I just realized that Dave Brubeck had died. He died about a week ago on December 5, apparently on his way to an appointment with his cardiologist. I remember vaguely reading his name somewhere, but that was the day I was on my bus to New York, so most forms of communication would have been unavailable at least until the next day. I owned a cassette with Brubeck's Take Five on it, which I would play constantly. I even tried to play it, with both hands, simply from listening to the piece.
Steve Paiken, the great journalist with Television Ontario (TVO) had a piece on him this evening. He cleverly titles the segment "Take Fifteen." He brought in JAZZ.FM91 radio host Brad Barker, who looks like a neo-hippie, to talk about Brubeck's legacy. Barker talks in technical terms for part of the interview, which is interesting in itself, I've linked to the interview above, but here is what I found interesting in it. Paiken brings an old footage of Brubeck saying that he wanted the jazz public now (in the 1970s) to try "more adventurous rhythms."
Paiken asks Barker: "What do you think he meant by more adventurous rhythms?"
Barker answers: "I think that swing had become so prevalent and that 2/4 that he spoke of was the rhythmic thread of the jazz that had come before that I think he was feeling that it needed to progress beyond that, those swing feels.
Barker continues to talk about polyrhythmic music: ...that could combine the things that we knew, or the things that sounded familiar, and the way to bend them a bit to make them a little more interesting...."
Paiken asks: "Can you think of any music of the top of your head where he might have used this different time signature?"
Barker: "Well, obviously Take Five [in 5/4]...Really the best tunes that we know are in odd meters." Barker then demonstrated how to tackle a 7/4 meter: "Think of it as the phrase.It's quarter notes again, but it is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven [tapping on his leg] so it's really that phrase that takes you over as opposed to the trying to drill a beat right through it like one, two, one two, one, two. So you think of it in that whole phrase of seven, then you go to the next one.
Paiken: "That must be hard to write."
Barker: "It's hard to write, and then you have to think about the improvising the musicians are doing on top of it that are so used to playing their licks and the things they've learned over those meters that are ingrained in them from the beginning, in blues based music as jazz is.
Paiken: There's this phrase I saw as we were doing research for this..."he improvised with polytonality." What is that?
Barker: ...What Dave is saying is "you're going to play this in the key of C, but what I'm going to do is either write a melody or improvise in a completely different key than a C." And that way it will obviously sound very unique and different, and and it will take a very clever and musical mind to make that work without sounding very wrong all the time.
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Joe Dodge, pianist Dave Brubeck and bassist Bob Bates)