Time Out Revisited

[Note: Thanks again to Jazz.com for including the blog in their links page. If you're new to the site, welcome, and stay awhile.]

Next year will be the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Dave Brubeck's Time Out, one of the classics of the modern jazz canon. Commercially, Time Out was one of the most successful jazz album of all time, reaching number 2 on the Billboard pop album charts in 1961 (the track "Take Five" from the album reached number 25 on the pop singles chart that same year). Two tracks from the album, "Blue Rondo a la Turk" and "Take Five," are now standards of the jazz repertoire. The album itself has a secure place in The Jazz Tradition as one of the quintessential recordings of cool jazz. One critic has gone so far to describe "Take Five" as a tune that "for a lot of people who aren't really jazz listeners defines what jazz is."

But while the commercial success of the album is undeniable, Time Out still suffers from somewhat of a critical indifference, at least if you compare it to the status of other "great" albums that came out around the same time as Time Out. 1959 was a very fertile year for jazz classics, as Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come, and John Coltrane's Giant Steps were also released that year (as were a number of lesser "classics," like Charles Mingus' Blues and Roots). Many of these records are given more prominent places in the pantheon of legendary jazz albums, and all are considered to be important statements in the evolution of jazz. Compared to these other albums, there is little love for Time Out, which is sometimes dismissed as an exercise in time signatures, rather than a work of art in its own right.

Part of this was no fault of Dave Brubeck himself. As Stanley Crouch remembers,

When I was coming up, people either liked Dave Brubeck or they hated him. Now if they hated him, they hated him for a couple of reasons. One, they didn't think he swang [sic]. Two, they thought his conception was garbage. And three, they thought he was getting a lot of attention because he was white.

Crouch makes an important point. During the media fascination with cool jazz in the early 1950s, when Life, Time, and even Good Housekeeping were extolling the virtues of clean-cut, white jazz musicians from the West Coast who were (in their words) saving jazz from the drug-addled excesses of bebop, Brubeck was often cast as the Great White Hope of jazz. This clearly upset many musicians, who felt that the media obsession with Brubeck and other white musicians willfully neglected the artistry of black musicians.¹ Brubeck was often a target of black musicians in Down Beat Blindfold Tests around this time.² Even though many musicians softened on Brubeck later on, a lingering skepticism persisted in the reaction to his music for a long time, which doubtless contributed to the indifference paid to Brubeck by constructors of The Jazz Tradition, who often relegated Brubeck to footnote status.

--

I first listened to Time Out when I was in high school, still building my jazz collection. When I bought the album, it quickly made its way into my regular listening rotation. Before that time, I had never listened to Brubeck or saxophonist Paul Desmond, and still had not listened to much music considered to be part of the 1950s cool school (sometimes also called cool jazz and/or West Coast jazz). I was quickly drawn to the sound of Desmond's saxophone and his and Brubeck's compositions, none of which sounded like anything I had heard before. However, as time wore on and my jazz library grew, I found myself coming back to Time Out less and less often, to the point where, according to my iTunes, I had not listened to it at all in the past three years until I started working on this post.

This is not because I all of a sudden began to dislike Brubeck, but rather I feel I may have grown out of his music. When I first heard the album, it sounded so adventurous. The album opens with "Blue Rondo a la Turk," a tune written in 9/8 that is played in a delayed four (with every measured grouped as 2+2+2+3/8). The song shifts into standard 4/4 in certain sections, and remains in 4/4 during most of the solo section. It is a well-conceived and well-executed tune, with a wonderful solo from Paul Desmond. The main melody was captivating to my teenage ears. Sometimes I would listen only to the main melody, and skip the solos, so I could break the melody and rhythm down in my head, and explore the song's construction. When I hear the melody today, I am still captivated by it, somewhat in part due to the nostalgia factor of remembering how I felt when I first heard it.

