Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time

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Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). In Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time, Clark provides us with a thoughtful, thorough, and long-overdue biography of an extraordinary man whose influence continues to inform and inspire musicians today. Each page is so loaded with technical music theory jargon that it becomes almost unreadable to the general reader without a degree in musicology.

DAVE BRUBECK: A Life in Time is about the timeless life of the inspired and inspiring jazz master Dave Brubeck. The brain, hopefully, grasps increasingly complex interrelationships between unrelated chords as our ears acquire a taste for a tarter and more aromatic harmonic palette. Clark reveals that the musicians were subject to an unusual set of printed “principles and aims” in which Brubeck detailed their individual roles and responsibilities with a bracing and slightly alarming clarity. All fans of Brubeck will treasure this, though if you are not a musician, the descriptions of the execution of songs and concerts will leave you lost. A LIFE IN TIME includes in-depth analyses of Brubeck’s music; and I have to confess that much of the technical terminology used by the author is beyond my understanding (and possibly resulting from my lack of a formal education in theory of music).Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Dave Brubeck at the piano with (from left) Paul Desmond, Joe Morello and Eugene Wright, in 1959. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

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. An honor bestowed by President Obama with the words: “You can’t understand America without understanding jazz, and you can’t understand jazz without understanding Dave Brubeck.sax, interaction with Charlie Parker; and including the early Octet, which had a strong alignment with the chromatic ideas of Milhaud etc. At Mills College: In terms of the octet, the most important thing Milhaud taught us all- and you can hear it in the records-was about counterpoint, which helped us create our own sound. Tutored also by his mother (Bessie) who was fairly well down the path of a concert pianist career - her hopes dashed by her rancher husband moving the family to run a cattle ranch in remote Ione (Sacremento). I wasn’t sold on the non-chronological structure of Philip Clark’s book at first, but it grew on me.

Each chapter explores a different theme or aspect of Brubeck’s life and music, illuminating the core of his artistry and genius.I wish I had been able to have a real conversation with them; they were very nice, but I was so excited, I could barely speak. It also looks at his influence on many strands of popular music since the 1950's and demonstrates he was as influential as any of the bebop players. We start on a tour bus early this century and that's more or less where we finish but in between Clark takes us back and forth across Brubeck's life and his music. Few knew he couldn’t read music, yet he created a unique musical idiom that encapsulated much of the ’60s sound. The learning that Milhaud had instilled into him ten years earlier, as they worked together on "Playland-at-the-Beach," was still taking Brubeck in new directions.

I am now listening to his solo music as well, something I never thought I would do as I have always previously underrated Brubeck. For all his success, Brubeck was an essentially modest and unpretentious man whose immediate reaction to the Time magazine cover was that it should have gone to Duke Ellington. And really I'm not much of a jazz aficionado, but I own a dozen CD versions of his now-classic 50's and 60's albums when he was fronting his eponymously-named Quartet.In the decades that followed, Brubeck remained the focus of controversy, even as his quartet’s albums – with their abstract-expressionist cover art by Joan Miró, Franz Kline and Sam Francis – became almost as ubiquitous a fixture in the homes of the upwardly mobile as a hostess trolley or coffee percolator. 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). Eventually, I even got to meet him and his wife when an ensemble I was in premiered some of his choral works. At a different level, Clark is sensitive to the musicians’ human characteristics, such as Desmond’s destructive ego and alcohol problems.