Max Décharné

The good boy of jazz: Dave Brubeck’s time has come round at last

The clean-living pianist finally gets the recognition he deserves

On 8 November 1954, Dave Brubeck’s portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine, accompanied by the words ‘The Joints are Really Flipping’. Inside, the pianist and leader of his own jazz quartet was variously described as ‘a wigging cat with a far-out wail’ and ‘way out on Cloud 7’, who when at college chatted up his future wife Iola with the immortal philosophical enquiry: ‘Tell me about this Plato cat.’ Yet Brubeck’s life and habits were far from the archetypal drug-fuelled, self-destructive behaviour the public had sometimes been led to expect from best-selling memoirs of that world, such as Mezz Mezzrow’s hugely entertaining sustained exercise in jive-speak, Really the Blues (1946). On the contrary, Brubeck was a moderate man: in 1961 he confessed to the New Musical Express that his favourite drink was ‘good, clear spring water’, and he remained happily married to Iola for 70 years.

This year sees the 100th anniversary of Brubeck’s birth. There was a curious scarcity of books about him in his lifetime (he died in 2012), Fred Hall’s 1996 biography It’s About Time having the field almost to itself. But Philip Clark’s new study arrives just as two other works also appear, focussing on Time Out! (1959), the quartet’s most famous LP. In the publishing world, Dave’s time has come round at last.

Clark’s book is primarily a thoughtful examination of Brubeck’s composing, recording and playing career, with much time spent deconstructing individual musical passages. This is understandable, since the pianist took inspiration from classical composers such as Stravinsky or Bartok, as well as from jazz pioneers like Fats Waller, not to mention elements drawn from indigenous music genres around the world. Here is the author discussing Blue Rondo à la Turk (1959):

Bar 3 was a literal repeat of the first bar, and the fourth bar picked up the scalic tailpiece that had ended the previous bars and ran the three of them together, each marching further up the scale, which shifted the rhythmic pattern from 2+2+2+3 to 3+3+3.

There is a great deal of this kind of carefully observed analysis, which would not raise an eyebrow in a sleeve note accompanying a Schoenberg recording, but the general reader expecting a more conventional biography might struggle to
sustain interest.

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