Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
John Wm. Riley : 04/11/1954

This year Dave Brubeck, California jazz pianist, and his quartet, were the winners of both “Metronome” and “Downbeat” polls. These are magazines devoted to jazz. At hand are five Dave Brubeck discs, produced by Fantasy Records (a company operated by Boston’s George Wein and his Storyville staff). These show plainly why Brubeck today is considered one of the most influential forces in modern jazz music. Two discs are called simply, The Dave Brubeck Quartet. One features Dave and his gifted sax man, Paul Desmond, with Ron Crotty, bass, and Joe Dodge, drums, backing them them up as always. Jazz at Oberlin was recorded at the Ohio college, while Jazz at the College of the Pacific is the most recent.

Brubeck does to a popular tune what the classic composers did in improvisation to music of their time. He has a firm background of study with Darius Milhaud, but has evolved a personal style and an aesthetic, which have a lot of meaning today. The serious music lover will have to hear Brubeck to believe that his work has an almost universal appeal.

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Original Liner Notes by Wayne Morrill
President, Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia
College of Pacific, Stockton, California

The story of Dave Brubeck and jazz at the College of Pacific begins long before this meridian concert given on December 14, 1953. This was the third such concert Dave had played for the student body under the sponsorship of the C.O.P. chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national music fraternity.

In 1950 Dave’s newly acclaimed trio played a memorable concert to a packed house. And even before that, in 1948, the first concert of Dave’s virtually unknown Jazz Workshop Octet, a trail blazing and radically experimental group, included compositions showing not only a mastery of the structure and content of jazz, but also the influence of e. e. cummings and Dave’s teacher, Darius Milhaud.

Dave’s association with C.O.P. began as a student majoring in music in 1938. Apocryphal but vivid stories continue to be told of Dave’s undergraduate years. It is said he lived in a gigantic cellar—called the “Bomb Shelter”—with three other musicians, a cook stove, a cold water pipe and a sump for a shower, and an old upright oakwood Starr piano. During this time Dave existed by playing piano at night and attending classes by day. One day, while dozing half asleep in a music theory class, he was called on to analyze a chordal sequence. He muttered to himself, “I can feel it in my fingers,” and thereupon, to the amazement of the students and the professors, he played the sequence perfectly on the piano. During these busy days, however he did find time to write a charming five movement suite for piano to Iola Whitlock, a drama student at C.O.P., who is now Mrs. David Brubeck. These early indications of vigor and talent (humor, too) are amply demonstrated by the finished musicianship heard on these records.

The concert began on a quiet note. The first tune, I’ll Never Smile Again, is keyed low in dynamic range and emotional content, and is played at a medium tempo. Paul starts, his choruses are melodic and straightforward. Dave plays in a single note style, develops into his block chord technique, but then backs off for a final chorus of delicate exchange with Paul. The ending shows the quartet’s humor, as Paul interpolates a phrase of the tune, Taboo, a minor third higher in tonality.

The second tune, in a bright tempo, is All the Things You Are. Paul begins again, with an unadorned melodic line. In the development, he uses swinging, contrapuntal-like fragments and eighth note running figures. Dave uses the lower portion of the piano to great effect in his first chorus. Then, as the excitement mounts, Dave develops his solo into the sound that is so unmistakably Brubeck: snarling, complex smashing chords, running passages in contrary motion, and—Dave singing to himself. As he finishes the solo, he halves the tempo a la Garner and cuts down the large chords to a two and three line figuration. Paul renters in quasi-counterpoint and the thing winds up with a Rameau-like “classical” ending.

The third tune, For All We Know, is played at a very slow tempo. Paul starts with a quiet, lyrical solo that demonstrates his singing tone quality. Dave backs his second chorus with a rocking 6/8 type figure that swings behind Paul notes. Dave’s choruses are among the most interesting on these sides. He begins with the use of almost saccharine thirds in the melody, and expands his ideas to full, harmonically complex chords, reminiscent of his early style. Paul reenters cautiously mid-chorus to end the tune, using a modal scale that is Oriental in flavor.

