By Mike Katz
When Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” became a runaway hit, it was 1959 and I was in the third grade. By the time I started seriously listening to jazz, in the late sixties, Brubeck’s original quartet had broken up and the jazz scene was in a flux. Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis were going electric. Freddie Hubbard and Stanley Turrentine, among others, had gravitated to the CTI label and would soon be flirting with disco. The jazz that found its way onto the college campuses Brubeck once cultivated had been repackaged as fusion, backing up bands like Blood Sweat & Tears or Chicago.
“Take Five,” meanwhile, had become sort of a pre-curser to Pac-Man, munching up everything else the Brubeck quartet had produced. That would be some considerable munching, since Brubeck, Paul Desmond and company had spent a decade atop the charts, playing to SRO crowds, with Dave becoming the first jazz artist to grace the cover of Time Magazine long before the Time Out LP was ever conceived. But for the general audience, “Take Five” was Brubeck and to a certain extent always would be.
One 1970-ish day I was idly flipping through a record store in Evanston and found a double album compilation of the Brubeck quartet called Adventures In Time. It had all of the famous Brubeck tunes (most of them unknown to me): “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” “Three To Get Ready,” “It’s a Raggy Waltz,” “Unsquare Dance,” many of them in different takes or performances than the originals. All the songs but one were composed by members of the quartet. All but one were in time signatures other than 4/4. Listening and listening and listening some more, until the grooves were worn down, I finally figured out what these guys were doing – not that it was really necessary. Incessant foot tapping and aimless humming as I wandered the Northwestern campus were explanation enough.
Looking back, it seems strange that Brubeck endured criticism for not being, for lack of a better word, jazzy enough. Jazz is improvisation and experimentation, and what could be bolder than taking the basic 4/4 march time, not only of jazz but all popular music, and standing it on its ear? And there was more. When Brubeck, in 1957, released “Dave Digs Disney,” there was much sniggering from critics, yet “Someday My Prince Will Come” became a standard for Miles Davis and “Alice In Wonderland” one of Bill Evans’ best known tunes from the Village Vanguard sessions. Still, while jazz searches for the “next” Miles Davis or John Coltrane or Bill Evans, we never hear about the “next” Dave Brubeck.
Perhaps that is because he really never left.
Although it’s been written that he devoted much of his post-original quartet years to larger orchestrations and cantatas, there was plenty of jazz left in the Brubeck oeuvre. Most musicians would have loved to have the mid-life career Brubeck shared with Gerry Mulligan in his second major quartet. The baritone sax may seem the polar opposite to Paul Desmond’s “sound of a dry martini,” but it still sounded great. Check out LPs like Last Set At Newport, or some of the tracks with Mulligan on the Monterey Jazz Festival’s release Live At The MJF. Brubeck continued to compose in the jazz space as well. His 1995 release Young Lions and Old Tigers featured lovely themes for Roy Hargrove, James Moody and flugelhornist Ronnie Buttacavoli, as well as two wonderful tunes with Mulligan and a duet with George Shearing on Brubeck’s classic, “In Her Own Sweet Way.” And that is just one CD out of dozens.
One of the joys of becoming a regular at the Monterey Jazz Festival was getting to see Brubeck perform live in a milieu that had become in many ways a second home for him. He was “discovered” by festival co-founder Jimmy Lyons, played at MJF 1, MJF 50, MJF 52 and many, many times in between. Two of my favorite memories are the cantata, co-written with his wife, Iola, based on John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, featuring Roberta Gambarini and Kurt Elling, performed at MJF 49 in 2006; and his MJF 50 duet with Jim Hall the next year. Their rendition of “Take Five” was stunning, and one can only hope both those performances, now in the MJF archives, will someday be shared with the public.
So, finally, Dave Brubeck has left us. Certainly “Take Five” never will, as long as there is someone walking down the street, humming and tapping and daydreaming.
To read more iRoM reviews and posts by Michael Katz, click HERE.
To visit Michael Katz’s personal blog, “Katz of the Day,” click HERE.
Posted by irom 
Winner. Chick Corea : “Five Hundred Miles High” from Forever.
Winner: Terri Lyne Carrington and Various Artists: The Mosaic Project.
Winner: Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke & Lenny White. Corea, Clark & White.
Winner: Christian McBride Big Band. The Good Feeling.
Winner: Gordon Goodwin: Rhapsody in Blue.
Winner: Bela Fleck and Howard Levy: “Life In Eleven” from Rocket Science.
Konik’s Commentary: “Jazz Is Dead, Part 2: Performing Artists”
August 14, 2011By Michael Konik
We’ve previously discussed how poor programming choices on jazz radio are unintentionally sabotaging the medium’s noble mission to “keep jazz alive.” But terrestrial radio, an increasingly irrelevant distribution channel in the age of the Internet and satellites, isn’t the only culprit in our music’s alleged “death.” Some of jazz’s most effective assassins are the people who care most: the professional musicians.
In an age when fewer folks than ever are willing to pay for recorded music, the only way for a full-time jazz recording artist to earn a living is by touring, giving concerts, putting on shows, performing – being a performing artist.