But regardless of that feeling, the song has lost much of its novelty and immediacy in the years since I have first heard it. This is not surprising in retrospect. When I first heard Time Out, I had not yet heard Ornette Coleman, fusion-era Miles Davis, Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, Charles Lloyd, or a number of other exploratory and/or avant-garde musicians who would push or bend the boundaries of jazz much farther than Brubeck did on Time Out. To put it another way, after hearing The Shape of Jazz to Come, much of the music on Time Out no longer seems so radical. This has to be a large part of the reason why I do not listen to Time Out much at all these days. In high school, the album was like a new girlfriend; I had yet to explore the complexities inherent in the album or learn everything I could from it. Now, the album resembles an ex-girlfriend, in that I focus more on its shortcomings than what I loved about it so much to begin with.

--

And there is much to love about Time Out. As he so often was, Desmond was in rare form, giving many captivating solos and exhibiting his unique tone on alto saxophone. Desmond and Brubeck were one of the great partnerships in jazz history, on par with Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Charles Mingus and Dannie Richmond, or Bird and Diz. One could just as easily consider this album a vehicle for Desmond as a vehicle for Brubeck's compositions. To quote Crouch, "the combination of the two of them on the same bandstand was better for both of them career-wise and perhaps for the ear of the audience."

However, unlike the other classics of 1959 mentioned earlier, Time Out made no major stylistic statement other than the embrace of nonstandard time signatures. Otherwise, it was a typical effort from Brubeck masquerading as an adventure in style. There is little difference between Time Out and every other album of his that preceded it, save for the unusual times of the tunes. It did not turn jazz on its head as The Shape of Jazz To Come, nor did it distill the essence of tonality the way Kind of Blue did. The album is simply Brubeck being Brubeck, to borrow an overwrought phrase.

--

"Blue Rondo a la Turk" is the most adventurous tune of the album, with alternation between straight 4/4 meter and 9/8. However, it is also a tune that is prone to the common accusation against Brubeck, that he could not swing. After the melody and bridge are played, the tune switches into a standard blues form for the solo section, with a few detours into 9/8. After Desmond gives a subdued but enjoyable solo, Brubeck enters, and tries to match the mood set by Desmond. However, he overshoots the mark, and his first solo sounds stiff and overly muted. Here the swing feels artificial, and a bit sterile. This is rather unfortunate, since the tune got off to such a captivating start with the weaving melody and solo by Desmond. The band returns with the melody after Brubeck's solo, but the tune never fully recovers. In a way, the tune is a microcosm of the entire album, alternating between moments of joy and moments of tedium.

"Strange Meadow Lark" follows, and it is one of the more conventional pieces on the album, played in straight 4/4 after a rubato introduction. Though there is no overt challenge to convention inherent in the tune, it is nonetheless enjoyable, on par with other tunes of Brubeck's like "In Your Own Sweet Way."

The third, and most notable, track of the album was "Take Five," a bluesy tune set in 5/4 time, which effectively introduced the time signature to jazz. It is the only tune on the album written by Desmond (the rest were penned by Brubeck). It is a brilliantly-concieved tune, which swings as well as any other jazz tune while navigating an assymetric meter. Desmond dextrously works through the tune's head, then lets his haunting tone shine through during a brief but satisfying solo. Brubeck sits out the solo section here, and instead drummer Joe Morello solos over the comping of Brubeck and bassist Gene Wright. Morello keeps things simple (after all, the song's meter is already confusing enough to new listeners), but still commands attention. The tune is an effectively ominous drone, which manages to keep a single rhythm interesting throughout the five-minute tune. The tune also has a certain je ne sais quoi which Infiniti executives misinterpreted to mean "Buy our sedan," but that is a different subject for a different post.

