‘Take Five’ Is Impeccable. ‘Time Outtakes’ Shows How Dave Brubeck Made It.

The New York Times’ Giovanni Russonello writes, “An album of previously unheard recordings from the “Time Out” sessions in 1959 reveals the making of a masterpiece.”

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Listening to the alternate takes and behind-the-scenes recordings of any classic album will unravel some of its timelessness. But there’s something especially startling about hearing what went into the making of “Time Out,” the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s masterpiece, and maybe the ultimate example of a live art form being carved down and mapped out into an impeccably finished product.

Chances are this record lives somewhere in your memory, whether you can name it or not. “Take Five,” the single that sent the LP to No. 2 on the Billboard chart in the early 1960s, is among the most iconic records in jazz.

But from the sound of “Time Outtakes” — a collection of previously unheard recordings from the “Time Out” studio sessions, released last week in commemoration of Brubeck’s 100th birthday on the family’s new label — making the album was a sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating process, with the quartet feeling its way into a set of music that had not yet come to feel patented and perfected.

“Time Out” would be the achievement that effectively quieted Brubeck’s critics. They had called the pianist’s music uptight, unswinging and mannered (it often was), and some listeners rightly bridled at the injustice of how swiftly he — a white musician whose path ran through the conservatory and the college touring circuit, not the jazz clubs of New York — had vaulted over other bandleaders and into a Columbia recording contract. Brubeck often told the story of how ashamed he had felt when, in 1954, he became the only jazz musician other than Louis Armstrong to appear on the cover of Time magazine. He was on tour at the time with Duke Ellington, who was clearly deserving of such an honor himself, and it was Ellington who first showed Brubeck the Time cover when it came out.

As he built out his niche in jazz, Brubeck found purpose in a kind of globalism. Fascinated throughout his life by rhythmic complexity, his ears were piqued during a State Department good will tour in 1958, when he heard odd-numbered folkloric rhythms in various parts of Asia. He committed himself to integrating them into his compositions, while also making sure to nest hummable melodies inside each tune. On “Time Out,” he and the quartet manage to do all this while maintaining an effortless feeling that could easily be adopted by the listener; this was all the more impressive given that Brubeck was not always a graceful, mellifluous pianist.

The last track of “Time Outtakes” collects studio banter from throughout the recording session, and we hear Brubeck getting a little frustrated as he strives to capture a perfect take of the autumnal ballad “Strange Meadowlark.” It’s striking and disarming to hear him throwing around snippets of that song’s impeccable chord structure, sussing things out, playing one section here and a snatch of another there, while bantering with the producer Teo Macero.

Elsewhere in that track, we hear Macero encouraging the quartet to loosen up, reminding them to think of the session as nothing but a rehearsal. “You’re goddamn right it is,” one band member jokes, playful but sharp. “And I’m not getting paid for it!”

“Time Out” was recorded over three days spread across the summer of 1959. The eight tracks on “Time Outtakes” were all recorded on the first day, June 25, as the band was just breaking in the tunes. The album includes five alternate versions of pieces that made it onto “Time Out” and two tracks that did not (the show tune “I’m in a Dancing Mood” and the ad hoc “Watusi Jam”).

Paul Desmond had written “Take Five” partly as a gesture to the quartet’s drummer, Joe Morello, who wanted to show off his newfound confidence playing in 5/4 time. Listening to “Time Out,” with Morello’s broad rolling beat propelling the band and his concise, dramatic solo serving as the track’s centerpiece, he is in the driver’s seat.

But on June 25, the band tried nearly two-dozen times to get the song right, and still couldn’t. It was scrapped until a session the following week, when Morello apparently nailed it in just two takes. The “Time Outtakes” version is from June, and Morello’s part is far less developed; he taps out a sparse but somewhat obtrusive pattern on the ride cymbal, trying to perch on the end of beat one and the start of beat four. By July, he would figure out how do far more while sounding more efficient.

Still, there is an unfolding quality on the “Outtakes” version, a sense of reaching for what’s ahead, that doesn’t pertain to the final recording, maybe because it doesn’t have to. Morello’s solo on the early “Take Five” unfolds in a growing series of drum rolls, flicks of the wrist that slyly alternate their frequency and then seem to pull Morello’s arms across the whole kit. It is a far more cinematic and open display than what we get on the iconic “Time Out,” though not as built for posterity.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet
“Time Outtakes”
(Brubeck Editions)

Brubecks Feature

Sandy Brown Jazz covers the Brubecks in Poland, in 1958.

