With Dave Brubeck’s 90th birthday five days away, anticipation of the event is materializing in news stories, interviews, radio airplay, web tributes and accolades from colleagues and admirers. Marc Myers’ piece in The Wall Street Journal includes this paragraph:
Clean living, a happy marriage and global popularity have made Mr. Brubeck a media darling–and a target of envy. “Even in the ’50s I’d hear critics and musicians say, ‘Oh, Brubeck, he’s different’–meaning separate from the rest,” Mr. Brubeck said. “Others described my music as West Coast cool or light. Listen to our version of ‘Look for the Silver Lining’ from 1952. Tell me, what’s cool about that?”
You be the judge. The recording is from 1951, not ’52, but 59 years later, it’s understandable that anyone could lose track of a year. This was an NBC Radio live remote from the Surf Club in Hollywood. The record label lists ony Brubeck, Paul Desmond and bassist Wyatt Ruther. The drummer is Herb Barman.
Cool? Please use the comment link at the bottom of this post.
To answer your question one would need to first define what cool is which is almost impossible. The definition has also changed over time. I think the idea of cool was first developed by African-Americans as a method of survival under a system of brutal oppression. Among other things, it was a way of maintaining composure since any resistance would be met with beatings, imprisonment, and lynching. On a literal level, it might have even stemmed from the idea of avoiding hyperthermia in the fields of plantations – work blacks had to do for decades after their presumed emancipation.. It seems only natural that the idea of coolness, of keeping a composure that ensured survival, entered their aesthetic conceptions – even if it were not a formalized philosophy. Stay laid back. Don’t be provoked into something that will get you beaten or murdered by people who considered you less than human. Keep it cool, man.
By the 50s, coolness had been appropriated by the dominant culture perhaps because it offered a response to the oppressive rigidity of an era characterized by extreme militarism, scientism, conformism, materialism, and red-baiting. Nevertheless, there is always an irony in white coolness, because the system of oppression whites suffered was not even remotely as bad as what blacks faced. Perhaps that’s why white coolness always has an element of falseness about it, a feeling that one is not so much trying to survive as just adding the accoutrements of hipness to one’s consciously contrived persona.
So in this recording we hear Desmond’s clean, resonant, rather straight laced tone that is reminiscent of the way classical musicians play the alto. It has a simple, singing quality that sounds like it comes from a man without many worries in the world. And definitely not a man who has had to find a way of surviving in an atmosphere of concentric brutality. And at about 1:40 into the recording Brubeck’s solo starts with a rigid, almost march-like quality and then moves toward a thumping quality on low chords, like a clueless white guy trying to affect getting down and dirty. The saving grace is that he has so much musicianship that the ideas are still interesting even if rather unauthentic.
All the same, there is some coolness in the recording. You can just hear someone going up to these guys and asking them if they are communists, and then watching them all smile ironically while reciting the pledge of allegiance. Cool of sort, I guess you could say, but these guys never faced a bull whip or lynching. Maybe you could call it candy-assed cool. It’s not a “silver lining” coolness, but a silver spoon coolness.
what is meant by cool?
it was cool for me back then.
While rummaging through YouTube I came across the two videos that seem to me appropriate to the occasion:
One is a fragment of the concert at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with one of the best symphony orchestras – the Mikhail Pletnev Russian National Orchestra (RNO) and famous Yurlov Choral Capella.
The other is from the Dave Brubeck session with the faculty and students of the Moscow Conservatory at one of the most beautiful and accoustically superb MC halls – The Rachmaninoff Hall.
Hope you’ll enjoy them as much as those present there.
(The clips are from “Brubeck Returns To Moscow.” Copies of the DVD are rare, but can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/Dave-Brubeck-Quartet-Returns-Moscow/dp/B00008V2U2 —DR)
Dave is a Master of composition, piano/and improvisation. I’ve been listening to him from the get-go and fighting the critics and musicians who claimed he was a non-swinger. Now define that folks!
