Dave Brubeck: How to Make Sense of His Piano Style,2 of 2

Last time, we discussed Brubeck’s very mixed reputation as a pianist, and we watched an unreleased TV performance. To try and explain his unique approach, critics love to say that Brubeck was a classical pianist who learned to improvise. But that is absolutely false. He was not seriously involved in classical music, except for the kind that everyone gets exposed to in piano lessons, such as he had with his mother. It’s clear from everything Dave ever said that his favorite artists were people like Art Tatum, Fats Waller and their less-known contemporary Cleo Brown, and that his focus was always on playing popular songs and swing-style piano.

And remember that Brubeck was born in 1920. (December 6 would have been his birthday.) By the age of 22 or so, his swing style was well established. Consider his earliest known recorded performance, “I’ve Found a New Baby,” in which he sounds very influenced by Tatum and Teddy Wilson. This was recorded probably in 1942, on disc, in a rehearsal room at the College of the Pacific, where Dave was an undergraduate student:

So, where did classical music come in? Dave’s mother, Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck, played and taught classical piano. Dave’s older brother Howard pursued a career as a classical composer, and he was studying with Darius Milhaud, a French modernist composer who was Jewish and fled to America with his family in 1940. At Howard’s suggestion, Dave began studying with Milhaud after his service in World War II. So began Dave’s personal journey into, not classical music overall, but specifically the concepts of Milhaud. It’s evident from his own classical pieces that Brubeck was never well versed in, for example, Stravinsky, Bartok, Xenakis, Stockhausen, or other canonical twentieth-century composers.

The Milhaud influence on Brubeck as a composer is clear. (He and Iola named their first-born child Darius, after all! ) Dave’s early octet pieces are in a definite Milhaud style. These are fully written pieces with no improvisation; examples include the “Serenade Suite” and “Playland-At-The-Beach,” written and recorded between 1946 and 1948. (The exact dates of the earliest octet recordings were not preserved.) However, I believe his improvisations are also heavily influenced by Milhaud's teachings — teachings that might be documented in Milhaud’s notes or Dave’s notes, which are not currently available. For example, I can imagine Milhaud saying to Dave, “Why can’t polytonality be used during an improvisation? And why does everything have to be in 4/4, or 3/4? And what about polymeter—using one meter over another one?” This aspect of his training with Milhaud has not been adequately explored, and would be a worthy research project for someone who wants to spend time in the Brubeck family archives, which relocated in 2020 to Wilton, Connecticut, near the long-time family home.

In short, Brubeck was a swing player who overlaid classical music and modern jazz onto his swing style, not a classical player who got into jazz. The critics got it exactly wrong. And because his style was well established by 1942, his swing feel was an older approach, not fully compatible with the modern bebop feel — and, one could argue, not fully compatible with his rhythm sections, which were in the modern vein (even though they were not at all in the forefront of modern jazz). This partly explains why people said Brubeck didn’t swing. There was yet another disconnect, between his time feel and that of his rhythm sections. He probably would have sounded more swinging with a Fats Waller-type of rhythm section.

But there’s more to this question of swing. It’s all too easy to misunderstand Brubeck’s infamous comment that “Any jackass can swing.” He followed this by trying to explain that swing is not everything, that it’s more important to try and innovate. Think about it this way: What would swing have to do with the solo you heard last time? Should he have omitted all the rhythmic complexity in order to make it swing more? If he removed the tempo explorations, what would remain? Wasn’t that one of the most original and interesting aspects of the solo?

The so-called Jazz Police love to say that jazz is about freedom, but what they really mean is that it’s about freedom if you do it the way that they consider “correct”! In fact, I’ve performed with both straight-ahead and so-called “free jazz” musicians, and I’ve learned that even “free” players have very fixed ideas about the “right way” to play free. For example, the late Cecil Taylor, whose work famously broke away from any traditional concept of swing, wrote in 1952 — in an unpublished letter to his friend and fellow New England Conservatory student, composer Robert Ceely — that he liked Brubeck’s music, but: “If only he could swing more when submerging himself with those wonderful sounds.” (This comes courtesy of Christopher Meeder, my friend and former grad student, who did excellent research on Taylor for his Masters thesis.)