"Three To Get Ready" is the most underrated tune of the album. Shifting between 3/4 and 4/4, the tune is upbeat and joyful, perfectly written for Desmond's sound. Desmond's solo out of the head is among the best he ever recorded, and is one I recommend to anyone who asks me about Desmond. "Kathy's Waltz" follows, and Desmond again carries the day, while Brubeck plays with the time signature in his solo, superimposing a two-beat rhythm on the waltz accompaniment. The effect is fun, and swings rather nicely.

"Everybody's Jumpin'" is a satisfying, if unmemorable swinger set against flurries of block chords by Brubeck. Like much of the album, it suggests something new without lighting the world on fire. "Pick Up Sticks" ends the album on a similar note, bringing the album to a somewhat anticlimatic end following the disruptive beginning set by "Blue Rondo a la Turk." Listened alone, the second half the album does not seem like something scholars would be discussing fifty years later.

--

The time-signature experiments of Time Out were never extrapolated by anyone else the way Miles Davis' modal experiments on Kind of Blue or Ornette Coleman's breaking of harmonic barriers on The Shape of Jazz To Come were. Perhaps this is why it given secondary position to these other works in The Jazz Tradition. Remove the nonstandard time signatures, and the album is still enjoyable, but is not progressive, in the sense that it did not present a drastically new way of playing jazz for other musicians to draw on and evolve. It is still full of surprises, and presents new layers upon further listening, but in the constructed Jazz Tradition, it does not provide trajectory, save for introducing the music to thousands of suburban college students (which is no small feat indeed). As I wrote earlier, the album suggests something new without lighting the world on fire.

Thus it is not entirely unfortunate that the album is overshadowed by Miles, Ornette, and Trane, but this is not to say it is no less of a work of art. Brubeck may not have reinvented the wheel, but he certainly did not mail it in on this album either. On its fiftieth anniversary, it rightly will be celebrated as an example of the limitless possibility inherent in jazz, and also for the searching curiosity of the music which could build so big a tent as to include it with the harmonic explorations of Coltrane and harmalodic possibilities of Coleman.

--

Track Listing: Blue Rondo a La Turk; Strange Meadow Lark; Take Five; Three to Get Ready; Kathy's Waltz; Everybody's Jumpin'; Pick Up Sticks
Personnel: Brubeck, piano; Paul Desmond, saxophone; Gene Wright, bass; Joe Morello, drums

¹Brubeck was well aware of this fact, and, to his credit, was also skeptical of the way the jazz press and mass media sometimes latched onto white jazz musicians in order to present the music in a manner more palatable to white audiences. He was also as aware as anyone of the way in which jazz was sometimes used to gloss over problems relating to race relations, in addition to being an ally of the civil rights movement. See for instance The Real Ambassadors, a musical he wrote with his wife which satired the use of jazz as a foreign policy by the US State Department. In the musical, Louis Armstrong plays a musician visiting a fictional African country who criticizes the contradictory measure of using jazz to promote America as a bastion of liberty and equality while the US government had yet to sufficiently support the efforts of the civil rights movement.
²My favorite example of this is a Charles Mingus Blindfold Test from 1955, in which Mingus says of a Lee Konitz record, "This makes me mad, because it's not jazz, and people are calling this kind of beat jazz. Dave Brubeck gets the same beat." Mingus would retract this comment himself later that year in his Down Beat article "An Open Letter To Miles Davis." In a 1963 interview, Archie Shepp embarassedly remembered telling Lee Morgan that Brubeck was one of his early influences was Dave Brubeck, after which Morgan "really wigged out."

--

Below is a YouTube of the Brubeck quartet playing "Take Five" in 1961, with Desmond showing off his inimitable style and Morello giving a nice solo evocative of the styles of both Art Blakey and Philly Joe Jones.

List: Indispensable Jazz Blogs

When I first started writing this blog, I decided to search the vast interwebs for some inspiration. Though I already had a couple of jazz blogs in my reader, I soon discovered that there are plenty of great blogs out there that I did not know about. Since it took me awhile to scour the internet for these blogs (not to mention sifting through the tons of jazz blogs that turn up on a Google search that are no longer active), I thought I'd list some of my most essential reading here on the blog.

