Deciphering Dave Brubeck

I've always been a little ambivalent about Dave Brubeck.  While I appreciate his genius as a composer, musician, and jazz innovator,  most of the time I don't really connect emotionally with his music.  Don't get me wrong, I have 55 (!) Brubeck albums and play and enjoy many of them regularly.  But while Brubeck often gets my toes tapping, I find that I don't always get into the music as much as I should because I'm busy thinking about key changes, time signatures, and poly rhythms.  Something that never happens when listening to a record by, say, Bill Evans. 

Bill Evans moves me.  When I'm listening to him play I don't think about keyboard technique or the structure of the tune.  I'm just transported by the lyricism and the beauty of the music.  It's kind of like how I can enjoy and admire a painting by De Kooning and appreciate the tension between his use of form and color and space.  But when I look at a painting by Van Gogh, I just marvel at the beauty without thinking about his brushwork or technique.

After recently reading the 2020 biography "Dave Brubeck: A Life In Time," by British musician and musicologist Philip Clark, I think I finally figured out what's going on.

Clark spent 10 days shadowing Brubeck's quartet during their 2003 tour of the UK.  Brubeck rented a house in London as a home base and hired a bus to shuttle the band back and forth to gigs around England.  During the sometimes lengthy bus rides, Clark and Brubeck spent long hours talking about Brubeck's life and discussing his music in microscopic detail.  (Brubeck's wife, Iola, and other members of the band often take part as well.)  Clark mines these conversations to provide insights into Brubeck's life and music.  

While I do recommend the book, be aware that a lot of it is tough sledding.  The first hundred pages or so are an in-depth look at Brubeck's musical influences, with long sections devoted to explaining the theories of Brubeck's primary teacher, the French modernist composer Darius Milhaud, with whom Brubeck studied at Mills College in Oakland, CA.  You will learn far more than you probably ever wanted to know about Milhaud, George Auric, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Louis Dorey and a host of other French composers who, under the influence of Cubism and surrealism, attempted to rewrite the rules of classical composition.

In a not atypical passage, Clark describes an early Brubeck composition called "Playland-at-the-Beach" thus: "The opening section darted agitatedly between three distinct keys, with jolts and collisions in the orchestration -- like a trumpet line being snatched and sucked inside the texture like a Venus flytrap -- matching the non sequitur upsets of Brubeck's harmony."  Venus flytraps eating trumpets, yep, my thoughts exactly.

Of another Brubeck composition, Clark says it: ". . .re-accented the 3+3 of 6/8 to become 2+2+2 of 3/4, a neat rhythmic pun to chew on as Brubeck's harmony feasted on another, more existential ambiguity: Was this music in the major or the minor?"  Very good question.  I took piano lessons for ten years and I have have no idea what he's talking about.

While there is a fair amount of interesting background information about Brubeck's life and family, the book isn't a normal biography.  Instead, it's a detailed dissection of Brubeck's music with hundreds of pages devoted to analyzing Brubeck's choice of time signatures and keys, his use of counterpoint, rhythm, and tonal contrast.  Reading the book didn't tell me a lot about Brubeck the man (except that he was a complete egghead), but it did give me a much better understanding of why his music sounds like it does.  Brubeck combined jazz with French modernism -- a classical movement that embraced polyrhythm and polytonality -- that is, musicians playing different time signatures and different chords at the same time.  My takeaway is that Brubeck was not a classical musician who became a jazz composer, he was an avant-garde classical composer who became a jazz musician.  [Hmmm.  Discuss.]

Even though this interpretation of Brubeck's music only came to me after reading Clark's book, Brubeck's place in the history of jazz has long been a subject of debate.  As one of the originators of "West Coast" jazz, Brubeck and his mostly white contemporaries were often dismissed by the predominantly black East Coast beboppers.  In his harrowing autobiography "Straight Life: The Story Of Art Pepper," white West Coast alto saxophonist Art Pepper describes how at some gigs the black musicians he was playing with were so disdainful of a white jazz musician from California that they wouldn't even acknowledge his presence.  He says they resented him and other white jazz musicians who they felt were appropriating "their" music.