Brubeck’s technique of improvisation was indeed quite free. In fact, it was sometimes avant-garde and totally outrageous. Consider this solo on “This Can’t be Love,” from 1952. As it unfolds, it becomes fierce and loud, and crunchingly dissonant. It stands as a self-contained moment that does not depend on its rather distant connection with the original song. Brubeck’s solo begins at 1:12:

It’s wild! And I totally “get” that this is the very type of solo that people found “heavy handed.” However, because his method was so open-ended, there was tremendous variety in his improvisations. Depending where the music led him, he could also be intensely lyrical. I really love the “bells” effect that he creates at 1:10 in his piano solo on “Jeepers Creepers” (the 1954 studio version):

I hope I’ve helped to explain why the jazz establishment had so much trouble with Brubeck’s pianism. But then why was it such a hit with the broader public? For one thing, a general audience doesn’t come with all these preconceived notions. It’s my impression — and there’s still time to document this before it’s too late, if someone wants to do the research — that his devoted audience included a much larger percentage of people who were new to jazz, compared especially with the fan base of someone like Miles Davis. In fact, Brubeck makes this point in the famous Time magazine cover story of 1954, when he says that many of his fan letters specifically state that his was the first jazz they liked.

Then there is Brubeck’s truly spontaneous improvisational method, which appears to go something like this:

• Start with an idea — any idea — possibly something inspired by the end of the sax solo—and build from there, regardless where it takes you.

• Keep the general motion and key centers of the chord progression, but not the exact chords.

• It’s even OK to change it from major to minor (he often does this), but keep the same tonal center.

• Forget completely about being beholden to any tradition: play “free” over the chord “changes,” regardless of the bass and drums (who unflappably continue to play the changes and the straight time feel).

Brubeck achieved a lot of freshness using this approach. When you compare takes from his recording sessions, there’s rarely much similarity between two solos on the same tune. For example, his other recordings of “These Foolish Things” are completely unrelated to the one we heard last time. (Here’s one suggested by jazz historian and subscriber Bill Kirchner.) That’s something we all claim to be striving for as jazz players. And his method of keeping the general sense of the chord progression, but not the exact chords, is what many jazz masters do in practice. It’s how one breaks free from the tyranny of the chord sequences. (Of course, he goes much further from the chords than most.)

For many novice listeners, this approach to improvisation seems to involve them in the process in a way that doesn’t happen with more conventional jazz solos. They don’t need to “follow the form” or the choruses; they just follow his process of discovery as he moves from one idea to the next. And Dave played with intense focus and a high level of energy, qualities that are readily apparent onstage or onscreen.

Now that you’ve followed my line of reasoning, it should make sense that there are so few pianists who profess to be disciples of Brubeck. His approach is not a “style.” It wouldn’t make much sense to transcribe him, or to learn his solos and licks. Because the whole point is to hit one note or chord and see where it leads you. It’s the process, not the notes — a process that everyone can learn from, without sounding anything like Brubeck.

Does this method work all the time? Of course not; it’s a high-risk approach. Using a standard approach to jazz improvisation would be a surer way to a high batting average. (Even a relatively uninspired Flanagan solo still sounds excellent, whereas an uninspired Brubeck solo can indeed sound heavy-handed, as is often claimed.)

In my opinion, his best solos are daring, even astonishing. But when I’ve given this essay as a presentation to graduate student jazz musicians, there are always a few who say, “Thank you, now I understand what he’s doing, but I still don’t like it. It has nothing to do with what I’m trying to accomplish as a player.” Please understand—it is not my purpose here to “make” you like Brubeck’s piano playing. That’s for you, dear listener, to decide for yourself, and there’s no way I could do that. Even I don’t claim to like all of his playing, but I “get” it even when I don’t always like it. I’m only hoping that, after reading and listening to what I’ve offered, you will understand his music better than you did before.

All the best,
Lewis

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.