Two notes on this list:

1. As important as they are, I have not included sites like AllAboutJazz or Jazz.com since they are technically not blogs (though Jazz.com hosts a blog).
2. This list is by no means exhaustive. I have not included every blog I read or have seen, and any omissions are not meant as slights. Instead, I'd like this list to serve as a jumping off point for any potential readers out there. The sidebar on my blog or any of these other blogs has even more links to pursue, so don't limit yourself to the list below.

Now that the disclaimers are out of the way, on to the list, in alphabetical order.

• Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, in which Darcy James Argue comments on the goings-on of the jazz world while updating you on the goings-on of his Secret Society.
  
• Destination: OUT. If you're new to avant-garde and free jazz and need someone to hold your hand while you explore this corner of the jazz world, then this site is for you. Proprietors Chilly Jay Chill and Prof. Drew LeDrew provide tons of samples of rare or out-of-print music and discuss their finds with the readers. Seeing a new D:O post in my reader is always a treat, like opening the first present on Christmas morning.
  
• Do The Math. DTM is a blog run by Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus, with occasional contributions from Dave King and Reid Anderson. Since The Bad Plus are on the road so often, the blog can often go awhile without updates. But when the updates come, they come big, see this epic 18,000-word post on Lennie Tristano from March of this year.
  
• Fred Kaplan. Besides being a top-notch foreign affairs columnist for Slate, Fred Kaplan is an avid jazz buff who blogs for Stereophile. Unfortunately, Stereophile does not provide an RSS feed for Kaplan's blog. Get with the program, Stereophile!
  
• Greenleaf Music Blog. Another great musician's blog. Dave Douglas runs the shop here, with contributions from various coconspirators.
  
• Jazz Beyond Jazz. Run by estimable Howard Mandel, Jazz Beyond Jazz covers the New York scene, among others.
  
• Jazz Lives. I only tuned into this one recently, but it has quickly become a must-read. Blogger Michael Steinman recently dug up a letter from Sonny Rollins to Coleman Hawkins for the blog.
  

Under the Radar: Percussion Bitter Sweet

Max Roach
Percussion Bitter Sweet

In the standard history-of-jazz retelling, Max Roach disappears in 1957. He shows up in the 1940s, when he was present at the creation of bebop, and, along with Kenny Clarke and Art Blakey, reinvented jazz drumming for a new generation. He shows up again in the mid-1950s, when he is leading a hard-bop quintet with Sonny Rollins and Clifford Brown that helps define the genre. Beyond that, he fades against the luminaries of Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and others. Max Roach seemingly ceases to be a titan of jazz, slipping into historical obscurity.

In reality, while operating under the massive shadows cast by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and others during the 1960s, Max Roach produced some wonderful jazz in the early part of the decade worth revisiting. Though he would later recede from the jazz community,* his work early in the decade displayed an artist whose social activism reinvigorated his art following the tragic death of Clifford Brown in 1956. Roach thrust himself into the burgeoning civil rights movement during the late 1950s, raising money for various civil rights organizations, taking part in protests and sit-ins, and using his position as a professional musician to promote the cause in the media. His activism first seeped into his music with 1958's Deeds, Not Words, though one could argue that his founding of Debut Records with Charles Mingus in the early-1950s was also part of his activist streak, considering the socioeconomic environment in which musicians operated.

Roach's activism flourished as the 1960s began. In 1960, Roach helped organize a rebel counter-festival at the Newport Jazz Festival, hoping to promote younger up-and-coming musicians while protesting the low pay of the (usually black) artists who could not garner top billing. Later that year, Roach recorded We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, a multi-part work which chronicled the history of African Americans from slavery to 1960. The next year, Roach would record Percussion Bitter Sweet, with a veritable all-star lineup including trumpeter Booker Little, saxophonist Eric Dolphy, vocalist (and wife) Abbey Lincoln, and pianist Mal Waldron, among others. The album features fresh rhythms, incorporating Afro-Cuban 6/8 beats at times, and captivating performances, but it was also a statement of Roach's cultural politics. Roach acknowledges jazz as rooted in African rhythms and folkways, and presents music that is informed by and informing of African cultures and societies.