His personality is all charm. He is 100% committed to his purpose in life and that is to extend the good, the holy and the beautiful.
His marriage to Iola was made in Heaven. His children are a joy to him and as talented.
Hagiographically yours,
Jack Reilly
I’ve liked Brubeck for many years – still have and play his music on my PC. The role of Paul Desmond in the quartet was, I think, a large contributer to their overall success. They worked together so well.
I’m glad to hear that he’s still alive and happy.
You know what this reminds me of? Stan Getz’s early recordings on Roost. I’m nota huge fan of the “cool” moniker myself, or any jazz categorization, but the sound on this record is typical of the time (late ’40s – early ’50s), when guys like Desmond and Getz took the harmonic complexity of bebop and subtracted some of the bombastic qualities of it. Less bombs, less organized chaos, more soft tones in the sax. So an inconclusive yes.
Wow! That’s one heavy (duty) essay contributed by Mr. Osbourne. Is he speaking tongue-in-cheek or dead-and-serious? I bow to superior understanding and merely ask: can one be cool and hot simultaneously? Art Pepper, Clifford Brown, Getz at times, the Duke (pianist) often, “The Duke”‘s composer when stops are pulled out?
Hi, Ed. My thinking wasn’t tougue-in-cheek. This history of jazz is often a lot more serious and brutal than we often remember. A little knowledge of the history can help us better appreciate what the men and women who created blues and jazz were actually trying to express. If you or you’re friends are interested, a lot of my thinking in this area comes from Alan Lomax’s book __The Land Where the Blues Began__.
It illustrates the extreme brutality African-Americans faced after their “emancipation.” It details their living conditions how it flowed into their music. Their work, such as on the levees and in the prisons, was often similar to slave labor until the late 1950s. They were constantly subject to summary murder through lynching and other forms of execution if they showed even the slightest impudence. It is astounding how quickly we have forgotten this relatively recent history even from the 50s.
The white foremen who “worked” these prisoners were specially trained (or simply adept) in brutal, murderous thuggery, since this was thought to be the only way “niggers” were to be dealt with. (The book uses that word repeatedly since it was a commonly used term in the decades during which the interviews were completed.) I quote below a couple paragraphs from a section concerning the Parchman Prison, which as the _New York Post_ observed in 1957, was essentially a large cotton plantation using convicts as labor. On the day described, the prisoners were sent to hoe cotton. One of the white “bosses” named “Cold Blood” was being teased by the other white foremen about how slow his squad was moving down the field. Cold Blood decided to take this out on an old crippled black man named Lew who couldn’t keep up. Cold Blood ordered some of the men to hold Lew down spread eagle so that he could be whipped with a hemp rope, but Lew brandished his hoe and threatened to attack anyone who came near him. The prisoner Lomax interviewed, a blues singer, continues:
“The boys quite naturally, wouldn’t go up to [Lew]. Finally old Cold Blood got off his horse, loaded his shotgun with buck shots instead of bird shots, and began to chase old Lew around. Cold Blood was so fat and so soft that he could not even catch that cripple old man at first, but he finally got in reach of him and struck Lew on the shoulder with the barrel of his gun. The gun went off and blew away half of Lew’s shoulder.
“‘Don’t shoot me no mo, boss,’ Lew pleaded as he fell to earth. Cold Blood walked back a few steps to where he had dropped his extra shells and loaded his gun again. Then he approached Lew with a curse on his lips. ‘I’ll put you out of your misery, you right sorry old hard-ass nigger,’ and he laid his gun on the side of Lew’s head and blew the top of his head off. He then mounted his horse and ordered the men to go to work. All the gangs in the field had stopped and were watching what happened. When Cold Blood had done his dirty deed, Easter Rabbit [the nickname of another foreman] and all the bosses began squabbling and pushing on down the line. We rolled on while a couple of the trusties dragged Lew to the wagon. An investigation was held, but nothing was ever done about this incident. Cold Blood is still a guard on the Big Brazos.”
