Time Out

I am not a jazz expert at all. I listen to some jazz, but I can't tell you the definitive version of some song or name all the people who played with Charlie Parker on a particular track. Today is Halloween - my least favorite holiday - and I am hiding in my house and "taking five" by listening to the first jazz album I ever bought.

I bought this album in my formative years. It was Time Out. 

This was Dave Brubeck’s fourteenth album for Columbia Records, but this was his breakthrough album and that's because it was perhaps more accessible to non-jazz listeners.

Brubeck's quartet had released several live albums recorded at colleges and jazz covers that were closer to the pop side of the jazz catalog than the hardcore and bee-bop side. He released an album called Dave Digs Disney.

Time Out seems like a leap - a concept album exploring time signatures that were not common in jazz.

The Quartet at that time was Dave Brubeck - piano, Paul Desmond - alto sax, Eugene Wright - bass, and Joe Morello - drums.

One article I read sees the album as one that changed jazz. (see video below) One point that I never knew that influenced Brubeck and others is that the U.S. State Department’s sent American jazz musicians around the world as cultural ambassadors. They included Brubeck, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Dizzy Gillespie.

The article/video says that Brubeck’s innovations came from the polyrhythms and folk music that he heard while traveling through other countries. The music he heard in Turkey had an influence on the album's track “Blue Rondo a la Turk." The song's title is a musical play on Mozart's "Rondo alla Turca" from his Piano Sonata No. 11.

The title track, "Take Five," is the only song on the album that was not composed by Brubeck. Cool jazz alto saxophonist Paul Desmond wrote the track.

They recorded at Columbia Records' 30th Street Studio in New York City in July 1959, but it didn't become a hit until 1961. It was the biggest-selling jazz single ever, and it still shows up in lots of movie and television soundtracks and still gets lots of radio airplay on jazz stations.

Joe Morello, Brubeck’s drummer, knew something about complicated time signatures from his classical background as a violinist. Morello experiments with 5/4 time became the backbone of “Take Five.”

Brubeck contu=inued this direction in a "sequel" titled Time Further Out.

I got turned on to Take Five at the same time that I was given copies of John Coltrane's Blue Train and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue to listen to in my teenager room full of rock albums. It was an education.