Dave told me he included the fourth tune, Laura, “because it was so relaxed.” This is typical of Dave’s mastery of understatement, as this is like no other Laura you have ever heard Dave play. It is to me the high point of the concert: slow in tempo, florid in technique, yet played with great restraint (not “showy”), truly mature in pianistic, formal and musical control of the idiom. It is reminiscent of 19th century Romantic pianism, sounding as though Rachmaninoff might have written it. And the piano on which Dave plays, a Bösendorfer grand recently purchased by the C.O.P. Conservatory, shows Dave’s excellent artistry and tone to its best advantage. I feel this is his best effort on records to date.

The concert closed with the group playing Lullaby in Rhythm, their third encore. Paul and Dave play the first chorus in the typical block pattern, then Paul develops from a quiet beginning one of the integrated, restrained solos that seem to flow effortlessly from his horn. Dave enters with a quiet ostinato “F” in the melody, then gets into the chordal, barbaric rhythmical style so typical of his playing: parallel motion, open fifths in the bass, interpolating fragments of other tunes. Then Dave trades four-measure phrases with Joe Dodge, who brings the house down with his excellent solos. The last chorus by Dave and Paul uses their usual figure, with a nice variation by Paul on the last eight bars.

So ended another memorable concert by the Brubeck group at C.O.P. We of Phi Mu Alpha and the College of the Pacific are proud to have Dave as an alumnus, and to know Dave as an old friend. Dave can be sure that he and his groups have a faithful and eager audience at Pacific.

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Liner Notes by Alun Morgan
Vogue Records reissue, circa 1959

There have been many books written about jazz in recent years. Histories, biographies, discographies and pet theories, all contained in stiff board covered editions or cheaper paper-backs, have come on to the market in a quantity which leaves even the most avid jazz reader reeling. Despite this deluge of print (to say nothing of record reviews, sleeve notes, magazine articles, etc.), few authors have attempted an analysis of our music on technical grounds and even fewer have tried to explain the mystery of improvisation. Perhaps it is just as well that the art of improvisation remains shrouded—so far as the written word is concerned anyway—for jazz is primarily a musical form to be heard rather than mulled over as a collection of notes related to stave lines drawn neatly across a sheet of paper. In fact, it is patently obvious that jazz cannot be captured with accuracy by anyone using the standard method of notation. The positions of notes relative to the bar line subdivisions, to say nothing of the precise evaluation of the notes themselves, are of prime importance to the soloist constructing an inspired extemporization. A symphony musician presented with, say, one of Lester Young’s solos in transcription form, could not reproduce Lester’s work in a manner likely to impress a jazz enthusiast. Lester’s tone, vibrate and subtle nuances of phrasing defy capture by even the most accomplished musicologist working with pen and score paper.

Even more difficult to explain, or discuss, is the jazz musician’s own attitude towards improvisation. Exactly what passes through the minds of the men creating those memorable performances? What special combination of biological and spiritual elements goes into the building of an outstanding soloist? It might be as well to mention here the answer which Johnny Hodges gave when asked what direction his thoughts took as he built one of his richly intoxicating variations on All of me or Sunnyside of the street. Standing in front of the microphone, his manner akin to a viewer suffering through a TV commercial. Hodges thrilled his listeners night after night during the Ellington tour of Britain in 1958, “Well,” answers Johnny, “as I play I look about the hall and try and figure out how many people it will hold. Then I try and work out how many of the seats are occupied. Then I think, if the Queen came to the concert, where would she sit?” Throughout the course of these detached ruminations Hodges continues to pour forth a lucid cascade of notes forming another classic alto solo.

