Brubeck, the true fusionist:

‘The inexplicable ability to know what the next note has to be’

There was an occasion in my youth when I was striving to sightread a profusely chorded Brubeck score. I was proceeding at the rate of a bar a minute when Gordon Burrows looked in and asked to replace me at the piano. He sailed flawlessly through some twenty bars in half a minute and rose with the comment, “That's pretty good music.” I could have been listening to Brubeck himself playing.

I began with this anecdote as an indication not only of the density of Brubeck's harmony but of the instant appeal of his music for a brilliant musician like Burrows, profoundly versed in classical music and with no interest whatsoever in jazz, who had never even heard of Brubeck. It illustrated his achievement of bringing jazz into the musical mainstream. In so doing Brubeck proved himself to be one of the great fusionists of musical history.

Beethoven fused Palestrinian polyphony and baroque counterpoint with sonata form to create a new musical language for himself in his last years. What Brubeck did was even more radical. He fused together two seemingly alien musical cultures, namely classical and jazz. He achieved this by investing jazz with the harmonic complexity of modern classical music. Cecil Taylor, the jazz critic, has spoken of “the depth and texture of Brubeck's harmony, which had more notes in it than anyone else's.” And to classical music Brubeck restored the practice of improvisation. As Ted Goia said, he was “inspired by the process of improvisation rather than by its history.” In this way Brubeck too forged a new musical idiom.

And he did more. Through his own and Paul Desmond's lyrical gifts he enabled jazz to transcend its mainly urban character and become a music of the countryside as well, and thereby more truly representative of the American ethos.

Thus did Brubeck bring jazz into the great tradition of Western music as no other jazz artist has been able to do, not even Duke Ellington whom Brubeck greatly admired. At the same time he adjusted and enriched that tradition. He is remembered today chiefly for his polyrhythmic and polytonal innovations. As regards the former, they are of little permanent interest because they make no meaningful contribution to Brubeck's primary achievements in harmony and improvisation,. These are best in evidence when he and his quartet are playing in the traditional common time. His fame with polytonality, however, is justified although the full extent of this contribution here is insufficiently appreciated.

Brubeck brought into his music the harmonic ideas he learned from his teacher Milhaud, the master of polytonality, and from Schoenberg, the master-in fact the inventor-of atonality or keylessness, with whom he had just two lessons. I recall Brubeck being interviewed over the radio when he spoke of his experience with Schoenberg. When Brubeck questioned his instructor's insistence on his changing the harmonic progression of one of his compositions, Schoenberg led him into the next room where all the scores of Beethoven's nine symphonies were displayed in a cabinet. Pointing to them Schoenberg said, “I know every single note in every one of these symphonies. If they were played backwards I would still know them. That's why you need to listen to me.” That was when the two parted company.

Albeit heavily influenced by the harmonic developments in classical music Brubeck remained his own man. The polytonality of Milhaud was not introduced at the expense of melodic tonality (the sense of key), nor was the atonality of Schoenberg adopted at the cost of harmonic tonality. They are present primarily to enrich and enlarge the musical experience whilst maintaining fundamental tonality. In this Brubeck resembles Debussy at his best, as in the String Quartet. Thus the spirit of jazz is never vitiated. This can be seen by considering two of Brubeck's most famous compositions, “In Your Own Sweet Way” and “The Duke”-his tribute to Ellington.

The latter piece has the air of enigmatic jauntiness typical of Ellington's melodic line and could, in fact, be mistaken for one of the latter's compositions. But the way it is treated is entirely Brubeck's own. A professor of music told him that his setting of the very first eight bars incorporated the keys of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, ie. all the black and white notes in sequence within the octave. This was clearly the influence of Schoenberg who had invented the twelve tone sysem in which all twelve notes had equal values. Brubeck, however, had been unaware of this; so is the untrained listener, since harmonic complexity is not allowed to submerge the melodic outline of the composition.

Thus, as we see in the subsequent improvisations on the melody, Brubeck's incessant straying from the basic key relationships of the composition is not a case of sheer atonality, as with Schoenberg, or of deliberate modulation into other keys as in Beethoven's developments. Rather is it a case of the Milhaud-influenced combination of different keys simulaneously but, unlike Milhaud, momentarily.

This has the beautiful effect of irradiating the basic tonality of the composition with a myriad shades of complementary harmonies, all seemingly dissonant or unrelated but always falling into the ultimate pattern envisaged by the pianist. Leonard Bernstein once said that Beethoven in the compositional process had “the inexplicable ability to know what the next note has to be.” One cannot help feeling the same way about Brubeck's chord progressions which, when it is considered that these are all improvised, is a truly remarkable achievement.

We see this process at work again in the beautifully lyrical “In you Own Sweet Way.” This, like “The Duke”, is in a straightforward AABA subject-format involving just three keys, viz. A: tonic, mediant, tonic and B: subdominat, mediant, tonic. In Brubeck's solo piano version his improvisation consists of three variations on this theme, all of which strictly follow these key relationships.

There is no modulation beyond this basic pattern, for which reason the piece has the steadily mounting intensity of the slow movement of Beethoven's “Appassionata Sonata”, of which it is about the same length. But there the resemblance ends because the three variations together with the concluding coda are as different from each other as Beethoven's great “Diabelli” variations differ from one to the other.

This is because Brubeck, apart from resorting to contrapuntal effects, seems to be exploring the harmonic effects of all the keys of the chromatic scale without departing from the basic key relationships. It is the very flowering of harmony.

Brubeck's great counterpart in the quartet, the saxophonist Paul Desmond, is said to have initially been puzzled by Brubeck's polytonality. But he got into the spirit of it soon enough. When he begins his solo after Brubeck's introduction of the theme, it is invariably in a different key, usually a fourth below in the dominant, while the piano continues to accompany him in the tonic..

He eventually joins the piano in the original key, but his melodic line is throughout fraught with polytonal effects without abandoning the basic melodic pattern. In this way he presages and complements Brubeck's subsequent harmonic effects by establishing a delightful iridescence in his melodic motifs. This happens in the version of “In Your Own Sweet Way” which involves the entire quartet where, interestingly, Brubeck's own improvisations are quite different from the solo piano version described above.

Desmond's great contribution is by way of his sheer lyricism. In this his playing proved to be a radical departure from that of his contemporaries who generally followed the angular, urban-evocative melodic patterns developed by Charlie Parker.

Desmond's melodic line flows beautifully and reaches outwards into greater melodic spaces rather than being confined to a specific territory. His line as it develops seems particularly to favour Elgar-like leaps of fourths. As he proceeds from variation to variation, or from chorus to chorus in jazz parlance, you realise that like Brubeck he has an overall pattern in mind which he builds up progressivelly to a resounding climax, thereafter winding down gently to let the piano take over.

In a further article we hope to identify the contribution of drummer Joe Morello to the overall sound of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and to examine some developments in the American music scene following the disbanding of the quartet in 1967.