Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                                                             NERDY GENIUS

 

 

This is one of those moments when we suddenly realise our age.

My wife and I are both scanning through Youtube for something interesting to watch when we come across archival transcripts of jazz performances. We discover two long sessions of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, filmed in 1964 and 1966 before live audiences.

Like the Benny Goodman Quartet (Benny Goodman; Teddy Wilson; Gene Krupa; Lionel Hampton) Dave Brubeck’s Quartet is a racially-integrated combo i.e. Eugene Wright is black and on bass. Joe Morello is rather portly and on drums. Both Dave Brubeck on piano and Paul Desmond on saxophone are lean, Brubeck with his prominent hawk-like nose.

Brubeck got going with his Quartet in the early 1950s, but the 1960s were the combo’s glory days. The first six notes of Paul Desmond’s composition Take Five immediately take me back to my childhood in the early 1960s. Take Five was on the radio all the time. When Brubeck died (aged 92) in 2012, I took the occasion to note that the Quartet was the last jazz group to reach the great mainstream audience, beyond dedicated jazz aficionados. Everybody recognised Take Five. Most people recognised the Quartet’s version of Rondo a la Turk. I remember a TV advertisement for a sound system back then, which said you could listen to all types of music, described as “Bach, Brubeck and the Beatles”. Yep, for a while then, Brubeck’s combo was as popular as the Beatles.

But looking at them nearly sixty years later, we both note how strange their appearance now seems. Eugene Wright is clear of sight, but the three white guys are all wearing thick glasses with heavy black frames… and all four of them are in respectable dark suits with neatly done-up collar and tie.

Would any jazz combo dress so formally now? It’s as if they are participating in a symposium at some university’s music department.

This is intellectual jazz, cool jazz, thoughtful and composed jazz. This is not down-and-dirty blues, inspirational gospel or Dionysian wildness.

There’s that great off-syncopated rhythm that is Brubeck’s trademark; there’s that intense experimentation with time signatures. We listen with joy to their virtuosity. At one point Brubeck’s fingering of the key-board becomes so minimalist that I turn to my wife and say “He’s gone all Thelonious Monk”. At another point Brubeck is making spare and sparse notes from the keys on the right. I say “Now he’s Bela Bartok!” My wife says “More like Erik Satie”. But then there’s that reassuring repetition and repetition of Wright and Morello, holding it all together, giving it clear structure.

And the audience when the camera scans the auditorium?

The audience are in what looks like evening dress. The women are chic and professionally coiffed. The men are in suits as formal as the musicians on stage. They are at a classical concert.

The music is beautiful. It takes me back to being a kid. It’s a time of optimism.

But the look of it?

All I can call it is nerdy genius.

 

[And just to make me a liar of me, the photo of the Dave Brubeck Quartet above shows all four men wearing glasses... on a different occasion from the two transcripted concerts.]