Brubeck Renaissance

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30445, 20 May 1964, Page 10

Brubeck Renaissance

“When we're playing well, I consider the audience as important as the guys on the stand,” remarked Dave Brubeck a few years ago. “One deadhead in the front row can ruin a whole night.” The deadhead must have stayed home on the evening of February 22, 1963, for Brubeck and his quartet played a brilliant concert in Carnegie Hall.

Transcriptions from . the concert have been released here on a two-L.P. set (C.B.S, S2BP 460501 • stereo; also mono). Their quality is a double surprise, for Brubeck’ has in recent years made a number of records of extraordinary dullness, , which have led critics (including this reviewer) to reject his music as “shallow” or damn

it with faint praise. But it : is a critic’s privilege to be i wrong, and one can now • happily report that Brubeck. i remains a stimulating, original jazz pianist. Able To Communicate Brubeck is one of the few jazzmen who have reached

i . terms with themselves and i their music that enable them, i without compromising their : freedom of expression, to i communicate with the audi- • ence on its own terms. Gerry i Mulligan and Oscar Peterson ! are others who have done > this, but the surprising thing i about Brubeck is that he

draws audiences that include, besides the jazz fans, people who would not ordinarily listen to Mulligan or Peterson and might not have heard of them.

It may be that this has bewildered the critics. And it may be that Brubeck cannot function freely without the stimulus of an audience, for on these recordings both he and his partner, Paul Desmond, play with more invention and fluidity than on any of their studio recordings.

The programme is staple I items from (he quartet’s re ! pertoire, but none has been as well played before. Though there are no special highlights, “Pennie’s from Heaven” and “Blue Rondo” are worth close attention, the former for its lyricism, and the latter for its drive and; elan. Desmond’s creamy tone and elegant phrasing are sheer delight, a flow of burnished melody, underlined by the stirring, polyrhythmic drumming of Joe Morello. Morello takes off on a giddying whirl of his own on his featured number, “Castilian Drums,” but it is Brubeck who dominates all the way. He now seems fully to have absorbed Duke Ellington’s remark that jazz “has to have beauty, but it has to be beauty with smack.” Herman “In Person” Another recent “in-person” recording of more than usual interest is “Encore—Woody Herman, 1963” (Philips PHS 600-092 and PHM 2004)92), recorded at a club In Hollywood by the band which produced the brilliant “Woody Herman, 1963” album last year. While one hesitates to follow the lead of the sleeve by calling it a “live” performance (there is no known way of making a posthumous recording), it is certainly lively. Herman has a talent for choosing sidemen and the new band is probably the best he has had since the famous “Four Brothers” band of 1948-49 Although it has one or two rough spots—some ragged brass playing on “Caldonia” and a lagging drummer on “Better Git It In Your Soul” —the recording catches many of the sparks that must have flown during the band’s engagement at the Basin Street West. The soloists include, besides Herman, the gifted Bill Chase (trumpet). Sal Nistico (tenor saxophone) and Phil Wilson (trombone), who made a big impression on the band’s first recording. The playing here may be a little less accurate but the excitement is real.