Friday, June 22, 2007

Dave Brubeck: The Early Golden Years









This review covers only four early albums of Dave Brubeck—the experiments in “time” that I consider to be solid gold:

Time Out (1959)

Time Further Out: Miro Reflections
(1961)

Countdown: Time in Outer Space
(1962)

Time Changes (1963).

The musical personnel on all four albums were the same, the best that Brubeck enjoyed, before or since: Dave Brubeck on piano, Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, Eugene Wright on standup bass, and Joe Morello on drums.

Time Out (1959)

Time Out is the most famous of these albums (if not of Brubeck’s entire discography)—principally for the song that is probably Brubeck’s most known, Take Five. In my estimation, however, this album is the weakest of the four assembled here; yet even so, it sparkles in many places with the brilliance of the gold mine it shares with the others. To say it is the weakest is really only a roundabout way of expressing the virtually indescribable excellence of the other three.

Take Five

To deal with the most used coin first—Take Five—the only quibble we might offer is the overlong drum solo. I tend to find drum solos generally insipid, the only exception being, in fact Joe Morello’s far better explorations in the later albums (particularly Countdown) we will get to shortly. Not that I do not at times find the Take Five drum solo mildly pleasing; it’s just that it has too much of that sloppy snare drum sound, it tends to be rather too loose and not tight enough, and at the end of the day it seems to have been fit into the model of the song (perhaps by the author, Paul Desmond, himself) as a way to fill time with a song structure that is, frankly, rather sparse. Nevertheless, the alto sax melodies which Desmond has worked out to inform his song gleam like a perfect dry martini.

Brubeck, somewhat uncharacteristically, maintains a passively repetitious comp in the background—one, of course, that the listener recognizes is essential to the feel of the piece. As there are no other 5/4 experiments on this earliest album (1959), and on the liner notes of the immediately following album, Time Further Out (1961), we are told that Brubeck found the 7/4 rhythm of Unsquare Dance to be a challenge for him, it seems that Brubeck was a little slower than Desmond was in becoming comfortable with the odder time signatures. In the latter two albums we are examining—Countdown: Time in Outer Space (1962), and Time Changes (1963)—we will see that Brubeck eminently catches up with his colleague in his verve and facility for 5/4, 7/4, difficult combinations of 2/4 and 3/4, and even in one instance, 13/8 (unfortunately, the one 11/4 tune that Desmond wrote and shines on relegates Brubeck to a comping mode reminiscent of Take Five, though executed this time around with considerably more flexibility and ease).

Blue Rondo à la Turk

The real jewel of Time Out, however, is the lesser known Blue Rondo à la Turk. It’s basically two different songs fused together at two cross-temporal intersections: one at the beginning and near the end, the second stretching its muscles throughout the long middle. The first song is a fast-paced “rondo” in 7/8 time, exhibiting a classical air as well as a hint of Spanish folk rhythms and even possibly Latin influence, perhaps something Ravel or Bizet might have dashed off in one of their more daring, if capricious, moments. The piano work in this fast 7/8 section, although still predominantly comping, nevertheless displays a good deal of acrobatics with the contrapuntal jabs of bass keys and top chords-cum-arpeggios; and in certain instances does seem to undermine our previous theory about Brubeck’s earlier difficulties with the stranger times. The “blue” part of this piece, laid out in an unctuously leisurely 4/4—intercut in its introductory moments with jagged shards of the hectic “rondo” as it transitions out—, is a consummately polished exercise in the blandiloquence of “cool jazz”, deliciously filled out with Desmond’s alto sax—sounding sexy here rather than dry—as well as Brubeck’s signature style of single notes meandering pointedly on all the right notes. And all the while, Wright on acoustic bass and Morello on drums groove along in a classic walking style.

Strange Meadow Lark

This strange song glides from a stately, romantic prelude of pure piano to a tenderly ethereal yet sensual foray in Desmond’s alto sax that evokes in the listener a Sunday drive on a winding, suburban, deciduously dappled and sun-glinting road on perhaps a warm April day. When that lovely afternoon winds to a close, Morello’s perfectly placed crash cymbal introduces Brubeck’s other signature piano style: soloing in block chords instead of single notes.

Miscellaneous Tunes

This essay is not intended to cover all the ground of these four albums, so I may very well skip certain songs, or only mention them in passing (as with the first three songs on side B: Three To Get Ready, a smartly twinkling little number, slyly moving back and forth from 2/4 to 3/4; Kathy’s Waltz, another sun-dappling invention that calls to mind a pleasant drive in a big sedan along maple and poplar-shaded suburban roads; and Everybody’s Jumpin’, a similarly dapper and winking little divertissement).