One thing is certain, the surroundings have some bearing on a jazzman’s state of mind and will be likely to affect the quality of his music. A musician who is particularly sensitive to occasions and environments is Dave Brubeck who continues to strive for the optimum level of improvisation. The enclosed record captures the major part of a concert which took place before a seated audience of college students at California’s College of the Pacific. For Dave it was a noteworthy event; he discovered that Pacific College possessed a rarity in the way of pianos and was thrilled from the moment he first ran his fingers over the keys. Telling me about the concert later he said, “You know, the College had a magnificent piano, It was a Bösendorfer, made in Vienna. I believe there’s only three or four in the whole of the States. At the top end of the keyboard there was a kind of little cover and when you lifted it up there were another three notes underneath so that you could extend the normal range of the instrument. I was inspired by that piano and I’ve always thought I played at around my best that night just because the conditions were so right.” The conditions were certainly right not only for the involved All the things you are but also the quiet, reflective Laura. Laura is played by Brubeck, Crotty and Dodge only and is the kind of solo which demolishes so many of the arguments about Dave’s heavy-handed approach. The ballad is played with great tenderness and a light, whispy touch giving the effect of such Debussy preludes as La Cathedrale englouti and La fille aux cheveux de lin.

By complete contrast All the things you are is, to my mind, one of Dave’s most successful quartet performances and it is here that the time was right. Raymond Horricks has dealt with this solo at some length in an essay which first appeared in Jazz Monthly magazine and, later, in Raymond’s book These Jazzmen Of Our Time (published in 1959 by Victor Gollancz). “From a four bar piano introduction, bassist Crotty and drummer Joe Dodge set in motion a vigorous beat to support seven choruses of solo improvisation each by Desmond and Brubeck and two concluding choruses with the alto and piano improvising contrapuntally” explains Raymond. “Desmond, though so pale and virginal tonally, distinguishes himself throughout his seven choruses by an unswerving swing and a selection of thought so logical that from first to last his solo appears to be one continuously developing creative vision.” Here Horricks pays due tribute to a man whose work is sometimes overshadowed by that of his leader. Desmond is one of the most melodic improvisators in jazz today, always capable of hitting on an apt turn of phrase which never jars on the cars nor sounds banal. His solo on All the things you are shows him at near his peak, swinging in a more forthright manner than usual and throwing aside some of the caution and restraint which one feels is sometimes present. (It is strange that Kern’s All the things seems to bring out the best qualities in several jazzmen and, in the case of a frequently aloof stylist like Lee Konitz, it draws forth the dormant ‘animal’ spirit a witness Lee’s version of the tune on Vogue LAE12181). After Desmond, Brubeck takes over for his solo which matches the inspired alto choruses which have gone before. “It becomes obvious at once that he intends to develop his thought along the lines of a fugue at the keyboard,” wrote Raymond Horricks, “but in the opening chorus the improvised thoughts are most delicately interwoven by his hands. Not until the second chorus does he begin to turn the heat on, and to smash home his increasingly complex designs (developed, as with Desmond’s, from their simpler antecedents) with dramatic intensity. From then on and until near the end of the sixth chorus he proceeds to heighten the emotive tension of the solo by gradually stepping up the attacking impact of his playing in conjunction with his unfolding ideas.” Towards the end of the sixth piano chorus Brubeck moves away from the formal, fugal treatment he has utilized and introduces a syncopated figure. The effect is rather unusual just as Dick Twardzik’s dramatic out-of-tempo version of Bess you is my woman (Vogue LAE12117) drops into a swinging 4/4 for the final eight bars.

All the things you are in the hands of the Dave Brubeck Quartet that night two weeks before Xmas, 1953, resulted in some not-to-be-forgotten music of a standard which is not quite recaptured on any of the remaining tracks heard here. Despite Dave’s subsequent recordings and concert appearances with his revitalized quartet containing Joe Morello, despite the experiments with different time signatures, despite the growing maturity and technical dexterity of Brubeck and Desmond, despite all these things I would still rate All the things you are as one of Dave’s best records. We are lucky that the tape machine was on hand to capture this moment of truth for such a peak level of genuine inspiration is rare.