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These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Clark puts Brubeck’s music in its proper context, the stride piano and boogie-woogie influences as well as the counterpoint and polytonality (via his studies with composer Darius Milhaud, who also taught Burt Bacharach, among many others). Although I am not a musician and much of the technical discussion of Brubeck's music flew over my head, I enjoyed reading this book immensely. Words and sentences spit and spin and swing creating rhythms and harmonies worthy of Brubeck himself.
Nothing could have been more fundamentally F minor than the first bar of that opening track [of "Jazz Impressions of the USA"], "Ode to a Cowboy", in which Brubeck's melodic line raised up the notes of an F minor chord, a starting point of harmonic security from which he moved his melody step by step keeping strictly within the tonal boundaries. By keeping the music at the centre, and interweaving the background of cultural, political and social change to illuminate the development of the music, Clark gives us a complete picture of the artist's life and work. Something that was obvious was the author’s dedication to presenting an excellent and thorough presentation of the life and works of Dave Brubeck, but unfortunately I was unable to maintain interest for more than a chapter or two at a time as a result of what I’ve mentioned that seemed to get in the way of enjoying this book as much as I’d hoped to. Blocks of harmony passing between the brass and the saxophones, that was how arrangers tended to think, and i loved those arrangements. And really I'm not much of a jazz aficionado, but I own a dozen CD versions of his now-classic 50's and 60's albums when he was fronting his eponymously-named Quartet.
To my delight, Clark shows appreciation for all eras of Brubeck’s sixty-ish years in the public eye. He once related, with some amusement, an enigmatic compliment paid to him by the great avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor: “He told me I was the missing link.
It was an album that could melt into the background or send people to the dance floor but which also revealed, and continues to reveal, further harmonic, timbral, and melodic subtleties with each careful listen. Words and sentences spit and spin and swing, creating rhythms and harmonies worthy of Brubeck himself. Brubeck opened up as never before, disclosing his unique approach to jazz; the heady days of his 'classic' quartet in the 1950s-60s; hanging out with Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis; and the many controversies that had dogged his 66-year-long career.By the dawn of the 1960s, when “Take Five”, a catchy little number in 5/4 time, was high in the pop charts, regularly requested on the BBC’s Sunday lunchtime radio show Two-Way Family Favourites, he was effectively the public face of modern jazz, even though his genial temperament and settled family life – he was married to the same woman for 70 years – ran contrary to what was generally seen as the idiom’s beatnik tendency. Time Out may be what Brubeck (1920-2012) is known for, but, as Philip Clark reveals in Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time , it is merely the highlight of his long career as a composer, pianist and bandleader.
This book] is that rare beast: an uncompromisingly analytical study that absorbs and entertains, illuminating both its subject and his social context. There are little vignettes - the role of the US State Department in sending jazz groups out as cultural ambassadors, the way the mob ran jazz clubs and wrecked musicians' lives, the Brubeck influence on prog rock - but the core of the book is Brubeck's own music, described in loving, fascinating detail. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Dave Brubeck at the piano with (from left) Paul Desmond, Joe Morello and Eugene Wright, in 1959. In 1938 Dave started as a veterinary student at "The College of the Pacific" but quickly changed to take music classes.Philip Clark has produced an excellent book about Dave Brubecks progressive career and although it is a bit technical at times to a non musician like myself, it is never boring. Brubeck received America’s top arts award, The Kennedy Center Honors in 2009 (along with Bruce Springsteen), which happened to coincide with Brubeck’s 89th birthday.