Philip Clark - Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time

Once I had my title, not writing became more of a problem than sitting down to begin.

A Life in Time was a title that encapsulated the classic biographical model of the life and times, but it also opened up the terrain. The project was not to write a book that marched through Dave Brubecks life chronologicallycasually observing, perhaps as an aside, that shortly after his quartet recorded Take Five in 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon flew on a trade mission to Moscow and Billie Holiday died. The plan instead was to thread his life back through the times that formed it. Brubeck saw active service as a solider during the Second World War; he led a commercially successful, racially mixed jazz group during some of the ugliest days of American segregation; and in the late 1960s and early 1970s he created a series of large-scale compositions that reflected variously on issues of race, religion, and the messy politics of an uncertain era. Threading his life back through these times was both a musical and a social concernI wanted to shine a light on how Brubeck, thoughtful and sensitive as he was, had been changed as a musician and as a man by the troubled times through which he lived and during which he produced such optimistic, life-enhancing art.

As a biographer in search of a title, I was handed a gift by Brubeck, even if it took me a while to realize it. He was a man obsessed with time. From the moment he founded the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951 to only eighteen months before his death at the end of 2012, Brubeck spent much of his life touring the world, which adds up to sixty years of playing concerts in every continent of the world, including some countries that today would be too dangerous to contemplate visiting.

He was also a man impatient with time. Finding time to play jazz, time to compose, and time to devote to his wife Iola and their six children were all important to Brubeck, and with only so many hours in the day, one solution was to overlap those activities. Compositions originally written for his extended sacred pieces were adapted for his jazz groups; and, if you want to spend more time with your teenage children, one sure way to know where they are every night is to play jazz with them. Beginning in 1973, Brubeck toured with three of his sonsDarius, Chris, and Danas Two Generations of Brubeck and the New Brubeck Quartet, his initial reluctance to embrace their newfangled cultural reference pointswhich included rock, funk, and soul musicquickly forgotten.

But that word, time, also had another meaning altogether. Whenever I interviewed Brubeck, it never took long for two key terms to emerge: polytonality and polyrhythm. Polytonalitymusic sounding in two or more keys simultaneouslyand polyrhythmoverlays of different rhythmic pulses and grooveswere, like the attitude he took toward life, techniques that allowed obsessions and tics to coexist. Brubeck plied his music with overlaps: between musical cultures in Blue Rondo la Turk, which combined an indigenous Turkish rhythm with the blues, and in Three to Get Ready, which squared the circle of a waltz by inserting bars of 4/4; between different time signatures, like his version of Someday My Prince Will Come, which managed to be in 4/4 and 3/4 at the same time; between the radically diverse range of musical styles through which he waded in his improvised solosno sweat as Liszt flowed into James P. Johnson.