The album opens with "Garvey's Ghost," early-20th century black nationalist Marcus Garvey. After a haunting opening melody, Little gives a searing, melodic solo. Little plays around the harmony, weaving in and out of pitch in a solo evocative of a strong orator, rising in energy as his speech builds momentum. Clifford Jordan follows with a wide-ranging solo, and Roach then gives a playful and exploratory drum solo over a conga and cowbell accompaniment. The song closes with the restatement of the melody. Written by Roach, "Garvey's Ghost" uses Lincoln's voice in a chorale with the winds, lending added power to the melody. It is a wonderful example of inter-genre fusion, sounding at home in Africa and America, but possible only in the context of jazz.

Garvey's Ghost

"Tender Warrior" reminds us how special Booker Little and Eric Dolphy, and gives the listener pass to wonder how jazz would have been different had both of them not died too young. Little carries the tunes main melody on his flute, showing captivating control over the instrument and letting his voice sound through it. Mal Waldron gives an imaginative solo, followed by Little, who toes the line between harmony and dissonance better than any of his peers could at the time, providing a bridge between hard bop and the avant-garde. Besides that, his sound is wonderful, combining the urgency of Clifford Brown with the vocal quality and warmth of Miles Davis. Dolphy goes on flights of fury on a bass clarinet, followed by an even more furious drum solo by Roach. However, being Max, even when playing furiously he exhibits amazing control over the kit, not making any extraneous sound to dull his lines.

Tender Warriors

Perhaps the irony of Max Roach is that he made some of the best socially-conscious jazz ever, but did so at a time when highly artistic jazz was en vogue. This is not to say that the two are mutually inclusive, or that they are in direct opposition. Rather, Roach reached one of his peaks during the early 1960's when he recorded Percussion Bittersweet and Freedom Now Suite. However great those albums were, the public and jazz press at large were more interested in (or repulsed by, and then mobilized against) the zeitgeist created by Coleman and pushed further by Coltrane, Albert Ayler, et al. Thus, Roach is under-appreciated in memory, and a fertile period of work for him is not as well-remembered as his earlier peaks or the simultaneous peaks of his peers. Such is jazz, a diverse music that has become nearly impossible to completely keep up with.

Track Listing: Garvey's Ghost; Mama; Tender Warriors; Praise for a Martyr; Mendacity; Man From South Africa
Personnel: Max Roach, drums; Booker Little, trumpet; Julian Priester, trombone; Eric Dolphy, reeds; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Mal Waldron, piano; Art Davis, bass; Carlos "Patato" Valdes, conga; Carlos "Totico" Eugenio, cowbell; Abbey Lincoln, vocals

*A few resources I read while composing this post (including Roach's biography at All About Jazz), reference a brief period during the mid to late-1960s when Roach was "blacklisted by the American recording industry." The language in these references is vague, and offers few added details. I had not previously seen this in any other readings I have done, which leads me to be somewhat suspicious of the claim. Previously, I had understood that Roach scaled back during this time, recording less often because he was focused on his activism at the time. I'll have to get back to you on that one...

Out of Office

I'm off to Miami for Thanksgiving weekend. Enjoy your holiday, here are some links...

