The 33-year friendship between saxophonist Paul Desmond and pianist Dave Brubeck was as remarkable as it was unlikely.
The two met playing for an army band in 1944. Brubeck auditioned for the band, and Desmond, four years older, was struck by the originality of Brubeck’s chord changes. They continued to play together following the war, and officially formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951.
That Quartet would last a fruitful 16 years, peaking in popularity with 1959’s Time Out. It was the first jazz LP to sell a million copies, and it makes regular appearances whenever any jazz aficionado makes a list of the ten best or most important or most superbly superlative records or whatever.
Although the quartet bore Brubeck’s name, Paul Desmond was a significant contributor; the only track on Time Out that Dave Brubeck didn’t write himself was Paul Desmond’s “Take Five,” which is by far the best-known song the Quartet ever produced. The song’s success must have been a point of pride for Desmond; he released a solo record a few years later called Take Ten, with a title track that sounds – with all due respect to Paul Desmond – more like a knock-off of “Take Five” than a sequel.
Brubeck and Desmond were not only professional collaborators, but close friends. So close, in fact, that Brubeck’s own children were apparently under the impression that Desmond was their biological uncle until well into their teens.
But the incredible thing to me is that these two men could even stand each other. By all accounts, they appear to have been polar opposites. Brubeck was devoutly religious, a family man with old-school values. Desmond was emphatically un-married, a serial womanizer who dabbled in all kinds of drugs.
It’s the kind of personality difference that would usually tear a band apart, but somehow they made it work.
Given their sharply different lifestyles, it’s unsurprising that Brubeck outlived Desmond by 35 years. They enjoyed one last tour together in 1977, even as Desmond’s health was failing, with years of smoking finally catching up to his lungs.
It’s worth wondering how much of a stabilizing effect Dave Brubeck may have had on Paul Desmond. But it may also be that Desmond secretly pulled Brubeck out of his zone of comfort, as Brubeck once revealed in an interview:
At the end of Paul’s life, he said that he used to try and trick me, and play the worst possible note in a chord and see if I could resolve it. And I didn’t know he was doing that. I thought, “Wow, he’s playing a very wild note in this chord, I’d better get on it.”
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. Desmond’s playing is wonderfully smooth. He once said he was trying to sound “like a dry martini.”
2. When guitarist Jim Hall gets really into his solos, you can hear him humming along as he plays. (Also, I’m pretty sure that the guitar lick at the opening of this track was sampled in the song we featured back in week 76.)
3. The other players, of course, are all solid – Eugene Wright on bass, Connie Kay on drums. But notice that Desmond’s quartet on this album does not include a pianist. Maybe he knew there was no pianist he could connect with like he could with Dave Brubeck.
Recommended listening activity:
Wearing two differently-coloured socks.