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THE PIANO |
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...DAVE BRUBECK  DAVE BRUBECK at the keyboard with, from left, drummer Joe Morello, saxophonist Paul Desmond, bassist Gene Wright ---playing as The Dave Brubeck Quartet in the 1950s. |
He remains the master innovator at the piano
of TheColumnists.com
The first time I heard the Dave Brubeck Quartet in concert I was 19 years old and totally star-struck by these cool West Coast musicians. To be honest, I was more interested in the drumming of Joe Morello than in Dave or his alto sax player Paul Desmond or bassist Gene Wright. I had spent my high school years banging away in a combo in Indiana and I saw full-time jazz drumming as my future.
The Brubeck appearance was part of an events program at San Jose State College in 1958 and I was music critic of the school newspaper. We didn’t know it in sleepy San Jose but we were smack in the middle of the golden age of jazz, and sadly most of us would live to see this music decline as rock took over the world.
I managed to get backstage after the Brubeck performance and shake Morello’s hand. (I probably didn’t wash it for a couple of days.) He couldn’t have been more charming despite my geeky youth and inane comments. I also interviewed Dave and wrote a glowing review, but that was a detail compared to meeting Joe.
I never lost my love of good drumming, and even today I hear the drummer in any popular music, including rock. Elvis, by the way, worked with Ron Tutt, one of the best drummers ever, in his Las Vegas band.
In the early 1960s, I listened to Brubeck’s albums--"Jazz at Oberlin" and "Jazz Goes to College"--and came to understand what he was doing musically with his polytonal riffs (playing in two keys at once) and off-balance rhythms. Now, 50 years later, aged 89, he is still playing gigs and has never stopped developing.
My vote goes to him as the best-ever jazz improviser at the piano.
I choose Dave because no other major player has been as creative or managed to keep at it for so long.
He made it an article of faith to avoid repeating himself. He has said that most jazz pianists are predictable if you pay attention. You come to anticipate certain chords or runs up and down the keyboard. He calls this their “bag of tricks”. But he aspires, even now in his wizened, diminished physical state, to start over every time he sits down at the piano.
Judging the great jazz pianists is a risky business, he told one interviewer a few years ago. “You often begin to realize that somebody you thought was a tremendous improviser is not improvising at all. Or on the other hand, some guys that you thought were sloppy and not good jazz musicians suddenly become truly creative.”
As the world discovered him in the 1950s, he was playing in a style that owed very little to his predecessors in jazz piano. The New Yorker praised him for his “improvised syncopated music”, one of the more quaint ways to define jazz. And his famous Time Magazine cover story in 1954 credited him for “some of the strangest and loveliest music ever played since jazz was born”. The Time writer quoted fans as calling him “a wigging cat with a far-out wail”. And across the country, Time said, “the joints are really flipping”.
Brubeck gets credit from jazz historians for bringing jazz to the West Coast. Prior to his arrival on the scene, Dixieland jazz dominated the San Francisco scene. Most jazz innovation was coming out of New York. Brubeck strode onto the stage of the Black Hawk and other clubs schooled in advanced compositional techniques by Darius Milhaud of Mills College and the effect was like a “lightning bolt”, wrote one critic. He started with an octet, then a trio, and finally found his footing with his quartet alongside the late Paul Desmond.
Still, picking a favorite jazz pianist is never easy, considering the competition over the past hundred years. Many were self-taught and never learned to read music. The great technicians such as Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson stunned audiences with their virtuoso mastery of the keyboard. Nina Simone was a Juilliard-trained pianist who turned to jazz to make a living. She flattered fans by injecting bits of Bach into her ideas. Mose Allison’s recordings still surprise me. And let’s not forget the French love of the piano. Jacques Loussier has fused classical and jazz into a sound all his own.
And yet it is Dave Brubeck that I keep coming back to. As a creative artist of great integrity, he is in a class by himself.
©2010 by Michael Johnson. This column first posted , 2010.
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