• Jazz Lives posted a copy of a letter Sonny Rollins sent to Coleman Hawkins in 1962.
• On Rifftides, Doug Ramsey unearthed a great YouTube clip of the Bill Evans Trio in a 1966 Swedish television program. Bill speaks about the groups approach to improvisation, and the trio follows with a wonderful performance of "Emily."
• The New Yorker briefly covers a lecture on cell biology, evolution, and cancer by Harold Varmus, which is accompanied by a jazz quintet led by his son Jacob Varmus. Perhaps next time he could arrange for the Giant Steps robot to open...
• Over on Do The Math, The Bad Plus posted some choice photos from the Life Magazine collection newly hosted on Google. Here's one of my favorites after browsing the collection briefly: Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie on stage at the 1958 Monterey Jazz Festival.

• NPR's All Songs Considered takes a look at the Beatles' White Album, which was released forty years ago this week. Host Bob Boilen interviews Beatles scholar Bruce Spizer, and shares some wonderful demos of songs from the album recorded in May of 1968 at George Harrison's house. Though they were not a jazz group, they were certainly influenced by jazz and left a sizable influence on jazz (would there have been fusion without the Beatles? Probably, but it would have been different, I think).
• Again at Rifftides, here's a retelling of Paul Desmond's final birthday in 1976, which fell on Thanksgiving. He spent it with Jim Hall at Hall's daughter's apartment in New York City. After dinner, the two went to see Thelonious Monk at the Village Vanguard, later hanging out with Monk in the Vanguard's kitchen. I am a sucker for jazz-legends-as-regular-dudes stories like this, they make Desmond and Hall seem like Jerry and George meeting Kramer at the coffee shop...
  
• Sharing a birthday with Desmond on Tuesday was Willie "The Lion" Smith (1897-1973). Here he is in Germany in 1966:

Review: Radiolarians I

Medeski Martin & Wood
Radiolarians 1

Medeski Martin & Wood have been together for a long time - almost twenty years - so you can forgive them from shaking up their routine to keep things fresh and keep themselves interested. Whether that means bringing John Scofield into the fold for an album and tour, or releasing various side projects, these forays outside of the standard (if you could use that word to describe anything they do) MMW ouvre allow the trio to both pursue outside outlets of creativity and expand the repertoire that each member brings to the group.

This is the same process out of which sprang Radiolarians 1, the latest offering from the group. Foregoing their standard recording technique (relentless studio jamming edited into a group of tracks), the trio spent the first part of this year composing rough sketches of some new tunes, then let the compositions grow organically on tour before returning to the studio to record the newly-fleshed out tunes. Radiolarians 1 is intended as the first in a three-part series (you can imagine what the next two albums will be called). They named the album after a marine organism of the same name. According to the band's website, radiolaria "grow their intricately beautiful patterned skeleton around their soft core in defiance of normal biological process, similarly to Medeski Martin and Woods latest creative cycle."

The results of this process are quite satisfying. Like many other works from the trio, the tracks on Radiolarians 1 represent not only individual parts of a coherent whole but also captivating standalone pieces of music. The trio covers wide territory in each of the tracks, from the spacy New Orleans funk of "Free Go Lily" to the Jack Johnson-era Miles Davis back beat of "Cloud Wars." The process of slowly developing the individual songs in this album plays up some under-appreciated traits of the group. Medeski reminds us on "Free Go Lily" of how percussive his acoustic piano-playing is, lending extra rhythmic force on the tune – his percussiveness is easy to forget since he sticks to electric instruments so often. Wood is paradoxically light on his electric bass on the decidedly-heavy tune, "Reliquary." Martin displays his impish wit on "Sweet Pea Dreams."

This new recording process has served Medeski Martin & Wood well, allowing the three much time to dig in, explore, and develop their parts before putting them to record. The result is an exhilarating, fresh effort for the veteran trio, proving that theire well still produces after so many years together.

Track Listing: First Light; Cloud Wars; Muchas Gracias; Professor Nohair; Reliquary; Free Go Lily; Rolling Son; Sweet Pea Dreams; God Fire; Hidden Moon
Personnel: John Medeski, keyboards; Chris Wood, bass; Billy Martin, drums