The Dave Brubeck Quartet
The Columbia Studio Albums Collection 1955-1966
Sony/Legacy
www.popmarket.com
By George W. Harris

Columbia records has finally figured out the benefits of releasing
complete box sets, and has jumped in with both feet with some massive
collections, such as the Miles Davis conglomeration. This one has all
19 studio albums that Dave Brubeck’s classic quartet of Paul
Desmond/as, Eugene Wright/b and Joe Morello/dr recorded (with a few
sessions with bassists Bob Bates, Norman Bates, and Joe Benjamin that
preceded Wright). Inside the box are 19 slip covers resembling the
original albums, making for clever storage. The only caveats that I see
here are the facts that the meeting with Jimmy Rushing was omitted, the
one-off Jazz Ambassadors session isn’t here, and that no concert
recordings were included. Nit picking? Hey, if you’re going to include
Bernstein and a whole orchestra, why not go for the whole Meghilla?

Obviously, if you’re a Brubeck fan, you’re already going to have a few
of these, most notably Time Out and possibly David Digs Disney or Gone
With The Wind. A few, like Angel Eyes ( a wonderful tribute to composer
Matt Dennis) have been available on foreign copies, but a good
percentage have just never seen the light of day. All four Jazz
Impresions discs are here: USA, Eurasia, Japan and New York (didn’t know about the New York one) and they’re all excellent. Besides the Dennis songbook, the band covers Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Leonard Bernstein (and of course, Disney) showing an amazing range and depth. Brubeck grew up on most of these songs, so the rhythm and melodies are embedded in his dna.

The music throughout this set is uniformly wonderful. Most of it seems
fairly straightahead, but for its time it was considered radical to
experiment with irregular time signatures. I just watched the old 59
James Stewart movie Anatomy of a Murder, and he mentions how “far out”
Brubeck’s band was then considered. Paul Desmond, of course, is one of
the alto wonders of the world, and he is completely sublime throughout
as he glides like a dove, while Morello’s experimental time signatures
and Wright’s steady pulse gave the band its distinct sound. The music
is amazingly and uniformly excellent, mixing standards (albeit at times
in peculiar meters) with outlandish sonic explorations. Brubeck’s touch
was vilified at the time of these recordings for being heavy handed.
Hard to say, 50 years hence, what the fuss was all about, as his touch
can be Debussy-esque in it’s delicacy as well as thunderous with the
blocked chords like some saloon keeper at the upright. Now in his 90s,
and still occasionally performing, he can look back at these recordings
with pride. If you’ve got the bucks, there’s a treasure trove of
creativity here, material that will last, dare I say, for “all” time.