paul Desmond’s version of “Take Five,” recorded with Ed Bickert on guitar and Don Thompson on bass. (I do like Brubeck’s solo take on “The Duke.”) I’m led reluctantly to the conclusion that however good Brubeck was as a composer, his playing suffers by comparison.
And that’s the first problem with this album. On almost every cut, there is a moment when Brubeck flubs it. The flub is usually rhythmic, sometimes too blatant or wrong-timed an effort to syncopate the melody, other times little rhythm glitches. In any case, it’s hard to avoid noticing that unlike the great jazz pianists, Brubeck is ham-handed when playing rhythm. A particularly bad example is the clunky beginning of “How High the Moon” and later passages in the song. The piece offers a lovely solo by Desmond and the group, Brubeck included, really cooks here. (Lloyd Davis wasn’t all that bad a drummer.) But while the start of Brubeck’s solo is good, he then moves to his signature block chords and screws up the rhythm at 5:58, 6:14 and 6:45. Desmond and he end the piece with a thin pseudo-classical fugue. Over all, the performance is weak and derivative. At key points, it doesn’t swing (although at other points it does). Listen also to “Waltzing,” a nice piece, around 5:40 into the cut, for more botches in rhythm.
As to the trio cuts, Cal Tjader just wasn’t very good as drummer or bongo player. The best cuts, with Tjader on vibes, channel the much more able Red Norvo trio, only with piano in place of guitar. But then, Tal Farlow, in Norvo’s group, was a genius and extraordinarily facile on his axe, whereas Brubeck … has heavy hands.
The one cut I absolutely love on this collection -actually, a good part of the reason I bought it–is Brubeck’s rendition of “Over the Rainbow,” recorded at Storyville in Boston in 1952. The drummer hadn’t arrived for the evening’s sets, the bass player was just setting up, and Desmond was somewhere else when Brubeck started. The piece lasts one second short of five minutes and for four and a half of those minutes, all you hear is Brubeck.
I wish I could hear that Brubeck more often and not the Brubeck I most often hear, the one who has trouble syncopating, who overdoes the block chords and plays derivative classical tags in lieu of melodic line improvisation.
Several choruses in, half a minute before it’s all over, Desmond arrives, picks up his horn and joins Brubeck and the drummer for the final chorus. Then the song …ends. It’s magical to listen to even today, sixty-some years on. Brubeck had heavy hands and his sense of rhythm wasn’t always the best but on that night for that one song, he was perfect. It’s the one Brubeck record I still listen to regularly.
NOW LISTEN TO THIS
Now take a break from reading. Close your eyes and listen. To me, this recording is the best thing Brubeck ever did. I’ve worn out two copies of it. This is one of those recordings that tells you what jazz is about.
Dave Brubeck, “Over the Rainbow” (1952)
MUSIC & ME 