Jazzwise Magazine Breaking News

Jazz breaking news: Dave Brubeck dies aged 91

Thursday, 06 December 2012 09:04

Had Dave Brubeck retired in 1960, the year his album Time Out – which included the hit single 'Take Five' – sold a million copies, his place in jazz history would have been assured. Still selling well to this day, it remains one of the most popular and influential albums in jazz history. Instead, the Dave Brubeck Quartet went on become the most successful jazz group of the 1960s. And more than 50 years later, in December 2012, Downbeat readers voted the Dave Brubeck Quartet ‘Best Jazz Group’ in the magazine’s annual poll – quite an achievement for a musician who had made his first appearance in a Downbeat poll in 1950.

It was a remarkable tribute to a remarkable musician since the great paradox of Brubeck’s music was that he played ‘modern jazz’ but not in the then prevailing styles of bebop-into-hard bop, something critics found difficult to forgive. This was the 1950s when the sine qua non of jazz was swing and with everybody else swinging like mad in 4/4, Brubeck was swimming against the current by experimenting with polyrhythms, polytonality and in 1959 odd time signatures – his huge hit ‘Take Five’ was in 5/4.

No wonder the critics of the time didn’t get it. Even Brubeck was moved to muse whether they were musically qualified to write about what he was doing. Yet the impact of his experimentation was such that by 1957, he was able to say: “Polytonality and polyrhythms would be two avenues that I think we opened up more than any other group [in jazz].”

Today, it is clear that Brubeck was right all along. What his critics failed to understand was that he was a modern jazz musician preferring to forge his own style of modernism and own his way of doing things. It is perhaps one reason why his highly individual work still sounds freshly minted today and the work of so many others passé. Just listen again to 'Take Five', the epitome of hip, swinging modern jazz from the Eisenhower Era. Somehow it still speaks to us today.

– Stuart Nicholson

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