Two men climbed out, wearing the broad-brimmed hats of Pennsylvania state troopers, and ordered Desmond to produce his documents, and to get out of the car and show them that he could walk a straight line. With a gentle whirring of a siren, the sedan pulled up beside him, and one of its occupants motioned to him to stop. He assumed that it was being piloted by a prankster, and he accelerated in order to get away from him. Presently, he became aware that the sedan was right behind him. “Brubeck’s orders were somehow lost,” Rice explains,Īt perhaps two o’clock one recent morning, while was driving Brubeck-at a speed considerably above the legal limit-through Pennsylvania after a concert, he overtook a black sedan, which was proceeding at a rather leisurely pace. He never saw combat, though: the general who ran the center turned out to love jazz. Bodley made Brubeck read Dostoevsky, Proust, and Mann, and presided over a discussion group “devoted to subjects like the Oedipus complex, Cubism, Marxism, logical positivism, and tone rows.” Brodley also introduced Brubek to his future wife, Iola Marie Whitlock, “a girl,” Rice writes, “with a sensitive ear, a substantial literary gift, and a distaste for getting any grade lower than an A.”īrubeck was drafted almost immediately after college, and, after some time in the U.S., was sent to a “replacement center,” from which new troops could be deployed, in Metz, in eastern France. Russell Bodley, drafted the cowboy into the avant-garde. His mentor in the music department, a man named J. (He was, Rice says, “one of the sleepiest and most solvent undergraduates on campus.”) He eventually gave in and began taking courses in music. But he was constantly distracted by music in the evenings, he’d play in local jazz clubs. At the College of the Pacific, in California, he started training to become a veterinarian, determined to move back home and work on his family’s ranch. “The only part of the jazz world Brubeck has an affinity with,” Rich concludes, “is jazz.”īrubeck almost didn’t become a jazz musician. Brubeck calls himself “the cleanup man” because, when the other members of the quartet get tired of a solo and abandon it part-way through, he picks up the slack, out of a sense of duty. (Paul Desmond, the quartet’s sax player, explained Brubeck’s experiments in hedonism this way: “Every five years or so, Dave makes a major breakthrough, like discovering room service.”) Brubeck once proudly declared, of his quartet, “We’re the worst-dressed group in America!” In his playing, he displays patience and fortitude. Brubeck liked to save money, didn’t smoke, and limited himself to one martini before dinner. He grew up on a ranch, and spent most of his youth wanting to be a cowboy (that accounts, Rice thinks, for the way he moves at the piano, “rid the piano stool hell for leather, as if it were a cow pony”). In June of 1961, Robert Rice profiled Dave Brubeck for The New Yorker, in an article called “ The Cleanup Man.” Brubeck, Rice wrote, was a decidedly uncool cool jazz musician. On the single’s b-side was “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” a song written in 9/8 time, like the music Brubeck had heard in Istanbul. “Take Five,” which is written in 5/4 time, was the breakout hit single. Later, back in the States, the group recorded “Time Out”-an album of songs with unusual time signatures. It was a traditional Turkish folk song, widely known-in Turkey.Īs the tour continued, Brubeck kept listening for interesting rhythms, and he kept asking his quartet to experiment with them. He hummed the tune, and several of the musicians started playing it, adding flourishes and counterpoint, even improvising on it. He told some of them about the rhythm that he’d heard on the streets and asked if anyone knew what it was. When Brubeck arrived, the musicians were taking a break from a rehearsal. Like many broadcasters at the time, the station had its own symphony orchestra. Later that day, Brubeck had an interview scheduled at a local radio station. It was in 9/8 time-nine eighth notes per measure-a very unusual meter for Western music…. Walking around Istanbul one morning, Brubeck heard a group of street musicians playing an exotic rhythm, fast and syncopated.
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