Dave Brubeck 1920-2012

[drbirdsong]

Blue Rondo A La Turk - Dave Brubeck - YouTube

 

I had the good fortune to meet Dave Brubeck in 2000. He will be missed.

 

 

Manager: Jazz composer, pianist Dave Brubeck dies

 

By By PAT EATON-ROBB | Associated Press – 23 mins ago

 

 

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Jazz composer and pianist Dave Brubeck, whose pioneering style in pieces such as "Take Five" caught listeners' ears with exotic, challenging rhythms, has died. He was 91.

Brubeck, who lived in Wilton, died Wednesday morning at Norwalk Hospital of heart failure after being stricken while on his way to a cardiology appointment with his son Darius, said his manager Russell Gloyd. Brubeck would have turned 92 on Thursday.

Brubeck had a career that spanned almost all American jazz since World War II. He formed The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951 and was the first modern jazz musician to be pictured on the cover of Time magazine — on Nov. 8, 1954 — and he helped define the swinging, smoky rhythms of 1950s and '60s club jazz.

George Wein, a jazz pianist and founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, had known Brubeck since he first worked in Wein's club in Boston in 1952.

"No one else played like Dave Brubeck," he said. "No one had the approach to the music that he did. That approach communicated."

Brubeck "represented the best that we can have in jazz," he added. "The quality of his persona helped every other jazz musician."

The seminal album "Time Out," released by the quartet in 1959, was the first ever million-selling jazz LP, and is still among the best-selling jazz albums of all time. It opens with "Blue Rondo a la Turk" in 9/8 time — nine beats to the measure instead of the customary two, three or four beats.

A piano-and-saxophone whirlwind based loosely on a Mozart piece, "Blue Rondo" eventually intercuts between Brubeck's piano and a more traditional 4/4 jazz rhythm.

The album also features "Take Five" — in 5/4 time — which became the Quartet's signature theme and even made the Billboard singles chart in 1961. It was composed by Brubeck's longtime saxophonist,Paul Desmond.

"When you start out with goals — mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically — you never exhaust that," Brubeck told The Associated Press in 1995. "I started doing that in the 1940s. It's still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements."

After service in World War II and study at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., Brubeck formed an octet including Desmond on alto sax and Dave van Kreidt on tenor, Cal Tjader on drums and Bill Smith on clarinet. The group played Brubeck originals and standards by other composers, including some early experimentation in unusual time signatures. Their groundbreaking album "Dave Brubeck Octet" was recorded in 1946.

The group evolved into the Quartet, which played colleges and universities. The Quartet's first album, "Jazz at Oberlin," was recorded live at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1953.

Ten years later, Joe Morello on drums and Eugene Wright on bass joined with Brubeck and Desmond to produce "Time Out."

In later years Brubeck composed music for operas, ballet, even a contemporary Mass.

In 1988, he played for Mikhail Gorbachev, at a dinner in Moscow that then-President Ronald Reagan hosted for the Soviet leader.

"I can't understand Russian, but I can understand body language," said Brubeck, after seeing the general secretary tapping his foot.

In the late 1980s, Brubeck contributed music for one episode of an eight-part series of television specials, "This Is America, Charlie Brown."

His music was for an episode involving NASA and the space station. He worked with three of his sons — Chris on bass trombone and electric bass, Dan on drums and Matthew on cello — and included excerpts from his Mass "To Hope! A Celebration," his oratorio "A Light in the Wilderness," and a piece he had composed but never recorded, "Quiet As the Moon."

"That's the beauty of music," he told the AP in 1992. "You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn't make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz."

In 2006, the University of Notre Dame gave Brubeck its Laetare Medal, awarded each year to a Roman Catholic "whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the church and enriched the heritage of humanity."

At the age of 88, in 2009, Brubeck was still touring, in spite of a viral infection that threatened his heart and made him miss an April show at his alma mater, the University of the Pacific.

