Earlier than there was the world-famous hit-making Dave Brubeck Quartet, there was a far much less standard Dave Brubeck Octet. Brubeck fashioned the group in 1946 at Mills School in Oakland, California, the place he enrolled on the GI Invoice to review underneath the French neoclassical composer Darius Milhaud. His bandmates had been additionally Milhaud’s pupils: tenor saxophonist David Van Kriedt and clarinettist William O. Smith, who with Brubeck wrote a lot of the group’s library between them, trumpeter Dick Collins, trombonist Bob Collins, and bassist Jack Weeks. The exceptions had been drummer Cal Tjader and Paul Desmond, later the star saxophonist of Brubeck’s quartet, who each turned up by hyperlinks with the native jazz scene.
Milhaud left a deep mark on the octet. A Jew who fled Paris for Oakland in 1940, he was uncommon amongst European composers in his ardour for jazz, fortified twenty years prior on a visit to New York. Way more convincingly than George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924), his ballet La création du monde (1923) wrote the artwork kind’s spontaneity and improvisational warmth into a totally scored piece for classical gamers. Milhaud’s unruly melodies progressed in sudden phrase lengths and sometimes elbowed previous the measure. He ran unbiased tunes collectively, letting seemingly irreconcilable supplies free in the identical house.
Behind this obvious anarchy was a composer of steely self-discipline. Brubeck recalled the depth with which Milhaud taught the grammar of composition, all these workouts in counterpoint and concord based mostly on Bach. The melodic purity of Mozart was one other reference level. Then there have been fashionable composers: in Paris Milhaud had immersed himself in Stravinsky, Satie, Ravel, and Debussy, whose improvements in polytonality (music written in numerous keys performed concurrently) he handed on to his college students. He urged them to kind an ensemble to play their very own items—and made clear that, as younger Individuals, they might be sensible to embrace jazz.
The Dave Brubeck Octet took these classes to coronary heart: their library of tailored compositions and takes on jazz requirements is marked by sleights of hand with kind, experiments with common meter, Stravinskian harmonies, and freewheeling counterpoint. The heady brew went down effectively on campuses however San Francisco audiences had been a distinct matter. They needed both dance-band music or Dixieland jazz; the octet’s elaborate fusion of composition and improvisation didn’t open many doorways. In its earliest days, the group picked up a gig in a Chinese language restaurant the place, billed as “The Dave Brubeck Octet,” they had been fired; they then tried to return just a few weeks later underneath the identify “The David Van Kriedt Octet”—and had been fired once more. Even Brubeck’s father, rising from a live performance, advised a newspaper reporter, “That’s the damnedest bunch of noise I ever heard.”
Brubeck endured practically a decade of slog and fear. He performed badly paid gigs in down-at-the-heel venues and, throughout one low level, offered sandwiches from the again of a van. When the octet couldn’t discover work, he minimize his fabric to measure and carried out as a trio with Tjader and the group’s later bassist, Ron Crotty. They ditched their unique compositions and served up requirements like “Body and Soul,” “Laura,” and “I’ll Remember April.” The acquainted materials proved standard, resulting in a residency on the Burma Lounge in Oakland, and one other at San Francisco’s prestigious Black Hawk Membership. The trio recorded for Coronet, a cottage-industry label that served native Dixieland teams. These albums characteristic monumental piano block chords, with a number of tonalities slammed collectively, and asymmetrical rhythms, as on a radical overhaul of “Singin’ in the Rain.”
Paul Desmond was itching to show the trio right into a quartet; he usually sat in with the group. After Brubeck harm his again in a swimming accident, whereas recovering he realized that the saxophonist might assist with the inventive heavy lifting. Fashioned in 1951, the Dave Brubeck Quartet discovered immediate success, albeit at first solely on the West Coast. In 1953 they minimize two albums for the unbiased label Fantasy Data, Jazz at Oberlin and Jazz on the School of the Pacific, which caught the ear of George Avakian, a producer at Columbia Data who had overseen albums by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Frank Sinatra, amongst others. In 1954 the quartet signed to Columbia as a part of a company spending spree that additionally introduced Miles Davis to the label.
