![]() ![]() It was a huge success - “Take Five” became the greatest selling jazz record of all time and the biggest success of Brubeck’s career. They wanted him to go home and write some dance tunes quickly. When he brought in his now-classic Time Out album, featuring “Take Five” and other pieces in odd time signatures, the record company told him it would never fly, since it’s impossible to dance to anything outside of a strict 4/4 meter. “There’s too much distance between the performer and the audience.” It’s that distance that he’s been trying to overcome over the years, convinced that the public, much more than the honchos of the record companies who often call the shots, can appreciate all the complexity and richness his music can hold. “You can’t hear anything at the Bowl,” he said. On the present release, both versions of this masterpiece can be compared.The Dave Brubeck Quartet, “Take Five” by Paul Desmond.īrubeck was in town to play that night at the Hollywood Bowl with his quintet. Over time, the mono versions were condemned to oblivion, and only recently some music fans began to value these long forgotten masters, which capture classic performances from a different aural point of view. The stereo albums, thus, were slightly more expensive than their mono counterparts. This was explained at the time by the fact that Stereo was still a very recent innovation, and not everyone had sound systems capable of reproducing the new technology. In the late 1950s, it was common for big labels to record performances simultaneously in mono and stereo, and then release both versions at the same time, with different reference numbers. LP 2: THE MONO VERSION (Columbia CL 1397) LP 1: THE STEREO VERSION (Columbia CS 8192) ![]() However, one of the most catchy melodies on that album, “Take Five”, was a Paul Desmond composition, and it would become the quartet’s most celebrated tune. Most of the songs were composed by Brubeck, as is the case on the album "Time Out". The formation took the challenge to experiment with musical forms foreign to jazz and, in addition to playing standard tunes like everyone else, they introduced many new compositions that gave the formation its identity. Brubeck’s fame even led to him being featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1954 (the second jazz musician to receive the distinction Louis Armstrong was previously honored in 1949), a fact that was questioned by many black jazzmen like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, who rightly felt that they should have been there themselves and saw in the choice of Brubeck a form of racism.ĭespite the possible overreaction by the press, the popularity of the Dave Brubeck Quartet was real, as was the singularity of their music. They had begun playing in colleges, and slowly made their way into concert halls and jazz festivals. By 1959, the group with Paul Desmond (the bass player and the drummer changed a few times until Joe Morello arrived in 1956 and Eugene Wright joined the group in 1958/59) had been in existence for nearly a decade and it was highly popular among jazz audiences. The fact that Time Out became such a huge success took the world by surprise, including the members of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. TOGETHER ON THE SAME DE-LUXE FOLD OPEN 2-LP PACKAGE !
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