Brubeck was walking through Istanbul when he heard local musicians playing in 9, and his imagination transformed what he'd encountered into this flawlessly realised compositional object. ![]() ![]() Blue Rondo was, you feel, imagined in a light-bulb-goes-off instant, its lopsided rhythm nailed there by obsessively zig-zagging supporting wall harmonies. Then again the time signature thing has perhaps been overemphasised. Had there been a jazz composition in 9/8 before? If so, then certainly not counted as 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3. Like Take Five, Blue Rondo sported a fancy time signature. What was so great about it? It wedged ecstatic improvised blues choruses inside an owlishly clever composition improvisation and composition, it symbolised everything Brubeck believed in. Blue Rondo à la Turkīut Brubeck's compositional masterpiece was Time Out's opening track, Blue Rondo à la Turk. This video, beginning in 1981 then jumping mid-tune to 2009, gives a taste of its unfolding history. And once in improvisational mode, the basic pulse itself might fizzle, fragment and fracture into a freeflow slipstream of sound: time lapse more than time out. The vamp might be wacked out like the You Really Got Me riff or Brubeck latterly took to introducing Take Five subliminally with a faraway impressionistic intro. But once it was a hit, Brubeck's jazz brain immediately found ways of evolving it. A more unlikely set of ingredients for a hit record you can't imagine. ![]() His alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond, had traced a melody in 5/4 time over a drum pattern that Morello was using to warm up before concerts. Brubeck's vamp simply held the group together. Back in 1959, when the classic Brubeck Quartet introduced the piece on their album Time Out, it was meant to be a tailor-made feature for the group's drummer Joe Morello. Reading this on a mobile device? Click here to viewĭave Brubeck once told me that he never tired of performing Take Five: "It gives a reading of where the quartet's at," he said.
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