Word: brubecks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Diego Symphony filed onstage for the second half of their concert at the Balboa Park Bowl last week, they were impeccably dressed in black dinner jackets and black formals. But among them suddenly appeared four raffish young men in beige sports jackets and striped ties. They were the Dave Brubeck Jazz Quartet, there to perform in Howard Brubeck's Dialogues for Combo and Orchestra. It was the first time that a jazz group improvised in a concert with a symphony orchestra...
...jazzmen used to going "way out" on free-swinging improvisations, much of modern symphonic music has long seemed both sterile and inhibited. Composer Howard Brubeck, a college music teacher and brother of Pianist Dave Brubeck, wrote his Dialogues in an effort to un-inhibit things by wedding improvisation with formal music. Both the jazzmen and the symphonic musicians had some doubts about the project. "We can't memorize and play a piece we don't like the way a legit musician can," Dave said when he first heard Howard's plans. But he changed his mind when...
...Howard wrote four separate "dialogues," in each of which the quartet and orchestra treat a set of melodic and harmonic ideas. In the second dialogue, for instance, the orchestra (conducted by Howard himself) opened with a blueslike theme on the English horn with accompaniment from the cellos. The combo (Brubeck, Desmond, Bassman Norman Bates and Drummer Joe Dodge) then came in with a heavily accented "discussion" of the theme with orchestral string accompaniment, took off on a series of improvisations without the orchestra, then joined the orchestra again in a written variation on the main theme...
...result was a low-key blend of strings and muted brasses which sounded as smooth as cream and went down with the public just as easily. The album is still Columbia's popular bestseller outside the jazz field. (It is behind Dave Brubeck but ahead of the albums of such old standbys as Frank Sinatra, Paul Weston and Les Elgart.) Legrand followed it up with a series of mood collections on European capitals (Holiday in Rome, Castles in Spain, Vienna Holiday) which, with his first album, have sold upwards of 400,000 albums...
There's music in the air ... there's music in the hills ... there's music by the river ... there's music in the air-conditioned library. As a matter of fact, the interested Summer School student, whether his preference lies with J.S. Bach, with D. Brubeck, or simly with moonlight and grass, can hardly fail to find the musical interludes he is looking for during the months ahead...