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Jamie Cullum's Blog
The most disorganised man in showbusiness

Unedited Dave Brubeck piece for the guardian

My brother Ben and I were musical kids, not Rachmaninov toting 9 year old prodigies, just kids who were enthralled by music. Before walkmans, car journeys were four hour chats, squabbles, thumb wars, sticker swaps and a shared listen to the family car tape deck. In order to help keep some order in the back seat and guard against the usual onset of toddler boredom, Mum would provide us with a pair of pencils and a hardback book to drum on. It kept us amused for hours. As a youngster, one is nearly always subjected to the musical proclivities of one’s parents, which can be good or bad. After my choice of Ringo’s dulcet tones narrating Thomas the Tank Engine it was Mum and Dad’s turn to play DJ. They put on “The Best of Dave Brubeck.” This I instinctively knew as good. As we drummed haphazardly along to “Unsquare Dance”, “Blue Rondo a la Turk” and “Take Five” we were unwittingly taking part in rhythmic and melodic invention of the highest order. Like millions of others, Dave Brubeck was the first jazz musician I ever heard long before I knew what jazz was.

Dave Brubeck and his quartet - the geniuses behind the 1959 album “Time Out” changed music forever. The track “Take Five” became a huge hit with the other album tracks following suit. “Take Five” though not written by Brubeck himself (his cohort, saxophone player Paul Desmond penned this melody) was very much in the spirit of the album “Time Out” and it’s sense of playful invention. The album brought together a collection of compositions that were based outside the traditional 4/4 time feel so prevalent in both pop and jazz music of the time. Popular music still adheres mostly to this bind of regularity with notable recent exceptions from Radiohead, Gorillaz and Outkast.

“Time Out” though not originally a critical success, was eventually a hit with the people who gleefully sunk their teeth into music that sounded neither like the traditional jazz and bebop scene or the growing rock and roll scene. It became the soundtrack for many a college campus and Brubeck (on the advice of his wife Iola) became one of the first jazz musicians to tour colleges extensively. His music was loved then as it is loved now. He turns 90 next week and still performs his old and new compositions and his long form works for ballets and mass regularly. He is still happily married to Iola and has 6 children.

The plain fact is that Dave Brubeck’s music endures because of the many layers in which it can be appreciated. Rather than just shoehorning clever ideas into accessible sounding music, Brubeck built his music from the ground up with the kind of solid intellectual foundations that would keep his house standing and enduring tourists for many years to come. With this intellectual rigor comes a sense of playfulness that enables his music to hit you like a top 10 hit of any era. Brubeck was in fact a little bit of a bluffer at his first musical conservatoire. He was unable to read the music that his classmates at his same level were reading. He would learn them by ear - a strength that he possessed far in advance of both his fellow students and teachers. He later studied with the famed composer and teacher Darius Milhaud who sensed that he should study composition and orchestration over classical piano. His strengths were in improvisation, his compositional skills and his ability to tap into that childlike sense of abandon where your imagination is not yet hampered by doubt and slowed by the kind of intellectual anxiety that can take your ideas hostage. Thus we have the Peter Pan professor or a polymath with grassy knees. The song that opens his most famous album “Time Out”, “Blue Rondo a la Turk” is a perfect illustration of these multiple facets in operation.

Dave Brubeck’s children, Darius, Dan and Dave, all fabulous musicians and bandleaders in their own right, told me this story. On his many travels, Dave heard some turkish street musicians playing a series of songs with a similar, odd time signature “1-2 1-2 1-2 1-2-3”. He stopped to ask the musicians what they were playing and they proclaimed: “This time signature is as common in turkish music as the blues is to you.” “Blue Rondo a la Turk” was born. A tricky tune that references in its primary melody that tricky time signature, the simplicity of a nursery rhyme, segue-waying into a “traditional” blues which occasionally switches back to that original turkish melody. It is undoubtedly one of Dave Brubeck’s crowning compositional achievements - a bitch to play and beautiful to hear.

His ideas to employ both polyrhythms and polytonalities (time feels and melodies that work against each other) in jazz not only came from his deep understanding of classical music and the fugues of Bach and Shostakovich but also, once again inspiration from unlikely places. As a child on his father’s cattle ranch riding horses, he would sing different rhythms against the clip-clopping of the horses hooves, at first complementary then contrapunctually. The mark of a true artist is one that can pull entire concepts out of the world around him.

As a soloist, this identity extends further. Dave is not a traditional jazz soloist, rarely just soloing with simple chords in the left hand and flying single note melodies in the right. His cascading chordal solos sometimes sound like a child discovering his fists and the black and white keys for the first time. The joy of uninhibited noise making that morphs into deeply complex melodic extensions that recall Ellington, Gerswhin and Rachmaninov.

The success and invention of “Time Out” was continued with “Time Further Out” containing the classics “It’s a Raggy Waltz” and “Unsquare Dance”. The Dave Brubeck Quartet with Joe Morello on drums, Eugene Wright on bass and Paul Desmond on saxophone were all essential building blocks to Brubeck’s sound. They continued to play to huge audiences throughout the sixties whilst contributing less well known, though no less inventive studio albums such as “Jazz Impressions of Japan”. The quartet disbanded in the late sixties to allow Dave to concentrate on his longer form compositions. This is a part of his work that I believe will become more significant over time. Listen to “To Hope! A Celebration” to hear Dave’s hand extend joyfully into this arena. According to his sons, Dave still spends hours a day in his studio composing fugues and pieces, practicing and developing his art. At 90 years old his musical journey is far from over.

I have been honoured to spend time in Dave’s company and that slight tinge of the stuffy professor that one may have obtained from articles written about him immediately disappears. He warmly complemented my ballad playing (he had seen me play that afternoon) and asked what I was listening to and suggested a few other things that would excite my ears and keep me progressing. We discussed a shared love of choral music. He hugged me like an old friend. His wife Iola, his partner in life and music since 1942, was ever present along with two members of their bulging family. It was clear to me that the warmth that radiates from Dave’s music is something that extends to his family life and the world around him.

If I think back to those early car journeys and the delight I experienced hearing the lolling melody of “It’s a Raggy Waltz” and that famous wolf in sheep’s clothing “Take Five,” I realise how important Dave’s music has been to me. Like a great work of literature, you can dig into it perpetually to find new treasures buried under the surface. I stole my Dad’s “The Best of Dave Brubeck” tape and left “Thomas the Tank Engine” in the car. The journey had begun.

Essential Brubeck Albums

Time Out - The classic. Don’t tell me you don’t own this?!

Time Further Out - An extension of the classic but no less brilliant. Get the vinyl so you can properly enjoy the Miro on the front cover.

Dave Digs Disney - Taking the saccharine children classics and turning them into art. For adults and children alike.

Jazz Impressions of Japan - Dave’s teacher Darius Milhaud exhorted him to “travel the world and keep your ears open”. Here Dave does just that and explores the modes and feels of ancient Japan to stunning effect.

To Hope! A celebration - Dave’s first full Catholic Mass composition stuffed full of gorgeous melodies. Suitable for atheists and believers alike.

London Flat, London Sharp - Dave at 84 with his latest quartet, no less urgent and no less inventive.

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