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In 2008 Dave Brubeck was awarded the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy by the then US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice thanking the jazz musician for his "patriotic attitude, leadership in representing America, bringing the language, sounds and spirit of jazz to new generations around the world". The award was made close to the 50th anniversary of a tour during which the Dave Brubeck Quartet performed in countries such as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Poland. Dave Brubeck recalled that "jazz was and is a voice of freedom. People in the former satellite countries of the USSR longed for freedom and took great risks playing this music". Then he sat down at the piano and played Dziękuję (meaning Thank You in Polish and pronouced 'jen-KOO-yeh') an improvised piece composed 50 years ago at the end of the tour in Poland, dedicated to his mother who loved the music of Fryderyk Chopin.

Click here for a video from 2010 in which Dave Brubeck introduces and plays Dziękuję.

Dave Brubeck's son Darius revisited Poland (he was on the original tour in 1958 aged 10) three times in 2018 and his recent release Live In Poland by the Darius Brubeck Quartet - Darius Brubeck (piano), Dave O'Higgins (tenor sax), Matt Ridley (bass) and Wesley Gibbens (drums), commemorates his father's ground-breaking tour, one of several tours by American jazz musicians, sponsored by the US government during the period of international tension called the 'Cold War' that followed World War 2.

After WW2 the world was dominated by two superpowers, the USA and its allies in western Europe who advocated free markets, democracy and personal freedom and the Soviet Union with its Eastern Bloc republics together with China who espoused the revolutionary ideas proposed by Marx and Lenin in the Communist Manifesto such as public ownership, state control and revolution. Communism was of course renounced by western governments but racial discrimination and the treatment of African Americans in the USA provided the Eastern Bloc with a powerful weapon with which to criticise Western society. 

As has been mentioned during the 80th anniversary commemorations of the Blue Note Record label it took two expatriate Germans to properly support African American jazz musicians who had been suffering blatant discrimination and segregation.  To counter criticism about race relations and also to expose the inhabitants of countries dominated by the Soviet Union to Western culture it was decided to embark on a propaganda war using radio stations such as 'Voice of America' to broadcast news and entertainment into the Eastern Bloc. Willis Conover was one of the broadcasters on 'Voice of America' whose programme Music USA began in 1956 and provided listeners with some of the best of American jazz music - if they were able to receive it despite the jamming of radio signals by communist authorities.

 

Willis Conover

Willis Conover

Jazz had a following in Poland from the 1920s,  the Karasiński and Kataszek Jazz - Tango Orchestra became Warsaw's most popular dance orchestra and even toured Europe and the Middle East in the 1930s. Another very popular band during what could be called Poland's Jazz Age was the Petersburski and Gold Orchestra. In the middle 1930s, among the many Jewish immigrants that arrived from Germany during the rise of the Nazis, were several established jazz musicians such as trumpeter Ady Rosner who further strengthened the reach and appeal of jazz music in Polish cities.  However everything changed after the invasion of Poland by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939 leading to years of brutal repression and then more conflict as Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. The Polish state was re-established in 1945 but under Soviet domination after the Nazis were expelled by combined Soviet and Polish military action.  

Poland became a Communist Peoples' Republic with a Stalinist leader and as such art and culture were restricted to what was acceptable to the government; those who strayed from the party line risked severe sanctions if discovered. Despite the dangers, an underground Polish jazz scene became established and in one article, it was written about how from 1947 the movement was led by a band called 'Melomani' (The Music Aficionados) that included  'The Founding Fathers of Polish Jazz': Jerzy 'Duduś Matuszkiewicz (leader, saxophones, and clarinet), Andrzej Trzaskowski (piano), and Krzysztof Komeda (piano).

 

Click here for a video of the Melomani band playing (date not given).

Melomani

Melomani

In 1948 a jazz club was formed at the YMCA in Krakow and in 1954, on the only day when they were all available – 2nd November – Polish jazz musicians gathered in the gym of the primary school at Królowej Jadwigi Street; their jam session gave rise to the Kraków All Souls “Zaduszki” Jazz Festival. Slowly and carefully jazz music re-established itself in Poland, factors such as the death of Stalin in 1953 (leading to a re-appraisal of communist ideology) and protests and rioting in Poznan in 1956 and elsewhere against the communist government, resulted in a more liberal, although still communist regime which was led by Wladislaw Gomulka; and Willis Conover's Voice of America jazz programmes from 1956 had a very significant impact.

By the time Dave Brubeck arrived in Poland in 1958 the Krakow Jazz Club was flourishing having organised its 4th All Souls “Zaduszki” Jazz Festival.  The response to Brubeck’s first concert, performed in Szczecin on the border between Poland and East Germany, was rapturous. “It was uplifting and heartbreaking at the same time,” recalls Darius Brubeck in an interview with TIME magazine,  “Our whole era of propaganda and demonization just evaporated in seconds.”  The Dave Brubeck Quartet played 12 concerts throughout Poland and received rapturous applause wherever he went - he is quoted as saying "No dictatorship can tolerate jazz, it is the first sign of a return to freedom".  The last concert in Poznan, where up to 100 people had died during the anti-government protests less than 2 years previously, was applauded wildly by thousands after Brubeck played that specially composed piece, inspired both by Chopin and the loss of life entitled Dziękuję -'Thank You'. 

