ageless Brubeck plays one for the ages

The Dave Brubeck Quartet

Tanglewood Jazz Festival 2004 came to a close shortly before eleven o'clock Sunday September 5 and the last notes played were not the work of Brubeck, or Connick, or Marsalis - to name just 3 of the teriffic weekend's headliners - but old Johannes Brahms, whose "Lullaby" was played on flute by Bobby Militello of the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

Militello toosed off a few lines of the song on flute (with his saxophone tucked under his arm) when the quartet came back onstage to acknowledge the audience's ovation; everybody cracked up, nobody expected a real encore; it was another light, funny moment folded into a seriously brilliant two and a half hour concert, including a dazzling second set with the DBQ accompanied by the 23-piece Brubeck Symphonette.

The audience was cued to Dave Brubeck's playful mood right from the start, when, after introducing his band, he said: "I made a tune list and as we walked out here, I told the boys to forget it. I'm going to play an old tune from the 30s called 'Margie'."

Brubeck introduced the second number with an anecdote about life on the road - more precisely, about getting cranky deep into the Quartet's third European tour of the year and being placated by being setup with digs in London for the remainder of the tour.

When he was told that, "We'll put you up in a London flat," he said "Sharp!" It took the audience a moment to get the joke: he gave them a chance at redemption when his story continued in the form of introduction to "London Flat London Sharp," which Mr. Brubeck said he composed to dispel the gloomy mood all the travel had gotten him into.

"Now, my left hand will run down the piano in Flats, and my right hand will go up the piano in ... ." SHARPS rang out from the vast audience, now totally attuned and settled in for a great musical experience.

The number featured a searing alto sax solo by Militello and was followed by something completely different, "Theme for June" from brother Howard Brubeck's 1959 composition "Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra." Beginning with sublime and quiet notes on the piano, it lead into a bass solo wherein Michael Moore evoked a feeling of loneliness so palpable it could make one shudder.

Randy Jones moved the tune along with whispering brushwork, picking up the pace until Militello's sax lightened the feeling and finally Brubeck gave the whole idea a second thought with a fanciful run of notes before getting quiet again and fading to silence.

Brubeck spent a few minutes talking about his brother's composition, that it gave more room for the jazz musicians to improvise than earlier pieces for jazz and orchestra, and that Leonard Bernstein heard it at the original Music Inn in Lenox and decided to record it, conducting the New York Philharmonic with the DBQ in 1960.

Brubeck continued by telling us that in the early 50s and even in the 40s, he "was messing around with crazy time signatures" but that it didn't work because people couldn't dance to the tunes. Then he began to do popular tunes, doing them simple at first and then playing them crazy, "because people didn't listen once they were on the dance floor!"

Around the same time he began listening to the little yellow records of his kids and thought they were pretty good. One of them was "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," from which Brubeck wrote an arrangement of "Someday My Prince Will Come." Roundly dissed at the time for being so un-hip as to embrace pop music, Brubeck reminded the audience that it wasn't long before the uber-cool Miles Davis put out his own version of "Some Day..."

Listening to it tonight, one could waltz, march, and/or just groove to Brubeck's polyrhythmic genius. It was followed by the recent piece, "Elegy," written in memory of Norwegian jazz journalist Randi Hultin, which featured Moore's sorrowful bowing bass and Militello's plaintive flute. Drummer Randy Jones had the spotlight as they ended the set with "Out of the Way."

For the second set, the quartet was joined onstage by the 23-piece Brubeck Symphonette, all strings save for one French horn, conducted by Russell Gloyd, who embellished on Brubeck's earlier remarks by saying that one of those London gigs was with the London Symphony Orchestra during their 100th Anniversary celebration, with Queen Elizabeth II in attendance. Gloyd continued in M.C. mode, telling the story of how "Blue Rondo A La Turk" came to be written by Brubeck after he was intrigued by the rhythms he heard street musicians playing in Istanbul while on a State Department tour during the Eisenhower administration.

Besides "Blue Rondo...", the set included "Brandenburg Gate" which Brubeck described as being based on the rhythm of 'Danke schön' German for 'thank you;' the similiarly inspired "Regret,' which repeats the sound of that sad word throughout and which he invited the audience to devise their own programs for because he didn't know what the piece was about; and "Lullaby" from his Christmas cantata, "La Fiesta de la Posada."

For the evening's, and indeed, the Festival's, grand finale, we were presented with a scintillating performance of "Take Five," composed by Brubeck's original saxophonist Paul Desmond. All the solos were outstanding, especially Randy Jones', which got Brubeck to his feet the better to enjoy it before returning to the piano to put the wraps on one of the best concerts Ozawa Hall will ever hold.