Dave Brubeck: How to Make Sense of His Piano Style,1 of 2 (+Bonus)

Dec 01, 2024

(Paying Subscribers, there are quotes from some historic Brubeck reviews in this essay, but you can read the complete reviews at the bottom, with Thanks!)

For some 60 years, beginning in the early 1950s, pianist-composer Dave Brubeck was one of the most famous jazz musicians alive. During the height of that fame, he was as popular among the general public as icons like Armstrong, Ellington, and Miles Davis. Brubeck played the same festivals as they did, sharing equal billing. And he’s the rare jazz musician to have scored a true hit song: Take Five, composed by his alto saxophonist Paul Desmond but released by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. It’s one of a handful of jazz numbers that people who don’t listen to jazz will recognize.

Brubeck’s compositions are still in circulation; jazz musicians in particular like “The Duke” and “In Your Own Sweet Way.” And he was equally popular as a pianist. But among jazz musicians, jazz critics, and “hardcore” jazz fans, Brubeck’s piano playing has largely been either vilified or ignored. If a pianist says his or her main influence is Brubeck, that will almost guarantee a negative reaction in those circles. In fact, believe it or not, when I posted an early version of this essay in 2020, I received two responses that basically said “I can’t believe you’re defending Brubeck’s piano playing.” And this essay is not even about “defending” Brubeck—it’s an attempt to understand his method.

In fact, there are very few pianists today who openly credit Brubeck as an influence. One of the few is Ethan Iverson, who told me that “Brubeck is one of my biggest primary influences.” Ethan also notes that in an interview with Keith Jarrett posted on his blog, Do The Math, Jarrett recalls some formative experiences with a solo piano album, Brubeck Plays Brubeck, and the books of transcriptions from that album that were published around the same time. But Iverson and Jarrett appear to be exceptions. When I searched digitally through the 3,300-plus entries in the Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (compiled by Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler), where many musicians specifically list their favorites, I found none who cited Brubeck—not one!

So for this essay, it is Brubeck’s piano playing that I’ll focus on. I’d like to examine his music to try and understand this extreme disconnect between jazz insiders and the broader public. But first, let’s consider a few publications to show that this disconnect is very real:

Brubeck was omitted from the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz — both the original 1973 LP edition and the 1986 LP, and later, CD editions. For many years, teachers worldwide used this collection as the basis of their jazz history courses, which means that Brubeck wasn’t played in class unless the teacher brought in supplemental recordings. That collection was replaced by Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology in 2011, which does contain Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo á la Turk.” But a CD collection like that no longer has the same kind of impact in our era of streaming. (John Hasse, now retired after many years at the Smithsonian, told me that Brubeck was deeply hurt at being omitted from the classic set, and was delighted at being included in the newer one.) Brubeck was also omitted from Jazz Piano: A Smithsonian Collection, even though it includes recordings by a number of pianists who, while excellent and deserving, don’t have nearly the name recognition as Brubeck, such as Jimmy Jones, Ellis Larkins, Dave McKenna and Ray Bryant.

I found several books on jazz history, or surveys of “great jazz artists,” that make absolutely no mention of Brubeck. More often, he is mentioned, but briefly, in a page or less, and sometimes condescendingly. For example, Jazz, a major textbook by Scott DeVeaux and Gary Giddins, says:

The Brubeck Quartet blew both hot and cool, in the contrast between Desmond’s ethereal saxophone and Brubeck’s heavy-handed piano. …Brubeck[’s] solos …climaxed with repetitive blocks of chords, generating either excitement or tedium, depending on the listener’s taste.

Clearly this is DeVeaux and Giddins telling us that they don’t like Brubeck’s solos. I teach historiography — the study of how history is written — and I would argue that to denigrate or omit one of the most popular jazz artists of all time, simply because you don’t like his work, is not history. It’s as misguided as it would be to omit or downplay Bach in a history of classical music if you don’t like Bach’s music. History is not about your personal ratings. History is not record reviews. (Full disclosure: Thirty years ago, I coauthored a jazz history book which makes some of these same errors. I hope that I know better now.)

Since Dave was as famous as Louis, Duke and Miles Davis, why do they each get a full chapter in every jazz history text, while he gets no more than a page? After all, if he did get a chapter, it needn’t be simplified. A discussion of the controversy around Brubeck would be relevant and appropriate to the writing of history, and interesting for students to discuss.

