Take Five

On my 11th birthday, my dad handed me an orange album titled Time Out. "Dave Brubeck," he said. "Now, this is great music. Listen to 'Take Five.'"

I wasn't even sure what Take Five meant -- I certainly wouldn't have known it referred to the unusual 5/4 time of the piece. While "Take Five" wasn't the first jazz piece to utilize this meter, it is part of what made the piece distinctive.  

Time Out was actually released in 1959, years before it became my gift. In 1961, "Take Five," the album's most popular piece, became the first million selling jazz single on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

Believing my dad, as only an adoring daughter can, I played Time Out, and thought it very interesting. But I had no frame of reference for it aside from what my dad had told me. At the time, I idolized James Taylor, and jazz certainly couldn't compare with his music. It would be years before I would "see" into the appreciation my dad was talking about. But it was a start. And I never forgot it.

Now, when I listen to my favorite jazz, whether it's Bird, or Miles, John Coltrane or The Dave Brubeck Quartet, I think of my dad, who passed away last year. The love of jazz was one of his many legacies that I hold dear.

I recently watched a video of The Dave Brubeck Quartet performing "Take Five" in 1966 in Germany: the bespectacled Brubeck on piano, Paul Desmond on alto sax, Eugene Wright on bass, and Joe Morello (wearing sunglasses) on drums. It's Desmond's piece -- meaning, he composed it -- and it's also Desmond who fascinates me watching the video. I close my eyes listening to his sax and hear an eloquent white man's musing on urbanity, feeling the race toward the future and technology and liking it. It's truly a brilliant musical articulation.

Ted Gioia

This guy has opined on every musical subject it seems -- from Chet Baker and Lester Young to Tito Puente and even the tango. Here's a link to a review of his latest book, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool: http://tedgioia.com/

"Bebop was defined by its social context as much as by the flats and sharps of its altered chords. Outsiders, even within the jazz world, the modern players had the dubious distinction of belonging to an underclass within an underclass...a musical revolution made...by sidemen, not stars." - Ted Gioia

Melodious Thunk and Nellie

Melodious Thunk is what Thelonious Monk's wife Nellie used to call him. She did everything for him, sometimes, as for a child, as he was disoriented and slow, and so much about the music he conjured and played that he couldn't grasp much of anything -- unless it was music. I imagine he probably heard the noises made by those he loved, like Nellie cooking in the kitchen where he played his piano, also as a kind of music, and probably retreated deep into himself when the noises of the world got ugly. When its music got ugly.

There are geniuses like that who only know how to do one thing right, superbly. If they are lucky, they find a Nellie, someone to steer them or keep them in the vicinity of their art, where they can paint, write, make music. That was Nellie. Where is her prize?

I had a chance to recently savor the extraordinary nature and genius of Monk through a story told about him in Geoff Dyer's gorgeous collection, But Beautiful [A Book About Jazz]. The stories are an act of love, getting so deeply and thoroughly inside the skin of jazz greats, like Monk, that you honestly feel you carry away a piece of those artists, along with their music, when you finish reading.

David Thomson of the L.A. Times said that this book might have been the best "ever written about jazz." In my small sphere of experience with such literature, it is. If you are a jazz lover who cares, not just about the music, but about the individuals that created it and the culture and worlds from which they sprang, please pick up this book. It is a celebration of the art unlike any I have read to date. Dig this:

" -- See, jazz always had this thing, having your own sound so all sorts of people who maybe couldn't have made it in the other arts -- they'd've had their idiosyncracies ironed out -- like if they were writers they'd not've made it 'cause they couldn't spell or punctuate or painting 'cause they couldn't draw a straight line. Spelling and straight-line stuff don't matter necessarily in jazz, so there's a whole bunch of guys whose stories and thoughts are not like anyone else's who wouldn't've had a chance to express all the ideas and shit they had inside them without jazz. Cats who in any other walk of life wouldn't've made it as bankers or plumbers even: in jazz they could be geniuses, without it they'd've been nothing. Jazz can see things, draw things out of people that painting or writing don't see." - Geoff Dyer

hello world post

Welcome to Bebop Times the newest phase of the Bebop Project of writers, artists and editors in at least three states.
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I notice my friends have called this a blog about jazz, not just Bebop, and that's fair and fine. The genre is vast, and our tastes, varied.

I'm certainly interested to know what aspects and styles of jazz my friends and fellow artists and writers are attracted to and why, and who and what they recommend. The performers' words might be heard here as well.