Time out for a Life in Jazz

Brubeck started touring colleges to give concerts in the 1950s. Photo: AP

Dave Brubeck (1920-2012), jazz pianist par excellence, went to college to study veterinary science to be able to look after the livestock at his father’s cattle ranch. But he switched to music to nurture the talent he had inherited from his pianist mother. Yet the hoofbeats of the horses he rode came back later into the polyrhythms he wove into his jazz.

He brought them into the 1959 album he made with his quartet (Paul Desmond, alto saxophone; Eugene Wright, bass; Joe Morello, drums). Time Out was the first jazz album to sell a million copies, it’s most famous track ‘Take Five’, the first jazz single to sell a million. The year before, the Brubeck quartet had returned from a tour of Europe and Asia. At AIR’s studios in Chennai they listened to, and later jammed with, the mridangam player Palani Subramania Pillai for what might have been their first formal musical introduction to polyrhythm and the idea for ‘Take Five’, credited to Desmond, in a time of five beats to the measure. From that year, my first at college, I still remember some of my peers carrying the LP around as a badge that they were “with it”.

Its popularity didn’t make Brubeck famous; that he already was since the early 1950s when he got the idea of touring colleges and giving concerts that spawned a series of albums and brought jazz out from bars and dance-halls into auditoria. By 1954 he was on the cover of Time, only the second jazzman to get there after Louis Armstrong, and before Duke Ellington. Brubeck said later that getting on Timebefore Ellington bothered him, and thought he was favoured because he was white.

He couldn’t read sheet music, and nearly got chucked out of college, but for the teachers who recognised that his natural talent overrode this failing. His studies were interrupted by World War II, during which he was saved from combat duty by being put at the head of a jazz band, which at his insistence was integrated, unlike the US Army at the time.

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