Pick Up Sticks

We could never forget Pick Up Sticks, however. While we touted Blue Rondo à la Turk as the crown jewel of this album, Pick Up Sticks is nevertheless singular—unique, even, not only to this particular album, perhaps, but to all four albums under consideration here (if not Brubeck’s entire oeuvre). The piece opens immediately, with no preface, on the smashing sound of Morello’s ride cymbal juxtaposed to the first deep tone of Wright’s ingeniously repetitive bass line—followed a split-second later by Brubeck’s blockish chord style, which continues a while until Desmond’s alto sax enters on an incisively neat solo. It is when Desmond’s solo subsides that Pick Up Sticks really picks up: Brubeck here delivers one of his best single-note solos I have ever heard, only toward its close filling out with his en bloc chord style. His single notes punctuate the texture of the grain so ably supported by Wright and Morello—the former’s deeply grinding bass undergirding the latter’s smoky blues club ride cymbal—with deadly slick expertise and impeccable calculation.

Time Further Out: Miro Reflections (1961)

Unsquare Dance

This album has its “star” too, just as Time Out had its Take Five—in this case a witty little caprice that, although not nearly as famous as Take Five, has its own ensconced notoriety among musicians, music teachers and the public television and arts crowd. We are of course referring to Unsquare Dance: an exercise—indeed, an unashamed gimmick—in 7/4 time, constructed as a square dance in turn based on the 3-chord blues pattern. Not only is the title a play on the musical style it is parodying, it is also a wink to the then current late 50s, early 60s beatnik slang whereby most things “square” were to be mocked and avoided at all cost.

Maori Blues

Not so cute as Unsquare Dance, is the interestingly intelligent number written by drummer Joe Morello, Maori Blues. For the creation of a drummer, it is noteworthy that Maori Blues is dominated by Brubeck’s piano: indeed, the entire song is one long piano solo—riprapped, to be sure, by the supple and keen dexterity of Morello’s drum art, in this song utilizing more variety than usual, in a myriad subtle ways, ranging from the rapid fire on the center disc of the ride cymbal to his cunning tom-tom work, here and on Far More Drums inspired indirectly by Maori folk music. I’ve always wondered, for the more than two decades I’ve listened to Brubeck, whether Morello actually wrote out all the piano that Brubeck plays here, or whether he just laid down a loose structure and let Brubeck go to town on it. It’s hard to tell, because Brubeck’s solo style, as I theorize, is very structured and definitive: he does not sound like the typical jazz musician who tends to go into the recording studio and just improvise completely ad lib. His solos may have begun as free-form improvisations, but I get the sense that he works them over laboriously until he crafts exactly what he wants to play when the tapes run—and from then on, the solo is frozen. And who could fault him for that, when one hears the solos? They are, as far as I can tell, indisputably perfect. At any rate, whoever is responsible for the piano of Maori Blues—and it’s likely to be, at least in certain areas, an intimate collaboration of both Brubeck and Morello—it proves to be one of the coolest, smartest songs the Brubeck Quartet ever recorded.

Bru’s Boogie Woogie

Then there’s Bru’s Boogie Woogie: the best damn foot-tapping boogie woogie in recording history. The driving pulse throughout the song is the classic three-chord boogie-woogie scheme, and it starts with a bang, takes off like a speeding train, and during the long middle section, flies off the ground like a cropduster meaning business. Desmond’s horn is not present throughout, but it doesn’t seem to matter: Brubeck’s instrument rules the melodic tectonics through a joyous logic—whether spidercracking a kaleidoscope of individual keys or hammering those block chords he wields so effortlessly—that burns the house down and shakes the earth under our shuffling feet, at least until he eases up toward the conclusion to bring everything to a nifty end.

Blue Shadows in the Street

Many of Brubeck’s song titles are creative, and some are more evocative than others: such is the case with Blue Shadows in the Street. The somber, stately, cool blue tones that usher it in, and move it along like a dark, sleek vehicle following behind, evoke what the title says: a street, perhaps one of those secluded, cushy streets of brownstones in older Manhattan lined up and a small shop or two, planted with seasoned, burgeoning, copiously leafy trees that in the early night, or late twilight, dissect the lamplight—and perhaps also a shifting moonlight amid patchy clouds—into blue illuminations and blue shadows in jagged designs upon the sidewalks, across the street, on whatever parked cars there may be, and over the walls one passes on a mildly unpleasant, yet wistfully haunted walk, as one’s cigarette smoke lingers now and then behind the pensive preoccupation of our ambigation. . . This, and much more that only poetry can express is what Brubeck’s piano perfects, in its curiously achromatic marmor, particularly after Desmond’s alto sax sets the mood some time after the opening with inimitably rueful intonations saturated in liquid music as bittersweet as expensive vermouth.