Wynton Marsalis
Performing Artist: It’s a two-word job description. The majority of accomplished jazz musicians have no problem with the second part, the artistry thing. They’ve committed their life to learning and mastering a transcendent and mysterious magic replete with its own language, codes, and customs. They compose on-the-spot. They create. Jazz musicians are artists of the highest realm. Few of them, though, care enough about the first part, the seemingly less exalted imperative to put on a show. To perform.
Their disdain stems from an innate (and probably warranted) mistrust of “show business,” of an elemental (and probably warranted) disgust with a popular culture that tends to hear with its eyes and think with its genitals. When you make music that requires attention, concentration, and complete engagement, you’ve automatically narrowed your audience to the minority of sentient listeners for whom Twitter posts and Facebook updates aren’t reasons to live but a kind of obstreperous distraction. Yet even that dwindling demographic of thoughtful, observant listeners wants to be entertained – and transported, and thrilled, and provoked, and made to feel. They go to live jazz performances for some of the same reasons people go to pop, rock, country, hip-hop, and cabaret shows: for a performance. Otherwise they might as well stay at home and listen to their CDs.
Dianne Reeves
With few exceptions, most jazz musicians don’t want to be pop stars, or, indeed, any kind of star. They want to be serious. We don’t begrudge this lofty impulse; we love jazz musicians for their determination to invent something meaningful and profound. They operate in a debased culture where stars and celebrity – even the brazenly manufactured kind that requires no discernible talent – garner more interest from the average American than the power mongers who actually control our lives. They make art in a culture where the court jesters and fools have supplanted policymakers on the throne of public opinion. In such a climate, refusing to treat audiences with as much respect as the repertoire is a terrific strategy for making oneself increasingly irrelevant and ignored. That’s cool if you want your art to be the chief sacrament of a dwindling hipster cult. But if you want jazz to grow and flourish, you’ve got to reach across the invisible Fourth Wall and touch people.
Connecting with the audience matters. Maybe more than anything. They haven’t come to the club or concert hall or amphitheater to absorb disembodied sounds. They bought a ticket because they want shamans and wizards, divas and charmers. They want someone to take control and guide them through a journey. They want to have an experience.
This doesn’t mean the performer must behave like a buffoon or stripper or cheese-ball canister. It means accepting the implicit contract between Actors and Observers. It means being private in public. It means sharing something real.
Many jazz musicians, however, wear their ineptitude onstage as a badge of honor, as evidence of their outsider status. They behave as though the congregation on the other side of the footlights doesn’t exist – or is an annoying impurity in the otherwise pristine process of making exalted music. Aside from punk rock, where contempt for everything is sui generis, in the jazz realm you’ll frequently witness “performers” shut their eyes, construct an imaginary box, and literally turn their back on the audience, sending the implicit message that what’s happening on stage is an elite conclave meant just for the cats. In jazz you’ll often see front men (and front women) reading lyrics and chord charts, sometimes off a music stand planted in the center of the stage. There might be all sorts of good explanations for this unwieldy prop, but to consumers of live performances it looks like laziness: someone didn’t take the time to learn the song in advance.
Ticket-buying audiences are keenly attuned to nonverbal signals: Did the performer bother getting dressed? Did he comb his hair? Did she walk onstage like Diana Ross or like someone going grocery shopping? Casual presentations beget casual listening — which begets unengaged listeners who eventually find something more “interesting” on which to spend their concert-going dollars.
Stuff that’s unthinkable at a professionally mounted pop (or whatever) concert happens all the time in the jazz world. How many jazz shows have you attended in which the musicians huddle between tunes for a discussion of the repertoire – or to hand out under-rehearsed arrangements? How many times have you suffered through pregnant pauses and awkwardly mumbled announcements because no one on stage is ready to deliver the goods? To dedicated jazzheads, this kind of sloppy presentation has become expected, maybe even endearing in its naïf-like, “I’m an odd-meter-obsessed artist” ingenuousness. To new initiates or those not quite sure if they dig this whole jazz thing, amateurish stage conduct reads like disdain for the audience.
In just about every other segment of the Performing Arts, being unprepared to perform is tantamount to failure. Too many jazz musicians, focused on their flatted-fifths and diminished-sevenths, think it’s OK.
The marketplace is telling us it’s not.
John Pizzarelli
Some of the most successful acts in the business (both in critical and commercial terms) prove that it’s possible to be both a performer and an artist: Kurt Elling, John Pizzarelli, Bobby McFerrin, Dianne Reeves, Wynton Marsalis, Christian McBride, Barbara Morrison. They’ve got monster chops and loads of onstage charisma. Neither attribute dilutes the other; actually, these qualities augment and complement in a kind of aesthetic symbiosis that audiences, sophisticated or not, can instantly intuit. Successful performing artists know how to project their talent, to share it in a way that makes each audience member feel like the gift was meant just for them.
Bobby McFerrin
Learning how to perform as viscerally and directly as popular artists do is like learning an instrument: you have to practice (and maybe get coaching and direction). Casting a spell happens consciously. It’s a process. For jazz recording artists who genuinely wish to “keep jazz alive,” making a renewed commitment to connect with live audiences is crucial, maybe even mandatory. It’s the surest way to invigorate our music.
To find out more about Michael Konik, click HERE.