A film on YouTube gives a brief but revealing description of the tour - click here -    and there is a great deal more background here which makes fascinating reading. 
 

A programme cover from the 1958 tour in the Washington Post reads:

The "Cultural" Cold War had begun in 1954 when President Eisenhower arranged for US orchestras and performers to travel overseas as part of a diplomacy programme, the Soviets responded with the Bolshoi Ballet.  It was an African-American congressman, Adam Powell, who first suggested that mixed-race jazz bands would be particularly effective emissaries and Powell's friend Dizzy Gillespie was the first to tour countries thought to be at risk from Soviet expansion in 1956.  Brubeck and other jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong travelled the world to promote their country and show that racially-integrated bands existed within American culture. The irony of the situation, particularly in the light of events such as Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 when nine black students were physically prevented from attending a high school by the National Guard was not lost on these musicians. Louis Armstrong, in response to Little Rock incident cancelled a trip to Russia which some believe influenced Eisenhower to overrule the Arkansas governor and allow the black students to study where they wished.  Dave Brubeck, with his wife Iola composed a musical production called "The Real Ambassadors" in the hope that the production would be performed on Broadway; this was not to be but excerpts were performed at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival starring Louis Armstrong, Carmen McCrae, Dave Brubeck, Lambert, Hendricks and Yolande trio with Iola Brubeck narrating. The production's lofty ideals are described in the festival programme: "The theme of The Real Ambassadors is contained in the title. Louis Armstrong, Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie - all of whom have made extensive and highly acclaimed overseas tours under the auspices of the U. S. Department of State - are the "real ambassadors" representing America to foreign peoples. And since jazz has become an international language and a force for world understanding, it may well be that the very phrase "foreign peoples" will one day become happily archaic."

 

Dave, Iola, Darius and Michael in Poland Picture attributed to the University of California.

Dave, Iola, Darius and Michael in Poland
Picture attributed to the University of California.

The Darius Brubeck Quartet's commemorative album was recorded at 'Blue Note' in Poznan during a tour of the same seven cities where Dave Brubeck had performed in 1958.  In Szczecin, Darius Brubeck was deeply moved to find a section of the Polish National Museum dealing with the history of popular uprisings associated his father's tour and the beginning of the movement that liberated Poland from Soviet domination and that led to Polish independence in 1989.  One of the documents in the museum at Szczecin describes a reaction to Dave Brubeck's performance - "It was associated with another, free, better world and, like any forbidden fruit, tasted extraordinary. It was not just music but a lifestyle. Jazz was a promise of something different, more colorful and free than the cardinal reality of the People's Republic of Poland." Darius Brubeck says of his 2018 tour "Suffused with political meaning for the audience and my boyhood memories of witnessing the devastation left by war with my late brother Michael and my parents, this was no ordinary tour".  

And of course Live In Poland is no ordinary album, Darius Brubeck plays two of his father's compositions, In Your Own Sweet Way and Dziękuję, certainly not imitating them and with Dave O'Higgins on tenor saxophone as opposed to the alto saxophone of Paul Desmond in the Dave Brubeck Quartet there is quite a distinctive difference both in sound and improvisational approach. 

Click here to listen to In Your Own Sweet Way.

The arrangement of Paul Desmond's Take 5 on the album certainly departs from the very famous original and quite apart from the saxophone, Wesley Gibbens creates a drum solo that is also very different but nevertheless very impressive.

Click here to listen to that version of Take 5.

The album includes a great track credited to Hugh Masekela called Nomali; Masekela fled South Africa in 1960 when his activities against apartheid put him in danger from the authorities. Darius Brubeck taught jazz in South Africa and formed the first mixed race student band from a South African university continuing the family tradition of promoting human rights.  Other tracks on the album are composed by Darius Brubeck - Earthrise, Matt the Cat and the very evocative Sea of Troubles in which Brubeck thoughtfully uses dynamics, melody, interplay and crescendo to create a really great original sound.

There must be very few jazz albums with a more compelling backstory than Live in Poland. Darius Brubeck is following in the footsteps of "The Real Ambassadors" continuing his father's drive to make jazz an international language and a force for world understanding and he is also playing great jazz.

 

Click here to listen to Darius Brubeck's version of Dziękuję from the album. Click here for details and samples of the album.

 

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