Bluette

On the B side, Bluette echoes some of the tenor and tense of Blue Shadows in the Street—yet in a deeper, darker, bluer inclination. Throughout, Brubeck’s coldly classical and crystalline notes figure icy veins of assonance, when they are not coining cul-de-sacs of quietude. In keeping with the overall temper, Desmond’s alto sax in its overture and closure imbues the blue with breathy, velvety, magnetic, almost solemnly sonorous tonality underscored by Wright’s bass bowed in a gravely occult drone; while in its solo, it delves into and parses the blue with glimmers of reflectivity as pure and yet as tart as the sleekest gin. Before the end, Desmond’s alto sax engages in a counterpoint with Brubeck’s piano that accentuates the almost unearthly classicism of Bluette in turns and parts of symmetry and ice.

Charles Matthew Hallelujah

I would not necessarily include this onean ordinarily lesser piece all toldwere its roundly infectious joy not so tempting to at least call forth a note of mention. As the liner notes indicate, the song was conceived in a spontaneous burst of celebration for the birth of Dave’s son, christened Charles Matthew, and all through it brims and rings with the ecstatic pride of the parent for his child. In the energetically happy, dynamically adamant and aggressively loud chords he accomplishes in his son’s tribute, Brubeck once again shows that indeed, piano is his forte.

Far More Drums

Lest the reader be concerned that I forgot to mark Far More Drums—the first song on side A of this albumfor praise, I hereby assure him that I have merely been saving that amazing vehicle for Joe Morello’s drumming skills for last. Its impetus catapults immediately with a prototype of combination punches in 5/4 (which persists in an undercurrent of permutations from beginning to end), followed by a winsomely sunny and gratifying theme in piano that could easily be overlooked or underrated, in turn leading the way—particularly with the adroitly judicious tropes of basser piano notes discharged by Brubeck—to the long drum solo that forms the body and heart of this song.

This drum solo is simply the best ever recorded by any drummer in music history (far better than the signature solo of Morello’s career in
Take Five), for which the reviewer could not err in his account by pulling out all the stops of superlatives and vernacular extravagance. In persistingly reiterative yet progressively modulating configurations, Morello caroms and batters a series of tom-toms, only tactically accented here and there by shots and smacks of the snare and rims, in alternately satisfying and reciprocally counter-intuitive concatenations—underpinned throughout by an insistent yet subtle motif of the pedal-activated hi-hat that serves to remind the close listener of the ongoing 5/4 beat otherwise seemingly flouted and trampled upon by the protracted and exponentially vehement turbulence of Morello’s solo, as he accelerates madly, yet with a method of madness, elevating percussion to concussion and beyond.

Countdown: Time in Outer Space (1962)

Of this quartet of albums, this is my favorite. It represents the paragon and pinnacle of the collective genius of Brubeck, Desmond, Morello and Wright.

Countdown

On a bang, it begins with its title song, Countdown—barraging from our speakers right into our living room like a stampede of rhinos with Morello inventively pounding away on orchestral tympani. The perspicacious listener will hear Wright’s not so much walking bass as a jogging bass, its rumbling tones keeping quickly apace with the kettledrums resounding like the earth moving beneath the hooves of the rampant horde. After the throbbing tympani—switching back and forth with brief piano interjections—come booming to a seemingly anticlimactic decrescendo, Brubeck takes over with a roiling a cappela boogie woogie, whose harmonic logic winds down to a nodal culmination actuated by the trenchant splash of Morello’s crash cymbal doubling as the ride cymbal he uses to sustain the fizzing hiss of his accompaniment back with a normal drumset. As is so often the case, the brief piano solo that ensues by Brubeck is elaborated with chord changes at once thoughtful, deliberate and scintillating, with an intimation of a sad intellect—ending as suddenly as it began, with Morello’s tympani and Brubeck’s piano answering each other until the former stomps to a laborious close that rattles like a giant manhole cover spinning and losing ground to finally topple with a slam.

Eleven Four


An exceptional composition titled after its extraordinary tempo in 11/4 time,
Eleven Four wings its brightly euphonious and vernally melancholic way from the very first moment already in mid-flight, continuing to the very end Desmond’s effortless translation of the utterly unnatural eleven beats per measure into a buoyancy lighter than air and, with the greatest of ease, fleeter than a spring breeze. Morello’s concomitance on drums is understated, yet immaculate, riding out the entire song on the ride cymbal, with his pedal-operated hi-hat maintaining a base similar to the one he patented for Take Five (as Brubeck similarly repeats his bass note and chord paradigm from that song) and later for Castillian Drums—employing one unassumingly ingenious switch that only the careful listener will pick up.

