IT’S ABOUT TIME DAVE BRUBECK 1920-2012
At the end of 1967, Dave Brubeck disbanded his famous quartet. Ever since 1958, when the group’s line-up stabilised around Brubeck (piano), Paul Desmond (alto saxophone), Eugene Wright (bass) and Joe Morello (drums), the ‘classic’ Dave Brubeck Quartet had been an essential part of the modern jazz landscape. Brubeck’s 1959 album Time Out, in which he presented the first versions of ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk’ and ‘Take Five’, took instrumental jazz to the pop charts for the first time since the 1930s, when the likes of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw had been the pop stars of their day. Brubeck disbanded the group because quitting while he was ahead seemed sensible, but also because he wanted to devote his creative energies to writing choral and orchestral music.
fiat aspiration, however, did not last long. Within a few months he had hit the road again with a brand-new quartet featuring another star saxophonist, Gerry Mulligan. Brubeck would then spend the rest of his life touring – playing his final concerts only 18 months before he died on 5 December 2012, the day before his 92nd birthday.
Why would anybody want to write a jazz biography? The hours are long and hard and the economics are stacked against you, but in the end I found writing my more of a problem than sitting down to begin. Since I became a music journalist in 1999, Brubeck’s music had represented a personal crusade. The very first piece of journalism I published, in the now defunct magazine, had been an interview with Brubeck. By that point he was almost 80 and an icon of jazz and American music, the last survivor of a golden era of modern jazz. Miles, Coltrane and Monk had all gone, but Dave was still delivering jazz, hot and creative. And audiences were flocking to his concerts. He certainly didn’t need a champion – and yet it bothered me that the soar-away success of and ‘Take Five’ had blocked the light on so many of his wider achievements. didn’t come from nowhere. Brubeck’s first recorded statements were made 13 years earlier in 1946 – but also endlessly fascinating were those questions of how Brubeck dealt with the aftermath of ’s success, pumping tunes like ‘Take Five’ and ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk’ with creative energy for the next 40 years.
