'Dave Brubeck Quartet'‏ @ Montreal Jazz Festival

The Montreal International Jazz Festival closed with a giant,
who's been playing here for the past 25 years. He might be
85, but Dave Brubeck hasn't settled into complacency. Sure,
he still obliges fans by playing his two best-known songs,
'Blue Rondo' and 'Take Five', in the roughly 80 shows he
does a year. 'It doesn't bother me,' the jazz pianist has
said, in his gravely voice. 'Why should it? Did Duke Ellington
quit playing 'Take the A Train?' How stupid can you be when
you have sold-out concerts all over the world, and they want
to hear 'Blue Rondo and Take Five'. If you don't play it
would be impolite.'

The 'Dave Brubeck Quartet' was created in 1951, but before
that, it was a trio. The trio had won a new combo of the
year in Downbeat and Metronome. Which actually started with
the octet, between 1946 and 1949, then came the trio, which
evolved into the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
Brubeck has watched with bemusement as 'Time Out', which
includes those two aforementioned tracks, has played a see-saw
game over the years with Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue' as the
biggest-selling jazz album of all time. Coincidentally, both
were released in 1959. There's a thornier issue of hip credibility.
For many jazz snobs, Brubeck's West Coast cool jazz, however
ubiquitous it became, should never be mentioned in the same
breath as the groundbreaking work of the unimpeachably cool
and mysterious Davis.

In the post-quartet years, Brubeck has focused largely on
composition, writing and performing. A nine-minute score to
accompany Pope John Paul II's 1987 entrance to San Francisco's
Candlestick Park is a career highlight. Contributing to a
section of the unfinished C Minor Mass by Mozart is another.
He's recently written five new pieces for the Monterey Jazz
Festival. He says he derives equal enjoyment from composing
and improvising, insisting the two are not opposed. 'There's
very little difference in improvisation as a jazz musician
and what you do as a composer,' he's said. 'You're improvising
as you write it down.'
In spite of the Dupuytren's Contraction that sometimes flares
up and affects his fingers, Brubeck's still having trouble
getting those 80 concerts down to 40. If that means his current
quartet, featuring drummer Randy Jones, Bobby Militello on
alto sax and flute and bassist Michael Moore, must play that
many more versions of 'Take Five', so be it. 'You don't play
it,' he says, 'You play off it. It's different every night.'

* Reviewed July 8, 2006