By June, though, he was playing in Chicago, where the Tribune critic wrote that "Brubeck was coaxing from the piano a high lyricism more typically encountered in the music of Chopin."

In 1996, he won a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys and in 2009 he was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient.

Brubeck told the AP the Kennedy Center award would have delighted his late mother, Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck, a classical pianist who was initially disappointed by her youngest son's interest in jazz. (He added that she had lived long enough to come to appreciate his music.)

Numerous jazz musicians were scheduled to participate in a birthday concert in Brubeck's honor that had been scheduled for Thursday in Waterbury. The show will go on as a tribute concert. Darius, an acclaimed pianist, was among those scheduled to perform along with saxophonist Richie Cannata, and Bernie Williams, former New York Yankees star and a jazz guitarist.

"What he brought was a new meter to jazz," said Cannata. "I was probably in high school or elementary school when I first heard that 5/4 feel. I said, 'Wow, what is that?' I was totally influenced. It made me stand up and pay attention to another whole feel of music."

Born in Concord, Calif., on Dec. 6, 1920, Brubeck actually had planned to become a rancher like his father. He attended the College of the Pacific (now the University of the Pacific) in 1938, intending to major in veterinary medicine and return to the family's 45,000-acre spread.

But within a year Brubeck was drawn to music. He graduated in 1942 and was drafted by the Army, where he served — mostly as a musician — under Gen. George S. Patton in Europe. At the time, his Wolfpack Band was the only racially integrated unit in the military.

In an interview for Ken Burns' PBS miniseries "Jazz," Brubeck talked about playing for troops with his integrated band, only to return to the U.S. to see his black bandmates refused service in a restaurant in Texas.

Brubeck and his wife, Iola, had five sons and a daughter. Four of his sons — Chris on trombone and electric bass, Dan on drums, Darius on keyboards and Matthew on cello — played with the London Symphony Orchestra in a birthday tribute to Brubeck in December 2000.

"We never had a rift," Chris Brubeck once said of living and playing with his father. "I think music has always been a good communication tool, so we didn't have a rift. We've always had music in common."

___

Online:

Brubeck Institute: http://web.pacific.edu/x19959.xml

___

Associated Press writer Michelle R. Smith in Providence and former AP writer Mary Campbell contributed to this report.

[New World Kid]

One of my favorite musicians. 91 is a good life though, and his brilliant music that has captured listeners for years will continue to do so. Brilliance never expires.

[Babycat]

So sorry to hear of his passing... R.I.P.

[ColdFireYYZ]

Rest in Peace

[treeduck]

He had a good run...but we lost a great one there...

 

RIP

[RUSHHEAD666]

He had a good run...but we lost a great one there...

 

RIP

 

I couldn't have said it better myself.

 

RIP

[CygnusGal]

:(

[goose]

Dave, through his music, achieved eternal life. Wishing him a safe voyage onward...

[bikonon]

I'm new here, so maybe this has been pointed out before, forgive me if so.

 

I was listening to NPR's story about Dave Brubeck, and when they played a bit of Blue Rondo A La Turk - Dave Brubeck I was surprised how similar it is to this riff in

. I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this, and this is probably why the original poster included the link to that Brubeck number, but I'm curious as to whether this has ever been verified to be Rush's influence for their piece in Natural Science?

 

Thanks!

bikonon

[drbirdsong]

I never noticed that before, but I can see the similarity. I doubt Rush was influenced by any Jazz (at least they never mentioned it enough for me to hear about it). I posted that one because Keith Emerson used to play a hairy electronic version of Rondo with both The Nice and ELP. It didn't really match the original, but Brubeck was an early influence on him.

 

Jazz musicians are responsible for modern time keeping and bringing non-Western times into modern North American music that then spreading it to Europe so I guess you could say it was an indirect influence. Without Louis Armstrong, bee-bop, hard-bop and modal forms of music we would all still be sitting around waiting for something worth listening to.