Word: brubecks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While Desmond's horn sighs its fancies, Brubeck punctuates with syncopated figures, listening intently, now smiling secretly, now pursing his lips, ticking off the tempo with one brown suede shoe. When Desmond is through, Brubeck picks up the last idea and toys with it. He ripples along for a while in running melodic notes, builds up a sweet and lyrical strain, noodles it into a lowdown mood, adds a contrapuntal voice, suddenly lashes into a dissonant mirror-inversion, then subsides into a completely disconnected rhythm that momentarily garbles the beat. The listeners lose all contact with the original tune...
...Session with Brubeck. Brubeck bends his lanky torso over the keys, concentrating like a child on a jigsaw puzzle, but his eyes are closed. The other members of the quartet-Alto Saxophonist Paul Desmond, Drummer Joe Dodge and Bass Player Bob Bates-go to work. Desmond's tones are plaintive and pure, the rhythm of drum and bass is as rich and firm as a deep-pile carpet. Like Bach starting off to improvise a passacaglia, they lay down the tune-say, Let's Fall in Love-as a kind of groundwork. Desmond's eyes close...
...instrument studded with loose rivets that buzz like a dozen sizzling steaks), and his bass drum whaps out compulsively, unpredictably. Bates hunches closer to his bass. Desmond, his lips without their mouthpiece looking like a nearsighted man's eyes without his spectacles, moves quietly away from the piano. Brubeck seems to cut his ties with the tempo and tears off on a remote pulse of his own. He grabs huge fistfuls of notes, builds them into a sonata-size movement that ignores the divisions of the stock 32-bar chorus. The notes grow progressively more dissonant. Brubeck...
What Makes David Run? Last year Brubeck won Down Beat's popularity and critics' poll, Metronome's "AllStar" Poll. "Man, they wail!" wrote Down Beat Jazz Editor Nat Hentoff of the quartet. "A kind of teamwork which is without parallel in the entire field of music," wrote Jazz Expert George Avakian, who brought the quartet to Columbia Records. "Complicated and extremely cerebral, [Brubeck's music] has tremendous drive and surprising warmth," wrote Critic John Hammond. This kind of music (for 45 minutes three to five times a night) earns the quartet...
...Brubeck is as untypical in the jazz field as a harp in a Dixieland combo. In a business that has known more than its share of dope and liquor, Brubeck rarely drinks, and, after seriously and philosophically considering the possible value of mescaline,* rejected the whole idea. While itinerant musicians are apt to dally with the belles along the way, Dave is happily married and has four children (a fifth is on the way). Although a shady background was once almost essential to the seasoning of a real-life jazzman, Dave spent his youth playing nursemaid to heifers and earned...