Miles Davis apparently had similar feelings.  He was famously quoted as saying that "Brubeck doesn't swing."  Not all black musicians agreed however, as Charles Mingus wrote a letter to Downbeat magazine upbraiding the (at the time) very young trumpeter for his comment, saying: "At Newport and elsewhere Dave had the whole house patting its feet and even clapping its hands.  If a guy makes you pat your foot, and if you feel it down you back . . . then Dave is the swingingest by your definition."  I don't know if anyone but Mingus could have smacked down Miles like that and lived to tell about it.  But it apparently had an effect.  Clark reveals in his book that some time later, at a late-night jam session at the famed Black Hawk night club in San Francisco, Miles sidled up to Brubeck at the bar and by way of a grudging apology, said: "You swing. Your band don't swing."  (It helps if you think about how that would sound in Miles' raspy voice.)

In addition to the obvious racial component, the schism between East Coast and West Coast jazz was based on the feeling that East Coast was the true jazz idiom pioneered by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke and other black jazz musicians.  Real jazz had its roots in the blues and evolved organically from juke joints and jam sessions in the black bars and clubs of Harlem, Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Louis, where young, hungry black musicians (like Miles Davis) took part in late-night cutting sessions, challenging each other and showing off their chops.  Only the best players survived.  As Miles Davis latter said of his early days playing jam sessions in New York City, "If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's (in Harlem) and couldn't play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you, you might get your ass kicked."  

While white, West Coast musicians like Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Shelly Manne, Bud Shank, Shorty Rogers, Zoot Sims, (and Dave Brubeck of course), had impressive chops, on the whole the West Coast style was more lyrical than East Coast jazz.  The audience for many of the West Coast groups were suburbanites and white college students.  What's more, the West Coast cats often played from charts (for goodness sakes) and many of them earned a living playing sessions for television shows and movie soundtracks, or backing up crooners like Frank Sinatra.

The music press and record labels lost no time in promoting the rivalry between the two styles of jazz in an effort to sell records.  There were a number of albums (including the one above) from the 1950s that played up the West Coast - East Coast split.  It is telling that in the photos of the musicians on the cover of the West Coast Vs. East Coast album, only two of the West Coast players are Black, while only two of the East Coast musicians are white.

Which brings me back to Dave Brubeck.  As Clark relates in his book, Brubeck struggled for years to sell albums and find an audience for his cerebral style of jazz.  The turning point came in the early 50s when he began to focus on performing at colleges, where he finally found a receptive audience of young, white college kids.  Brubeck quickly became a media darling -- a safe, white, jazz musician who didn't use drugs, didn't drink or smoke, and didn't scare the bejeebers out of the parents of white kids.  By 1954 Brubeck was on the cover of Time magazine (below), and his career and record sales took off.

While Brubeck certainly benefitted from his status as a clean-cut, white jazz musician, this is in no way meant as a criticism.  The fact is, Brubeck was a stand-up guy in the fight against racism in the United States and abroad.  In 1958 he refused an offer to tour South Africa when he was told that his bassist Paul Morello (who was Black) would not be allowed to play.  And in 1959, Brubeck cancelled most of the dates on an extensive (and highly lucrative) tour of southern U.S. universities when the schools said that Morello could not appear on stage with the quartet.  What's more, wherever they played, Brubeck insisted that audiences at his shows not be segregated and demanded that Morello be given the same treatment and be allowed to use the same dressing rooms and facilities as the rest of the band at a time when blacks were regularly forced to use the back entrance or segregated toilets.  And for what it's worth, Brubeck was said to have been mortified that he was on the cover of Time, as he thought the honor should have gone to his hero, Duke Ellington.  (For the record, Ellington got his own cover two years later.)

All this is by way of saying that Brubeck was a genius and an upstanding human being who is rightly considered one of the greatest jazz innovators of all time.  His work forever changed the history of jazz.  But in the end, as much as I appreciate and enjoy Brubeck's music, it just doesn't resonate with me like the work of many other jazz artists.

Here's another way to put it: If my house is on fire and I only have time to save Brubeck's Take Five or Kind Of Blue, by Miles Davis, I'm taking Miles.

Enjoy the music!