When I meet Jazz Nightly listeners, I’m often asked when I first got into jazz. But I didn’t experience a defining moment. Jazz was always around when I was growing up. My parents had a variety of genres in their record collection and I was especially drawn to my dad’s jazz albums. One album that stood out and really caught my ear as a kid was the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Further Out, the group’s 1961 sequel to the best-selling Time Out from two years earlier.
My dad’s copy of the album wasn’t on vinyl, but on reel-to-reel tape. He also had a compilation tape that included the hits from Time Out: “Take Five” and “Blue Rondo a la Turk.” I don’t know how old I was when I first became aware of this music. Perhaps five or six – too young to thread the old 3M Wollensak reel-to-reel stereo machine and play the tapes myself.
If I’d been asked at the time what I liked about the Dave Brubeck Quartet, I couldn’t have answered very articulately. But on the occasion of Brubeck’s centennial (December 6, 2020), I’ll go back and access those early musical memories and try to describe what it was about Brubeck’s music that captured my attention at such a young age.
At the heart of the Brubeck’s quartet’s appeal is the leader’s compositions. Although they’re complex harmonically and rhythmically, his compositions are also catchy, memorable, and unique. Both Time Out and Time Further Out feature experiments in such odd meters as 5/4, 7/4 and 9/8, but these unusual time signatures only add an extra sense of playfulness and off-kilter surprise to the music. My young ears wouldn’t have known there was anything strange about a jazz composition outside of 4/4.
Of course, I wasn’t the only one captivated by this music. “Take Five,” written by the quartet’s alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, was a surprise hit and Time Out became the first jazz album to sell more than a million copies. It has since gone double platinum. Although Time Further Out never came close to those sales figures, it’s a worthy successor and shows the band’s growing ease with novel time signatures.
Critics often dismissed Brubeck’s piano playing, but I think his approach was key in the popularity of his music. Brubeck’s playing was as idiosyncratic as that of his contemporaries Thelonious Monk and Erroll Garner and, like them, didn’t fit easily into any jazz category like bop or cool. Instead, he had his own distinctive style.
As a self-described composer who played piano, Brubeck often built his solos using the thematic framework of his compositions. He also seemed to develop his longer solos in a series of pianistic episodes. Jazz musicians try to tell stories in their solos and Brubeck’s were more like a series of inter-connected short stories rather than long, rambling novels. As a young listener, this approach kept my attention and kept me from getting bored and disinterested.
The quartet’s alto saxophonist Paul Desmond was just as important to five-year-old me as Brubeck’s compositions. The sound Desmond got on his horn was transcendent. He famously quipped that he wanted to sound like a dry martini. Since I don’t drink martinis, I don’t know how accurate that is. But he had a dry, light, airy and cool tone that was in stark contrast to Brubeck’s often heavier approach. Yet the quartet’s music thrived on the tension between Desmond’s lyrical whimsy and Brubeck’s earthier touch. It’s what made their performances so enthralling.
Brubeck and Desmond had one of the great musical partnerships in jazz. Both were in the army and they first met in 1944 prior to Brubeck being sent to Europe. Desmond remained stateside. They played together occasionally after they left the service, but their collaboration didn’t really begin until the formation of the Brubeck Quartet in 1951.
They were two very different personalities. Brubeck was a sober, conscientious family man who was active into his nineties. Desmond was a divorced ladies’ man who drank and experimented with drugs and died relatively young. But on the bandstand and in the recording studio they were equally quick musical minds whose intricate baroque-inspired counterpoint is especially poignant on Time Further Out’s “Bluette.”
I loved the sound of Desmond’s alto so much that when I was ready to learn an instrument, I wanted to take up the alto and play like him. (Unfortunately, the band director pointed at a trombone in the corner and told me to play that instead, but that’s a story for another time.) To this day, Desmond’s alto sax remains to me one of the most mystical and transfixing sounds ever heard – and that will ever be heard – on planet Earth.
Drummer Joe Morello also had an indelible role in the creation of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s musical magic. The quartet was already one of the most popular groups in jazz when Morello joined in late 1956, but it took his imaginative, virtuoso drumming to provide the support the pianist’s experiments needed to take the band to new heights.
Morello considered himself a “melodic drummer” and he understood and respected the architecture of Brubeck’s compositions. It’s hard to imagine any other drummer playing on the classic Time Out and Time Further Out with the same rhythmic deftness and intuition. His drum patterns weave intricately throughout the ensemble and tie the music together, no matter how daunting the time signature.
Morello’s inventive restraint during his “Take Five” solo no doubt contributed to the recording’s enduring popularity. And his tricky stickwork on Brubeck’s 7/4 composition “Unsquare Dance” from Time Further Out made that track a challenging hand-clapping favorite. (Its appeal to kids was evident in its use for a regular segment on Captain Kangaroo that I recall featured disembodied gloved hands clapping in a revolving circle.)
About a year after Morello joined, Brubeck hired another indispensable member of his quartet: bassist Eugene Wright. He was very much the anchor of the group. He’d played with Count Basie. Wright’s firm sense of swing kept the quartet’s experiments from losing their bearings even as the group explored rhythmic worlds far beyond Basieland. The band’s music would have fallen flat without Wright’s sense of swing.
Time Further Out and the key tracks from Time Out provided much of the foundation for my enjoyment and appreciation of jazz. Even as my tastes evolved and understanding of jazz matured, my love of the classic Dave Brubeck Quartet never dissipated. In some ways it’s similar to my relationship with another fabulous foursome, the Beatles. I remember being thrilled to my core when I first heard songs from dad’s copy of Revolver, just as I had a few years earlier with the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
The classic Brubeck quartet dissolved at the end of 1967, as Brubeck and Desmond agreed to end their partnership, although periodic reunions occurred over the next several years. The break-up of the group allowed Brubeck to move into new areas of expression and delve into orchestral and sacred composition and even jazz/rock fusion with his musician sons.
The famous Dave Brubeck Quartet reunited for a concert tour in 1976, but that was the group’s last hurrah. Desmond died the next year at the age of 52, a victim of lung cancer. Drummer Morello died in 2011 and Brubeck the next year just before his 92nd birthday. Bassist Wright is the last surviving member at the age of 97.
I’ve heard thousands of hours of music since my parents first threaded the reel-to-reel machine and played Time Further Out for me. But that album remains close to my heart like few others. If I close my eyes, I can still see those spinning reels. As I hear the opening bars of the album’s first track “It’s a Raggy Waltz,” I’m still filled with the same musical thrills as some 50 years ago. That will never change.