Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time

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Alongside beloved figures like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, Brubeck's music has achieved name recognition beyond jazz.

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. Alongside beloved figures like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, Brubeck’s music has achieved name recognition beyond jazz.

Combining his commitment to jazz with the lessons learned during his early studies with the expatriate French classical composer Darius Milhaud, he was happy to explore a hybrid work such as his brother Howard’s four-movement “Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra”, which he and his quartet recorded with the New York Philharmonic in 1960, under the baton of Leonard Bernstein. The only Brubeck LP we had was “Jazz Impressions of Japan,” so that was my entry point into his work. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

The emphasis on the technical side of Brubeck's music, and on Brubeck's impact on rock and other nonjazz music, is thought provoking.Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Dave Brubeck at the piano with (from left) Paul Desmond, Joe Morello and Eugene Wright, in 1959. But when he concentrated for a dozen or so pages on discussing Time Out - my personal favorite of Brubeck's albums, featuring tracks with the off-kilter time signatures like 'Take Five,' 'Blue Rondo a la Turk,' and 'Three to Get Ready' - it was great.