With its promotional clout and lavish budgets, Brubeck hoped Columbia would document his octet. The label would sometimes drop hints to that impact, however they had been stringing him alongside; an experimental eight-piece group was unlikely to promote. In 1959 the quartet launched Time Out—a chart-topping album that handed the world “Blue Rondo à la Turk” and “Take Five”—which eclipsed his earlier work. Propelled by industrial demand, the quartet turned a full-time precedence, and the octet was consigned to a footnote in jazz historical past.
One more reason the Octet appeared destined for obscurity was the situation of its archive. The recordings that exist, which symbolize solely a fraction of the group’s library, had been captured totally on a transportable acetate recorder throughout their earliest conferences; they’d just one skilled studio session, in 1950.1 In 1985, when Van Kriedt emigrated to Australia, he took the scores with him; for many years the story persevered that they’d been broken past restore when his storage flooded. (Brubeck usually expressed frustration at Van Kriedt’s informal therapy of such a valuable legacy.) In 2001, when an augmented Brubeck Quartet tried a revival, they employed the arranger Jeff Lindberg to transcribe the octet’s information in order that they might attempt recording them anew. However the outcomes sound like what they’re: musicians rigorously enjoying transcriptions.
Brueck Household Archive, Wilton Library
Dave Brubeck Trio, circa Fifties
Brubeck by no means gave up on his eight-piece ensemble; in his later years it was a degree of reference in interviews. He would have been grateful to the Brooklyn-based saxophonist and composer Jon De Lucia, who, for the higher a part of decade, has painstakingly reconstructed the octet’s charts, on the premise of just lately recovered archival materials. That job has now come to fruition with an album, The Brubeck Octet Challenge. Seven a long time after the octet sounded its ultimate word, De Lucia’s musicians—with pianist Glenn Zaleski occupying Brubeck’s stool—play the preparations with loving consideration to element, then escape in solos like artists who’ve absorbed every thing that subsequently occurred in jazz, from John Coltrane to Anthony Braxton (who, in 1973, recorded an album with Brubeck and was a vocal admirer of Desmond). It’s an completed piece of musicological archaeology that brings misplaced items of jazz historical past again to life.
De Lucia is drawn to saxophonists who emerged throughout the Fifties and charted programs unbiased from bebop, which was then the dominant idiom in jazz. On this regard his lodestars are Lee Konitz, with whom he privately studied, and Desmond—two alto gamers whose improvisational approaches had been distinct from that of Charlie Parker, who all however made the instrument his personal. In 1959 Konitz led an octet that performed preparations by reedman Jimmy Giuffre for a basic session, Lee Konitz Meets Jimmy Giuffre. The document grabbed De Lucia and spurred what he describes as an obsession for “archival resurrection.” It “brought me into the whole world of octets,” he just lately advised me over the cellphone. “I wanted to perform that material with Lee, and then I started looking for other octet material from the same period we could play.”
The Brubeck octet undertaking was helped by an archival discovery. It seems that the group’s unique instrumental elements weren’t misplaced however had, in truth, been saved within the David Van Kriedt papers held at Mills School. The saxophonist seemingly solely took the group scores with him to Sydney. Not that Brubeck might have used these elements with out appreciable surgical procedure. “They were a mess,” De Lucia whistles. “In the same passage of music, we would realize that one instrument had more measures to play than the rest of us, and we’d have to puzzle it out. Extra bars had been pencilled in all over the place and, playing all the options through, we’d have to deduce whose part was correct.”
Brubeck invariably cited his association of Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight” as capturing the very essence of his octet considering. It perches between Stravinsky and the “progressive jazz” of Stan Kenton, with echoes of the patchwork construction of Duke Ellington’s 1940 “Harlem Air Shaft.” However the time period “arrangement” doesn’t do justice to the best way Brubeck reassembles the track’s constituent elements. Within the opening bars, he runs the theme alongside a paraphrase of itself, alto saxophone answered by trumpet, earlier than weaving extra strains contained in the contrapuntal nest. To wrap up, he superimposes Kern’s center part over the primary eight bars, obliging contrasting melodic strains to cohabit. De Lucia’s detective work did not unearth any materials for the association. He needed to pay attention—onerous—to the document and write down the notes he heard.
