[f_minor] Take Five

[Robert Merkin]

Nil nisi bono de mortuis.

Beyond his freakish finger span -- I think he could play a 12th -- Brubeck filled a very undistinguished niche in jazz. He produced a "safe," unsurprising product that white college-educated audiences felt comfortable consuming. It was also "television safe" because with very few exceptions, USA commercial networks took decades to broadcast African-American (Negroes in those days) artists. 

(Only Hefner's "Playboy After Dark" featured integrated or black jazz artists; it was a syndicated show never broadcast in the racially segregated South.)

With his "revolutionary" and whack time signatures, Brubeck's work was European//classically sophisticated -- but soulless. He seemed to view improvisation -- the heart of jazz -- as a slovenly embarrassment; there's not a measure of improvisation in his super-selling breakthrough albums.

That's why saxophonist Paul Desmond deserted the DB Quartet. He knew Brubeck wasn't playing jazz and never would. Desmond and Gerry Mulligan were the only white contemporaries of Brubeck who "got it," who seamlessly recorded with black artists.

I'm sorry to say that in the USA 1950s, genuine, historical-roots black jazz and R&B scared white Americans. It was spontaneous, energetic, exciting, thrilling, and worst of all, highly sexual, its sexual references only thinly veiled with puns and jokes. That didn't matter until the 1960s, because none of the major recording labels would touch black artists; their brilliant (and naughty) work got its limited airplay and sales on "race" labels sold only in the black ghettos.

Brubeck got all that airplay and filled stadiums because his stuff wasn't very challenging, contained references to respectable classical music, and didn't frighten white kids (or their parents who snooped to hear what the kids were listening to).

Brubeck didn't invent this niche. In previous decades, Paul Whiteman (and no white man was more aptly named) sanitized George Gershwin's jazz derivitives for white audiences, and in the '40s Benny Goodman did the same. Goodman actually featured African-American musicians in his band (I don't think Glenn Miller did).

It's easy to blame the big labels and radio and television networks as the villains of this sad American history, but it was the timidity and conformity of white consumers which did most of the harm. (It was rock's "scholars" like the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and the early Beatles who re-discovered historical African-American jazz and blues for white audiences.) 

Europeans weren't so timid. During the Nazi era, Germans (Berliners mostly) braved the concentration camp to smuggle in black American jazz records, and during the Soviet era Eastern Europeans would risk the gulags to listen to their beloved jazz. This was, after all, depraved and decadent Western music.

I've often wondered if I'd have the guts to risk prison to listen to my favorite music. But for decades thousands did -- and I suspect in some "Great Firewall" places, people still do.

Bob
Massachusetts USA


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Kpapademas at aol.com 
  To: f_minor at glenngould.org 
  Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 12:31 PM
  Subject: [f_minor] Take Five


  The passing of Dave Brubeck, 91 years old!

  http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/chi-dave-brubeck-dead-20121205,0,7126256.column

  Take Five!
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=faJE92phKzI


  K




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