![]() ![]() It would be an honor to have learned from Joe!Īs to playing along with the track, the only time I have ever heard Joe solo over the piano is in the album version. He opened up Portraits in Rhythm (a fantastic snare drum book full of interesting pieces) when it was brand new, flipped through for a few minutes and finds a bar of 3/16 with an extra sixteenth note! And if you played him an exercise he could tell you that you used your right hand where it should have been left, with no problem. You could spend a month working on one page out of any book and he would still find room for improvement.įunny story about Joe my teacher told me - Joe is a you may know,legally blind, and has one "good eye" which he could read music through by holding it very close to his face. For NPR Jazz, I'm Murray Horwitz.Should have clarified - My teacher was a student of Joe's for five years. It's called Time Out, The Dave Brubeck Quartet, it's on the Columbia label. HORWITZ: Happily, indeed because it's still a very listenable album and one that you should have in your Basic Jazz Record Library. HORWITZ: Well, it shows that things don't always work out the way you want them to. Paul Desmond said that "Take Five" was never meant to be a big hit on the charts, it was meant to be a drum solo for Joe Morello, primarily. SPELLMAN: It was a huge hit because it was so accessible. HORWITZ: What's extraordinary is that it was so very experimental and at the same time it was a huge hit. They don't stay in one rhythm on very many of these pieces. And as I say, you might hear them changing that as they go along. HORWITZ: This is getting a little technical, but I see what you mean - in other words, where you're used to hearing four beats per measure - one-two-three-four - we might hear one-two-three-four-five, one-two-three-four-five. So you might go from a nine back to a four. Not only that, but they thought that they would see what would happen if they changed rhythms during the course of a tune. So they thought that they would try to see how they could stitch it all together. SPELLMAN: Fives and sevens, that we're hearing in all this modal music of the Middle East and of India. SPELLMAN: American dance rhythms, absolutely, which is basically four-four, and then later, after Max Roach and Clifford Brown, there were some excursions in three-four time, but these guys were wondering.How do we make use of these nines and these. Jazz as you know, has been wed to dance rhythms for most of its history. SPELLMAN: Well, Dave Brubeck had taken the band on a tour of the Middle East and India in the late 1950s, and they were struck by the variety of rhythms that they heard. Let me ask you, how did this come about? I mean, how did they start experimenting with different time signatures? He gets different sounds off of one instrument. ![]() HORWITZ: It's true, because he gets a stunning array of timbres, just a different like, orchestral sound out of the drum kit. SPELLMAN: Well, Joe Morello is one of the best technical drummers in all of jazz, and for this kind of work here in which the time were so various, it was important to have a musician who could handle it, and make it all seem natural and keep it going together. HORWITZ: Why is Joe Morello, the drummer who Dave Brubeck stole from Marian McPartland, the right drummer for this group? Bass playing for musicians like this is very difficult, because it's hard in a harmonically complex piece of music to choose the right note out of the chord to keep the thing going forward. SPELLMAN: Eugene Wright was a very solid bass player. HORWITZ: Eugene Wright was the bass player. I have always considered Paul Desmond to be one of the great musicians in jazz for improvising a beautiful melodic line-a long melodic line that is lyrical, and that holds together impeccably. But it's also music by some very accomplished musicians who are well set in their styles. ![]() There's jazz that proceeds from Miles Davis "The Birth of Cool" records, which we'll talk about on another day. HORWITZ: And it's still really the sound that for a lot of people who aren't really jazz listeners defines what jazz is. SPELLMAN: "Take Five" was on the top of the Pop charts, it was number one for awhile. ![]()
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