Why

A nicer, niftier ditty in the anthology of jazz is likely never to have been written to compare with Eugene Wright’s
Why. (I have a hunch the question mark, normally presumed appropriate for that adverb, was purposefully excluded from the title: a delightful omission.) Wright, the underrated bassist for Brubeck’s quartet, has concocted a modestly elegant and unobtrusively dainty medium for him to go to town—within the snugly composed confines of staying cool as a cucumber—nimbly fingering up and down the fat strings of his upright bass, as Morello helps paint that little town with his brushwork on snare and hi-hat, and Brubeck fills in easygoing coloraturas of leisurely chords and collops all along the way, at one point hitting a high, diamond-thin triad that rings at the right instant like a priceless glass bell.

Castillian Blues

A shrewdly formulated Latin jazz arrangement in which a repeating circle of interesting chord changes provides for its palmy navigation in 5/4, with consummately crack contributions from Desmond, weaving his delectable poesy in woodwind in and around Brubeck’s complementary chords, and from Joe Morello, skillfully deploying his tom-toms with the stylistics that evidently influenced him greatly at the time, as is manifested in
Far More Drums (from the previous album) and Castillian Drums (from side B of the present album), which the liner notes from Time Further Out indicate were partially inspired by his exposure to Maori folk music, but which it seems to me draw also from Latin and African percussion as well as from Morello’s own genius. Also to be noted about this song is the way the marriage of piano and alto sax gladdens the heart with their players’ characteristic, and singular, commingling of blue melancholy and sunny felicity.

Castillian Drums


This isn
t just a vehicle for Morellos drumsit's a veritable motor vehicle accident on the freeway with a ten-car pile-up orchestrated by some berserk yet perfect divine being. It ranks up in the stratosphere with Far More Drums. Collectively considered, these two are arguably the best drum solos in all musical history. I tend to vacillate on which of the two I deem to be number one. No matter: the best drum solo that exists out there, by any other drummer, aside from these, is perforce to be relegated below them to third status.

Before we get to the drum solo, the overture of piano and alto sax is noteworthy for its captivatingly meticulous effervescence, followed by a seemingly unremarkable but in truth fascinating piano solo that prefigures some of the style of clotted notes and serried arpeggios Brubeck will more intensely exploit in his next album,
Time Changes (more about that later). At the end of his piano solo, Brubeck subsides through a trope of assuagingly machine-gunned chords run through a type of circle of fifths, and right after the last chord is struck—artfully fusing staccato and sostenuto—Morello segues by a sudden transition of his ride cymbal frequency, from one sizzling tinniness to another, which in turn signals his embarkation onto a protracted tom-tom solo, only here and there augmented by the odd hi-hat (either pedalled, Take Five-style, or hit open-and-shut).

This convolves no ordinary tom-tom solo, but one with Latin and African overtones as well as bouts of rapidity charged with a flamenco momentum for which “Castillian” seems an apt descriptor, using the device of certain tom-toms tuned unusually loose, endowing them with a deep and bouncy, almost spongy, quality—conducive to a peculiar groaning sound made, one conjectures, by the intensely pressured drag of the drumstick head over the drum skin, somewhat similar to the dull “moaning” sound conga drummers employ by rubbing their palm heels or thumb edge across the conga drum skin. One of the many feats starring in this drum solo is a patch where Morello somehow manages to sustain a snare-drum roll while simultaneously thumping ominously reverberating, diagonally rhythmic formations on a series of two or three deeply tuned tom-toms, before finally wrapping it up with pinpoint integration, leading with the smoothest suddenness back to the piano refrain—and the two of them ending on a charmingly succinct conclusion.


Miscellaneous Tunes

Again, I am loathe to leave any of the songs of this compendium unacknowledged, and when I do so—as with
Fast Life (notable for some deliciously pertinent and clever rimshots from Morello), Three’s A Crowd (somehow, indefinably conjuring the rain-odorous slopes of green Hawaii) and Danse Duet (another example of sophisticated jazz with a wonderful moment of the sun glinting off the windshield of a suburban Sunday drive in a nice big car)—it doesn’t mean they are not good songs; it only means they don’t rise quite as cream to the top. For example, I just can’t leave unmentioned the touch by Morello in the last mentioned, Danse Duet: while he remains laid back with his suave brushes throughout Brubeck’s solo, he intrudes one particular tom-tom & crash cymbal combination that is so spot on, it bypasses the listener’s ear to satisfy his groin with a zing.

Waltz Limp and Back To Earth

These two among the miscellany on side B, however, remain to be more fully praised. I’ve noted before the penchant in some Brubeck songs for a mélange of sadness and brightness. Waltz Limp leans toward the sad part of that paradox, suffused with a minor or mixolydian mode as it unfolds mellifluously through the alto sax and piano solos, and upborne by the deeply contented and tangibly agreeable paradigm maintained by Eugene Wright on the upright bass—with the few strategic variations 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.