I did the thing today I sometimes do that baffles my editors. One of them emailed about Dave Brubeck’s death and asked whether I’d like to write about him. I’m the jazz guy, after all, to the extent we have one, and Brubeck was the rare jazz musician everyone loved. But I passed. I have never been a fan of Brubeck’s piano playing. (I’ll get back to that.) I thought that in his later years he didn’t surround himself with impressive or even consistently coherent bands. I reviewed him twice for The Gazette in Montreal, not kindly. I was intrigued to be reminded that he had the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan in his band for a bit in the 1970s. That must have been tense: Mulligan usually insisted on the refinement and closely-calibrated group dynamics I don’t associate with late-period Brubeck.

But anyone who had the early career Brubeck had has earned any kind of late career he wants. His great quartet with Paul Desmond, Joe Morello and Gene Wright was as virtuous and influential as any in jazz in the 1950s and 1960s. It rose to prominence at a time when a lot of musicians were wondering what kind of next step jazz could take after the obvious possibilities of bebop — jetting velocity, rich harmony, accents in odd places — had been explored by hundreds of musicians for more than a decade. Different musicians had different answers. Miles Davis slowed the pace of harmonic change. Art Blakey and Horace Silver heightened the music’s blues and gospel overtones. A few years later, Ornette Coleman would edge toward an emancipation from much of the music’s rule book. The pianist Lennie Tristano and his small circle dove deeper into the rule book, working obsessively with a small group of standard tunes until they could take them in any direction.

Brubeck’s direction is suggested by the title of one of his early albums, Jazz Goes to College.  Continue…