Dave's world

Reconsidering Brubeck

by Richard C. Walls

What are we to make of Dave Brubeck? Once the most popular jazz pianist in America, he now seems both dated and somewhere outside time. He was a disaster with the critics, who never forgave him his pretensions or his inability to swing. He was an eccentric and generally unsubtle improviser whose signature trope was the obsessive-compulsive hammering of repetitious block chords. Still faintly iconic, he remains that slightly embarrassing stepping stone to something more substantial that many jazz fans of a certain age once loved and then put aside with such other adolescent enticements as the Peter Gunn soundtrack and the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels.

Starting in the mid '50s, Brubeck supplied a face for "progressive jazz" that was reassuringly white and nerdy -- he looked like a technician involved in the process of making America great. He also had the kind of misplaced sense of accomplishment that gives modernism a bad name. Indeed, the liner notes from the newly issued At Carnegie Hall (Columbia/Legacy) find Brubeck running on all too typically about the complexity of "Three To Get Ready": "We're in 3/4 time for two measures and then 4/4 in the next two, then back and forth throughout the piece. There's one part in which my left hand is in 2/4 time against shifting rhythms in my right hand." I was reminded of the breakfast-table scene in The Man on the Flying Trapeze where W.C. Fields's culture-vulture wife reads him some dreadful poem from the newspaper and then adds that the wonderful thing about it is that there's absolutely no punctuation -- to which Fields mutters in response, "Yes, that is wonderful . . . " Brubeck always wanted us to be as impressed as he was with his formalist tinkering. But as listeners our interests lay elsewhere, and for every beguiling concoction like "Take Five" or "It's a Raggy Waltz," there was a batch of rickety constructs; you endured them in the knowledge that Paul Desmond's solo would soon arrive.

Alto-saxophonist Desmond, of course, was Brubeck's constant companion from '51 till '67; both coolly ironic and supremely lyrical, he was part of the classic quartet that also featured the witty drummer Joe Morello and the somewhat anonymous bassist Eugene Wright. Not only did Desmond and Morello leaven Brubeck's lack of grace, their mastery of jazz momentum made the pianist's tempo digressions and patchwork solos seem more like perversity than inadequacy. Brubeck became a colorful oddball with a unique contrarian vocabulary who refused to join his mates in the perpetuation of exultant swing.

Four Brubeck recordings have just made their CD debut courtesy of Columbia/Legacy. Three of them are just okay; the other is his masterpiece. Actually, Vocal Encounters is less than okay: it's cobbled together from several LPs with standards by some great singers -- Carmen McRae, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Rushing -- and way too many uninspired songs by Brubeck and his wife/lyricist, Lola. Much more entertaining is Jazz: Red Hot and Cool, three live recordings from '55 and '56 -- though Bru is typically klutzy and Desmond is typically airy, weakest-link drummer Joe Dodge makes you appreciate how much Morello's insouciance contributed to the later combo's singular gestalt.

Jazz Impressions of Japan ('64) is, like most of the pianist's studio dates, relatively terse, but it is the most low-keyed of the quartet sessions. Apparently contemplating Japan can have that effect -- on Horace Silver's Tokyo Blues the great funk extrovert became almost morbidly contemplative. For Brubeck, the way to enlightenment lies through a pretty ballad and faux Eastern laments like "Fujiyama" and "Koto Song."

The real gem here is the two-CD Carnegie Hall session, which was recorded on February 23, 1963. It's one of those rare live dates where a crackling energy actually made it onto the tape; even Desmond, whose limpid tone could verge on evaporating in the studio, adapts an increasingly aggressive and edgy stance. Brubeck, no shrinking violet to begin with, has a series of uncompromisingly avant-garde solos that climax with some weirdly dense and robotic double-timing on the old crowd pleaser "Blue Rondo à la Turk," steamrolling over any memory of dainty time-signature experiments. He doesn't swing, but he does sound free, and you realize that this tantrum of obstinacy in the face of time's flow is and always was his strange way of soaring. If it hits you in the right mood, you might even think, "Yes, that is wonderful . . . "