Jacob Blickenstaff
Jon De Lucia, New York Metropolis, 2024
John Lake
Jon De Lucia Octet, New York Metropolis, 2024
The octet was all the time a collective effort. In “Fugue on Bop Themes,” Van Kriedt criss-crosses frenetic bop strains like spaghetti. He devours the melody of “September in the Rain,” turning it right into a background and including layers of variation over it. His scoring for brass and woodwind pushes the devices to their limits, as strains scurry quicker than appears potential till they’re hanging over the rhythm part beneath like a cartoon cat off a cliff edge. On “IPCA,” William O. Smith makes stunning, sharp-cornered melodic jumps. His totally written out piece for winds, the gnarly “Schizophrenic Scherzo” (not included on De Lucia’s album) seems to be forward to his later work as a jazz clarinettist in addition to a composer of experimental music that breathed the identical air as Milton Babbitt and Karlheinz Stockhausen. For his half, Desmond could be heard looking for that delicate, wistful sound that, within the basic Quartet, turned his calling card, offering a counterweight to Brubeck’s extra muscular volatility. “Prelude,” recorded in 1950, options his first recorded solo—and a primary glimpse of that honeyed, seductive tone.
This was, and stays, technically daunting music. Typical big-band preparations place soloists in reliable musical landscapes, by which they’ll amble with improvisational ease. However the Brubeck Octet wove a number of variations of a tune by each other, whereas sounding a number of tonalities. De Lucia’s skilled gamers breeze previous these challenges, alert to the kaleidoscope of improvisational potentialities, which retains the music satisfyingly unpredictable. Instrumental strains quiver and wobble like puppets balanced on strings. The bandleader is himself in advantageous kind, bringing a caressing tenderness to “Prelude”—a advantageous tribute to Desmond.
Whereas I used to be conducting analysis for a biography of Brubeck, I interviewed Smith.2 He recalled that the octet had given equal emphasis to jazz and fashionable composition; in some live shows they paired jazz requirements with transcriptions of music by Bartók, Milhaud, and Ernst Krenek. De Lucia hasn’t managed to unearth these preparations, however a second quantity of octet music is within the planning phases. It’s going to seemingly embody a advantageous association of Bernie Miller’s “Bernie’s Tune,” which Gerry Mulligan famously recorded with Chet Baker in 1952; a beforehand unheard, daredevil reimagining of Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things,” by which the theme is locked inside a distorting echo chamber of variations; and an untitled Brubeck piece for winds, boldly atonal, shifting time signatures between 5/8, 7/8, and 6/8. There are additionally some looser scraps of fabric, like a fragmentary scoring of Ellington’s “Perdido,” which De Lucia may work right into a fully-fledged association. In 1953, octet members joined the quartet on the Black Hawk for a collection of Sunday reveals. I’m wondering if that was the model “Perdido” the group carried out as a grand finale to one in all its final performances.
Seven years later, when the Quartet was effectively on its solution to success, the critic Ralph J. Gleason interviewed Brubeck for Downbeat journal. He urged that the Octet had borrowed explicitly from the Miles Davis Nonet, whose 1957 recording Start of the Cool—that includes an all-star solid that included Konitz, Mulligan, and John Lewis—successfully gave rise to the Cool Jazz style. Journalists usually made this allegation, which unsettled Brubeck. It’s true that each teams cloaked jazz improvisation in instrumental backings influenced by European moderns. However when the Brubeck Octet started recording, Miles was nonetheless a sideman in Charlie Parker’s group. Listening to De Lucia’s album confirms that the Brubeck Octet and Davis Nonet had been two trains on the identical observe heading to totally different stations. The spiky, obstreperous smack of the The Brubeck Octet Challenge has little in widespread with the floaty impressionism of Start of the Cool.
Within the fingers of De Lucia and his musicians, the Octet preparations fly off the web page with abandon and vibrancy. Their document is a reminder that Brubeck each conceived sturdy compositional kinds and left house for passionate improvisation—all the time wanting two methods directly. Barely heard in its time, the octet was a present for the longer term: it made the damnedest bunch of noise you ever heard.
