After establishing his own record label, Fantasy, Brubeck released the
Quartet's first album, Jazz at Oberlin , in 1953. The album was
a modest success -- enough to get the Quartet a contract with Columbia
Records -- but was more notable for being one of the first jazz LP's to
be recorded in concert instead of in a studio. Their first album on
Columbia was Jazz Goes to College in 1954, which sold over
100,000 copies and placed Brubeck and his Quartet in the national
spotlight.
In this same year Brubeck became the first jazz artist to
grace the cover of Time magazine as part of an article which
described him as "the most exciting new jazz artist at work today" and
the Quartet's music as "some of the strangest and loveliest music ever
played since jazz was born."
In 1959 the Quartet released Time Out , a collection of songs
which experimented with different time signatures, which included the
hits "Take Five" and "Blue Rondo a la Turk".
"Take Five", which soon became
Brubeck and the Quartet's signature tune, was officially composed by
Desmond but derived from Morello's original 5/4 beat. The composition
can be read as a conciliatory act between the two previously feuding
bandmates. "Blue Rondo a la
Turk" was a venture into 9/8 time and a play on Mozart's "Rondo alla
Turca". The wild success of the album and "Take Five" in particular
catapulted the Quartet and its leader beyond simply the temporal
successes of the day and into the permanent jazz canon.
The Quartet continued to produce popular jazz albums, including the inevitable Time Further Out which experimented further with nontraditonal meter. Brubeck himself, however, seized upon his popularity to branch out into other projects and expand upon his aspirations of being a composer in other realms. In 1960, a ballet he wrote entitled "Points on Jazz" was accepted into the repertory of the American Ballet Theatre. Brubeck wrote the score for The Real Ambassadors , an attempt to infuse a Broadway show with the emotions of jazz and its players, and its performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1962 with Louis Armstrong is remembered as a seminal event in the history of that venerable annual show. As Brubeck reached across boundaries to introduce jazz to different disciplines, the Quartet reached around the world to introduce jazz into new countries, touring extensively in Europe and Asia. Indeed, the popularity of the Dave Brubeck Quartet overseas was so widespread that longtime Brubeck supporter and comedian Mort Sahl remarked that "whenever John Foster Dulles visits a country, the State Department sends that Brubeck Quartet in a few weeks later to repair the damage." The Brubeck classic "Blue Rondo a la Turk" was in fact composed when the band was touring in Turkey and was based on a traditional Turkish 9/8 meter, and the Quartet released a collection of selections recorded on the Continent as The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe in 1958 and Jazz Impressions of Eurasia , recorded after an extended tour in Eastern Europe and the Middle East in 1958. Although the Quartet enjoyed continued success, their development soon began to diverge from that of mainstream jazz, and they disbanded in 1967, regrouping only once in 1976 for a twenty-fifth anniversary tour.
Among the awards and honors Brubeck received after the
breakup of the Classic Quartet are: playing for four presidents (Kennedy,
Johnson, Reagan, and Clinton), election to the Down Beat Hall of
Fame, San Francisco Jazz Festival Laureate, an appearance at the
Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow Summit in 1988, a Lifetime Achievement Award
from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, National Medal of
the Arts,
composing a score for Pope John Paul II's visit to San Francisco in 1987,
six honorary doctorate degrees, named a Duke Ellington Fellow at Yale
University, and a doctorate degree from Duisberg University -- the first
doctorate degree awarded to an American jazz musician from a German
university. A change in Brubeck's outlook is apparent in his development from the days of the Classic Quartet to his later work. In the early days, the only written parts of the tunes were the short intro and conclusion and a sketchy chord progression, and Brubeck confessed that 90% of the notes the group played occurred to them as they played. Despite this reliance on improvisation, he still received ample criticism that he couldn't swing (a hallmark of jazz up to the 1950's), to which he responded that "any jackass can swing. But to try something new and swing at the same time, that's hard." But as he continued to develop, he came to realize his dreams of being a composer, and his later work (other than strictly jazz tunes) relies more and more on written composition. Despite his obvious successes, critics often refuse to acknowlege Brubeck's importance in the development of jazz music, alluding to his abundant popular success as a mark of a want of merit. Yet regardless of the critics' subjective assessment of the merit of his contribution to the jazz idiom, he is arguably responsible for initiating more listeners into the art of jazz -- a legacy more fruitful and healthy for jazz music as a whole than most.
References and Brubeck Discography
Questions, comments, or conerns? smt3@acpub.duke.edu