Music, RIP

RIP Dave Brubeck

I can’t pretend I know all that much about Dave Brubeck, the jazz pianist who just died. Like most jazz fans, I know Time Out well. And I only know the rest of his career from reading about him. I don’t think I have listened to a single other Brubeck album though I have heard the odd additional track on CJRT (J as in Jazz) Jazz FM 91 – Canada’s Premier Jazz Station – “dedicated to jazz and the jazz community at large.”  (Did I mention they play jazz?)

Ahem.

I’m sorry. A eulogy isn’t the place for inside jokes about how frequently the Toronto jazz station says the word “jazz” on air. Let’s try this again…

Even if I haven’t heard much else, he certainly made an impact on me through Time Out. (There’s no way I would listen to much of the radical music I listen to had I not been exposed to that secretly radical album at a relatively young age.)

And his primary impact on mainstream jazz probably also stems from that album. Time Out is one of those odd beasts that managed to fairly radical yet also extraordinarily – for jazz – commercial. I believe it was the biggest selling jazz album of all-time up until – the very different – Head Hunters nearly 15 years later. Much of the music contained in Time Out – particularly “Take Five,” the hit from the album which was written as a feature for the quartet’s drummer, by the saxophonist – is recognizable even to people who have never consciously tried to listen to jazz in their lives.

But it was relatively radical for its time (1959). I say relatively because Ornette Colemen was inventing free jazz at the time, and most of you people out there won’t ever like free jazz, but you would like Time Out, I’m pretty sure. It was radical because the album broke from the near-standard time signatures of most jazz before it. Others had done so on the occasional track earlier than Brubeck, but nobody else has his commercial success with the idea prior to the album’s release.

And that release changed jazz – it became okay for even mainstream jazz musicians to play in non-standard time which allowed people to experiment without having to follow in the direction of free or fusion – and it changed popular music – for example, where would psychedelia or prog rock be without Time Out? Moreover, the Beatles were actually enormously influenced by this album – as you can learn in my book, plug, plug – and they influenced pretty much everybody else in the pop-rock universe, so there’s Brubeck’s influence on popular music for you.

But the fact is that Brubeck released an absolute ton of music, and Time Out is only the tip of the iceberg. As I noted, I can’t evaluate that for you, having heard little to none of it, but I can say that if any of it is even half as good and influential as Time Out, then the world has lost one of its great artists.

He may not been of the stature of Louis Armstrong or Bird or Duke or Miles or Monk or Trane or the others in what you might call the “first tier” of jazz greats. But he likely belongs in the next group. His legacy is enormous and we should acknowledge it more. Hopefully I will do so by listening to more of his music.

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