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Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time

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Apparently, this tendency got him in hot water with many jazz critics over the years who believed "true" jazz only resided only in the kind of innovations in melody wrought by bebop. The late Whitney Balliett of the New Yorker mastered the difficult skill of bringing an improvisation to life in the mind’s ear, largely by avoiding the use of technical terms. Quite a bit about Dave's early experience of Milhaud, Stravinsky, Bartok and Schonberg (all of who settled in the USA from 1940 onwards), and the effect this had on steering Dave away from the 1950s prevailing bebop (with its characteristic fast, busy and intricate improvisation on melody and chord progressions) towards a sort of cool approach, with the soloist improvising strongly on key changes (discusses Dave insisting on the Bass player staying in a constant key). Few knew he couldn’t read music, yet he created a unique musical idiom that encapsulated much of the ’60s sound. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here.

I have attended the Quartets' concerts on three occasions and I found this book to be most informative. we feel the grain and texture and historical weight of single moments, but only because we also understand the larger picture.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.

Brubeck comes across as someone you would loved to have met and I was surprised to read what a heavy drinker the alto sax player Paul Desmond was. 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.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). But finding a convincing fit for Brubeck's legacy, one that reconciles his mass popularity with his advanced musical technique, has proved largely elusive. This was a perfectly balanced mechanism with an immediately identifiable sound, thanks largely to the ethereal purity of Desmond’s tone in the group’s foreground. To my delight, Clark shows appreciation for all eras of Brubeck’s sixty-ish years in the public eye.

Each chapter reviews a different aspect of Dave Brubeck's career and does so in a very well argued and well presented manner.DAVE BRUBECK: A Life in Time is about the timeless life of the inspired and inspiring jazz master Dave Brubeck. Combining his commitment to jazz with the lessons learned during his early studies with the expatriate French classical composer Darius Milhaud, he was happy to explore a hybrid work such as his brother Howard’s four-movement “Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra”, which he and his quartet recorded with the New York Philharmonic in 1960, under the baton of Leonard Bernstein. Clark lives in Oxford with his wife, two children, two cats, and more recorded music than he can ever listen to.

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