Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time

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In 1954 the pianist Dave Brubeck became the first jazz musician of the postwar generation to be featured on the cover of Time magazine, infuriating those who felt that this white middle-class Californian had no business taking the limelight from Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie or Thelonious Monk, the true pioneers of an essentially African American music.

The book was enjoyed all the more while playing Brubeck’s great recordings, bringing back many good memories of the ’60s. Few knew he couldn’t read music, yet he created a unique musical idiom that encapsulated much of the ’60s sound. Woven throughout are cameo appearances from a host of unlikely figures, from Sting, Ray Manzarek of The Doors, and Keith Emerson to John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varèse. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. To my delight, Clark shows appreciation for all eras of Brubeck’s sixty-ish years in the public eye.

This biography, written with love and passion, is a landmark document that is insightful and inspiring all in itself. Critics thought he was too classic and too "white" in his playing even though his technique was grounded in stride and barrelhouse piano players like Fats Waller, Willie "The Lion" Smith and Erroll Garner. Each page is so loaded with technical music theory jargon that it becomes almost unreadable to the general reader without a degree in musicology. Woven throughout are cameo appearances from a host of unlikely figures from Sting, Ray Manzarek of The Doors, and Keith Emerson, to John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varèse.

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. The author is clearly a genuine fan and deeply knowledgeable of all of Brubecks music over the years and with this in mind be warned! But when he concentrated for a dozen or so pages on discussing Time Out - my personal favorite of Brubeck's albums, featuring tracks with the off-kilter time signatures like 'Take Five,' 'Blue Rondo a la Turk,' and 'Three to Get Ready' - it was great. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.The book’s discussion of Brubeck’s playing and composition styles is perceptive, showing just how different his approach was from peers like Bill Evans, Lennie Tristano, Thelonious Monk, etc. I am only half way through the book and am looking forward to continuing and finishing it, which might take some time, as there is so much more information to absorb.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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. Much about the changes in the group, Paul Desmond's coming, the iconic Quartet with Desmond, Morello and Wright of course, and other manifestations eg with Gerry Mulligan b.Apparently, this tendency got him in hot water with many jazz critics over the years who believed "true" jazz only resided only in the kind of innovations in melody wrought by bebop. Also, if you have lingering doubts abouts Dave's Jazziness, listen to the fabulous gem (imho of course! This excellent biography makes clear that he simply chose his own path and individual idea of jazz that was outside mainstream critical thinking and just as valid as anything the bebop players (most of whom actually admired him and his ideas greatly) were committed to. Each chapter explores a different theme or aspect of Brubeck’s life and music, illuminating the core of his artistry and genius. p>The data controller is Headline Publishing Group Limited.