The sheer descriptive verve, page after page, made me want to listen to every single musical example cited. Also, there is zero mention or any photos involving Brubeck's mass composition, "To Hope, A Celebration" that was written in 1999. I suppose that for some readers this will be very simple and an excellent narrative, but I can't see it myself. Without it, "Ode to a Cowboy" would have been a pleasant enough riding-bareback-through-the-prairies theme; with it came depth and variety.

A narrative densely packed with info (and gossip, maybe) about many of the jazz musicians of the 1950-1976 era + to a lesser extent 1976-2012. Also, if you have lingering doubts abouts Dave's Jazziness, listen to the fabulous gem (imho of course! The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. For all the resentment he provoked, and the scorn poured on his sometimes heavy-handed playing, Brubeck was an interesting musician whose experiments with unorthodox time signatures helped open the way for others to venture beyond the standard 4/4 and waltz time. Clark puts Brubeck’s music in its proper context, the stride piano and boogie-woogie influences as well as the counterpoint and polytonality (via his studies with composer Darius Milhaud, who also taught Burt Bacharach, among many others).But finding a convincing fit for Brubeck’s legacy, one that reconciles his mass popularity with his advanced musical technique, has proved largely elusive. I wasn’t sold on the non-chronological structure of Philip Clark’s book at first, but it grew on me. In fact I have begun to appreciate just how talented Brubeck was and I am now listening to his music more than ever. While most casual fans want to know about his work with the “classic quartet” in the 1950s and 60s (and the book devotes plenty of space to it), it’s refreshing to get to learn about Brubeck’s work beyond that period.

For all his success, Brubeck was an essentially modest and unpretentious man whose immediate reaction to the Time magazine cover was that it should have gone to Duke Ellington. A LIFE IN TIME includes in-depth analyses of Brubeck’s music; and I have to confess that much of the technical terminology used by the author is beyond my understanding (and possibly resulting from my lack of a formal education in theory of music). The bandleader’s early years and his rise from obscurity are closely examined, but the main focus of the story is inevitably the 10-year lifespan of Brubeck’s classic quartet, in which he and the alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, his long-term musical partner (and the composer of “Take Five”), were joined by the bassist Eugene Wright and the drummer Joe Morello.Apparently, this tendency got him in hot water with many jazz critics over the years who believed "true" jazz only resided only in the kind of innovations in melody wrought by bebop. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. The books featured on this site are aimed primarily at readers aged 13 or above and therefore you must be 13 years or over to sign up to our newsletter.