All of Lomax’s interviews were held between 1933 and 1947 (the latter date only five years before the Brubeck recording in question.) The stories of the singers often flow over into their songs and Lomax provides the texts. The levee camps, which used “hired” labor, were little different from the prisons. A literal stench of death often surrounded the tent camps of the workers. This was the milieu in which many African-American musicians spent most of their lives and helps us understand the meaning and evolution of the blues and closely related genres like jazz. Among other things, being cool was a method of staying alive.
Funny thing is though, I still really like smooth jazz — even people like Chris Botti. I just know it isn’t the whole story.
Cool is a strange expression in Jazz. This version of “Silver Lining” swings with Paul Desmond but Dave’s piano is pure bebop with its staccatto single note melodic line ahd harsh chords behind PD’s solo.
I would not refer to this recording as cool in any form. Its just great Jazz for me.
Hello, Mr. O.
I read with even more interest your excellent look at the sorry racial history of the South. And I promise, you are preaching to the choir. I come from a family of Southern farmers (Spiveys) and Northern retailers (Leimbachers), but because my Dad was Air Force, we wound up living about equally north and south up to my 21st birthday, including a stint in Montgomery during 1955-56, so I was actually present for Rosa Parks and the Bus Boycott and the sudden rise of Martin Luther King. In fact my parents were among those who gave rides to the walking Black people.
I saw despicable race hatred firsthand, but I also saw the kindly cordial side of Southerners of both races ,and the sometimes shared affection. I also experienced from my outsider’s perspective the subtler racism of the North, and I came to agree wholeheartedly with Dick Gregory’s canny observation: “Down South they don’t care how close you get, just so you don’t get too big. And up North they don’t care how big you get, just so you don’t get too close.” No one, including you or me, has a complete handle on the complex matters of race.
Those Lomaxes? Exploited Leadbelly (John), looked for bad news to report when in the South (Alan), denied Black researchers the credit due (both), demanded the musicians play hollers or blues when maybe the players wanted to show some other genre like a Jimmie Rodgers or Bing Crosby tune! Alan was known to have conflated incidents and historical moments into combined reports that made for better stories.
Over the years I’ve supported the Panthers, SNCC, the SPLC, and various groups espoused by MLK alive or dead. I got interested in the Blues in 1962, became a serious collector and casual researcher immediately, and in the late Sixties after years of reading and listening, I wrote the first movie script about Robert Johnson and the Blues life (can be found at http://www.robertjohnsonhellhound.blogspot.com), still love the music, still try to live my life in a non-biased way though I admit to great discomfort with gangsta rappers and the sad criminal life of the ghettoes, as impoverished Black people slide further back. (The rest of us are headed for violence and maybe revolution too, I’d say, as the gaps between rising super-rich and sinking middle class and trapped helpless poor continue to widen.)
All of that is just background to our discussion. Whether you are correct about the ultimate source of the concept of Cool, I don’t believe it matters in the music being scrutinized. Most intelligent White folks can recognize that pop culture grows from the efforts and innovations of Black musicians and other minorities. But you would be hard-pressed to define Cool Jazz, West Coast Jazz, Dave Brubeck’s Milhaud-influenced compositions, the counterpoint of Mulligan and Baker, etc., as being stolen from, or created on the backs and by the sweat of, Black laborers. Jazz music and instrumental stylings inspired by Armstrong, Ellington, Hawkins, Young, Hines, Wilson, Parker, Gillespie, on and on? Absolutely. But the result of evil machinations of Whites to keep the Black folks down? Nonsense.
Your doom-and-gloom pronouncements threatened to override the celebration of Dave’s long life and distinguished accomplishments, and that’s what I reacted to. And I do believe it’s possible for any human to be a Cool person/player, or a Hot one, or bear elements of both, even simultaneously. Such character traits have been around since the Dawn of Man, not just the Time of Slavery.