5/4.
Only a fraction of listeners can name Dave Brubeck's signature.
Typically, most have heard Take Five, but can't name the tune, who wrote it — or what 5/4 is, even. Which is, exactly, what it's not. Even — that is. It isn't.
Just as Bebop and Bird came and never flew the coup, so Dave Brubeck's take continues to wash down smoothly 50 some odd years afterward; enduring each and every everyman and woman's jazz cocktail "happy" hour, no worse for the extended play.
The re-action to the tune — still: toe-tapping-finger-snapping, bobbing and weaving — with most ones with 5 fingers and 10 toes not knowing where 1 is… or where 1 goes… mostly. Take Five: a smooth blend of syncopation and hypnosis which was, to many a pianist, a percussive epiphany; more 4 the rhythm, less 4 the melody.
Along with Paul Desmond — the actual composer of the tune — master polyrhythmist Joe Morello, and Eugene Wright on double bass — Dave Brubeck was able in more ways than 1. Recognizable — identifiable — marketable — an early brand, even — uneven a crossover as the Take Five "classic quartet" was. Brubeck, a classically trained "jazz" musician making cents and dollars where most would never categorize jazz as making any sense at all.
To generalize, the jazz genre — to most generals — is pretty much a no way hook. Too many notes. Too much work for the listener. Not the type of thing you'd expect to hear at a debutante ball. On and in the face of it all, "pop" was, is, and always will clock-in as hum-able. Dance-able. Quotable. But by jamming with and to his own drummer, quite unexpectedly, Brubeck hi-jacked predictability with what became his Take Five. Suddenly, putting extra change in the meter was catchy, and no body minded parking and taking TIme Out for a listen.
There are really only 12 notes 2 weigh on the Western scale. It's the combinations and — more precisely — when and where — yo — u — play — place — and grace them — in time — that unlocks the gap that allows for sound to roll — over on 2 itself — making you lean to 1 side — absorbed in the do-re-mi-fa-so la va — flow — going somewhere we don't know — caught — in momentary suspense — out of time — okay — so maybe that's just my own take. [And/ or Bill Shatner's — and that's exactly why no 1 wants to talk to me in real life.] But I am not the only 1 to make this observation.
Every jazz piano player knows Brubeck's 5 golden rings x 2 = magic fingers. Feel. 1 — of the lines of demarcation we players cross to begin — where bad is good — and out is in — e pluribus unum — through 88's and axes — skins and scats — Time Further Out — was where it's at. [WHO talks like this?] Though it might take place on 1, for the best players, it isn't about the stage. Bru's blues and un-square rags moved the black and white 4th wall from within — far away from the black and white on the page.
Time ends where feel begins. Though often applied as similes, feel and time don't spring from the same point of origin — or, the same well. Listeners can point out the differences between the 2 — even when and if they can't tell where 1 is. [Or what in hell it is I'm going on about.]
Back to 1. No matter where 1 was: the living room, concert hall or back-alley dinner club, Brubeck noted — for his feel and added beat — struck a chord with most all of the American listening public and beyond. Hoi polloi or finely tuned palette, he didn't hit it in the (inevi)table's pocket. He snookered it off the left bank while everyone else cued for the break. The 5, the 7 — behind the 8. Brubeck's Take Five — a classic bridging of pop and jazz/ the players and public.
Leave it to Dave Brubeck to be posthumously nominated for a Grammy only a couple of days after time stopped for him — and, appropriately, for a composition comporting Ansel Adams' masterworks in the key of black and white. The man, after all, was an ambassador of a musical genre central to the promotion of racial equality. He scored a choral work — The Gates of Justice — to the words and heartbeat of Martin Luther King, Jr. He stood up for civil rights and fought against racial injustice when it counted.
4 nominations for a regular Grammy, yet he never won 1 during his time. "Just" a lifetime achievement award in 1996 — and beaucoup prestigious awards, including the Library of Congress title of "Living Legend" — HR 1283, passed in 2009 in his honor by the House of Representatives — the National Medal of the Arts — a Kennedy Center Honor — myriad international awards as well — and a place on just about every shelf or stack of LP's back when covers were labeled "Super Hi-Fi Stereo" and "Mono".
Sophisticated, sometimes subtle, some sort of "what" was that? A sound so smooth, yet of such true grit (after all, he grew up on a ranch and wanted to be a cowboy) — that bar none — he could sell the image of slippers and scotch to serfs, politicians, and Sarah Lawrence grads unalike. That's branding. EVERY body loved Dave's signature —
timelessness.
Dave Brubeck — at 90 plus 1 — took five in the 12th month of this year — 2012.
All bad musicians go to 7.
R E S T I N P E A C E M E I S T E R B R U B E C K.