The most common opinion that I’ve heard and read all my life holds that Brubeck is an excellent composer, but that his piano playing is heavy-handed and doesn’t swing. And that it’s Paul Desmond who “makes” the quartet. (There’s a good chance you’ve held this opinion yourself.) For example, music critic Bill Simon called Desmond “first rate” but wrote that “Brubeck's piano playing I find pretentious and non-swinging. It's mainly a heavy-handed, unrelenting succession of block chords” (Saturday Review, August 28, 1954, p.59). Noted journalist Wilder Hobson wrote that Burbeck was “apt to build up to passages of loud chordal hammering.” But in the same article, Hobson notes that there is another side to the pianist: “While he feels out his deft running parts, full of subtle chord changes and modulations, I am usually with him” (Saturday Review, December 25, 1954, p.40). And the renowned Nat Hentoff, in a full-page article, said, among other things, that Desmond was the “truer jazz talent,” closer to the tradition, and that Brubeck “was probably the most uneven musician in jazz.” But, he noted, that inconsistency was mainly because he took more chances, and that “when he’s right, Brubeck becomes one of the most creatively adventurous individualists in all modern music” (Downbeat, March 9, 1955, p.4). (Paying Subscribers, all three articles are at the bottom for you, complete.)

So what’s going on to inspire such a variety of responses? Let’s pause here to consider a musical example. I’ve chosen one complete long piano solo, from a Parisian television broadcast, in November 1967. (This is not the set that was released as The Last Time We Saw Paris; it’s unreleased footage, which I posted with permission from the Brubeck estate.) What you see and hear in the clip is the very end of Desmond’s solo, and then Brubeck’s complete improvisation on a Great American Songbook “standard,” “These Foolish Things,” in the usual key of Eb. Try to follow the chain of events, without reading any further. For now, even if you’re good at following AABA forms, and even if you know the song “These Foolish Things,” please try to forget about all that and just follow the thread of his ideas, how one thing leads to the next:

After watching the clip once, please watch again while reading the following rundown, to see if it matches your experience:

Dave begins by echoing or extending the very end of Desmond’s solo, playing lyrical chords.
Next (0:34) there’s a repeated top note, with interesting, sometimes dissonant chords under it — substitutions that retain the general motion of the original chords but are not the same.
At the bridge (0:50) he goes into a bit of a Baroque classical style.
At 1:03, near the end of the bridge and continuing into the next A section, he starts playing chords in a different rhythm (not exactly double-time) over the unchanging rhythm section. And the chords go “out” a bit, for example at 1:13.
The second chorus begins at 1:23. He continues with chords, but now suggests a new, bluesy melody that is far from “These Foolish Things.” In fact at 1:40 he highlights a melody that resembles Dizzy Gillespie’s blues theme “Birks’ Works.” (That link takes to you to the first recording of that piece, from 1951. The 1956 date given on Youtube is when an LP was later released.) But immediately he again plays a faster tempo over the one being played by the bass and drums. By the bridge, 1:56, he is now closer to actual double time.
He begins the third chorus at 2:26 with another new melody, a kind of big “grand” one. But then he slows way down, leaving some space, and gradually coming back up to the tempo of the other musicians. At 3:10, in his freely associative style, he comes across a snippet of “Somebody Loves Me” (he smiles here) and decides to pursue that idea, playing in a nice stride/swing style. (Take note of how comfortable he is in this style.) Then he hands it over to Eugene Wright for a bass solo.

In many ways, this solo doesn’t fit the practice of modern jazz piano. It’s primarily chordal, not oriented around linear melodies. And there’s no clear delineation of sections, or even of the chord changes! In short, this is nothing like the approach of, say, Tommy Flanagan, as Dave’s critics frequently complained. But if he had been another Tommy Flanagan, his contribution to jazz history as a pianist would have been precisely zero. And yet Brubeck invites comparison with more mainstream players like Flanagan by playing some of the same standard repertoire, using a swinging bassist and drummer. No wonder critics, musicians and hardcore fans said something like, “This looks like a standard jazz performance, but what Brubeck’s playing doesn’t fit our expectations.”

To try and explain this, critics love to say that Brubeck was a classical pianist who later learned to improvise. But that is absolutely false. I’ll explain why next time, and we’ll listen to some more of his piano playing.

All the best,
Lewis

P.S. Paying Subscribers, keep scrolling down please!

P.P.S. A version of this essay was published at WBGO.org in February 2020, and this major revision still benefits from Nate Chinen’s excellent editing.

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