Dave Brubeck

The "impressions" series sits in a particular place in the Brubeck catalog: music that grows directly from specific places and experiences, written from listening rather than from imagination. The Japan album came out of the quartet's 1964 tour, and like the Eurasia record six years earlier, it earns its subject because Brubeck actually went and actually listened rather than just deploying exotic textures for color.

"Koto Song" is the centerpiece, built on the pentatonic scales of traditional Japanese music in a way that feels genuinely engaged rather than decorative. The melody is haunting in a way that most Western jazz rarely achieves. Desmond plays over it with a mournfulness that matches the character of the piece without forcing anything, his alto more spare and careful than usual, as if he is trying not to disturb something fragile.

"Rising Sun" is more energetic, drawing on Japanese folk material and running with it in a direction that is recognizably Brubeck without losing the spirit of the source. The best argument for this album is the same as the best argument for Eurasia: the sense throughout that Brubeck genuinely cared about the music he was encountering and wanted to do something real with it. A beautiful record.

The most urban entry in the "impressions" series, and intentionally so. The New York Brubeck was writing about was the city of the mid-1960s: restless, jazz-saturated, moving at a pace that could inspire and exhaust you at the same time. The music has that quality throughout. It does not romanticize the city or sentimentalize it; it captures a specific energy and runs with it.

"Summer Song" is one of the most immediately likeable things Brubeck recorded in this period: a melody so naturally singable that it lodges in your head after a single listen. He was never afraid of a tune you could actually remember, and here that quality pays off completely. "Theme from Mr. Broadway" came from the CBS television show Brubeck had scored, and it translates to the album setting with an easy swing that reminds you the band could play it completely straight when they wanted to.

Morello and Wright are at a peak by 1964, and on the more driving pieces here they push Brubeck and Desmond in a way that elevates everything. Desmond's solos on this record are among his most consistently inspired of the decade. A strong album and an undervalued entry in a discography that has no shortage of competition for attention.

The last album in the informal odd-meter series and a strong close to that chapter of the Brubeck catalog. Time Changes revisits the rhythmic experimentalism of Time Out and Time Further Out without simply repeating it: the meters are more varied, the pieces shorter, and the band plays with the looseness of musicians who have internalized this vocabulary so thoroughly that it no longer requires conscious effort.

Desmond is in peak form throughout. His phrasing across changing time signatures is so natural that it barely registers as a technical achievement, which is the whole point: the aim was always to make the unusual feel inevitable, and by 1964 the quartet had so fully achieved that aim that you could listen to the whole album without noticing a single unusual bar.

The album has a valedictory quality in retrospect, knowing that the classic quartet would disband three years later. None of that is in the music, which is generous and forward-looking. But hearing it now, the fully achieved comfort with these rhythmic experiments sounds like the sound of a band that had finished a long project and could finally enjoy it.

A Cole Porter songbook album from the final years of the classic quartet, and a genuine pleasure. Porter's melodic sophistication and harmonic inventiveness made him one of the best of the American songbook composers for jazz purposes: his songs have strong enough bone structure to survive almost any treatment, and they reward the kind of harmonic reconsidering that Brubeck loved to do.

Desmond is in extraordinary form. His treatment of "You Do Something to Me" is among his most polished studio performances: the melody stated with complete elegance, the improvisation unfolding with the patient inevitability that was his signature. Brubeck comps with an unusually light touch, leaving more space than usual and trusting Desmond to fill it in his own time.

The rhythm section is as settled as it ever was, and the album has a warmth that comes partly from the material and partly from a band in its last years playing with the ease that only comes from a decade of shared work. One of the more overlooked albums in the late Columbia catalog.

After the classic quartet dissolved in 1967, Brubeck kept recording, and this collaboration with Gerry Mulligan was one of the first post-Desmond statements. Without Desmond, something in the front line had to change, and Mulligan's baritone saxophone provides a different kind of presence: warmer, lower, with a directness that the cool alto never quite possessed.

The album title means "friends" in Spanish, and the easy familiarity between the two musicians is the central fact of the record. Mulligan had played on Near-Myth seven years earlier, and the comfort level in these 1968 sessions is noticeably higher. Brubeck plays into the baritone with a different kind of voicing, a little lower and heavier, as if the instrument has pulled his comping down toward the bass register.

Jack Six and Alan Dawson form the rhythm section, and Dawson in particular is a significant presence: a drummer with a broader technical vocabulary than any of the classic quartet's rhythm section members, and the difference is audible. A good transitional album that points toward the Atlantic recordings to come.

Desmond returns. It had been five years since the classic quartet dissolved, and the reunion here is not a nostalgia exercise but a genuine continuation: Brubeck and Desmond and Mulligan in the same studio, playing with the ease that comes from deep musical history. The title is the kind of joke that lands, because yes, this is the three of them together, and the last time was a different world.

Adding Mulligan to the Brubeck-Desmond axis creates something new rather than simply restoring what was. The three-way conversation between piano, alto, and baritone has a richness that the old quartet never had, the two horns trading and harmonizing in ways that bring out qualities in each that solo work does not reveal. Desmond sounds rejuvenated in this context, more playful than on his own quartet recordings of the period.

Jack Six and Alan Dawson provide an excellent contemporary rhythm section. This is not the old quartet with a guest; it is a new configuration with deep roots. The Atlantic period finds Brubeck working in a more open-ended way than the Columbia years, and this reunion album is one of its most successful documents.

Brubeck with his sons: Darius on keyboards, Chris on bass trombone and electric bass, Danny on drums. The 1970s provided the context for this kind of cross-generational fusion experiment, and Brubeck approaches it with the same curious openness that had driven the odd-meter experiments twenty years earlier. He is not trying to sound young; he is trying to find out what happens when his harmonic thinking meets a rhythm section that grew up with rock.

The results are mixed in the way that most fusion records are mixed, with some passages where the electric instruments add genuine energy and others where they make things less interesting rather than more. Perry Robinson's clarinet and Jerry Bergonzi's tenor saxophone give the front line a different character than any previous Brubeck group, and the combination of acoustic horns with electric rhythm section is handled with more taste than many fusion projects of the era managed.

Not essential, but more interesting than its mixed reputation suggests. The genuine rapport between the Brubecks gives the best passages a warmth that purely commercial fusion never manages, and the musical generation gap is navigated with more grace than the era typically allowed.

Two alto saxophonists who had each developed distinctive voices from very different corners of the jazz world: Konitz with his searching, intervallic Cool Jazz approach and Braxton with his avant-garde, AACM-rooted sensibility. Putting them in the same studio with Brubeck is a slightly bonkers idea that produces genuinely interesting music, because the two horns are similar enough in range to create counterpoint but wildly different in character, keeping the conversation unpredictable from start to finish.

Braxton brings an angular intensity that pushes Brubeck into harmonic territory the pianist rarely visited. Konitz responds with his own brand of adventurous lyricism, and the three-way conversation is unlike anything in the Brubeck catalog. The rhythm section alternates between Alan Dawson and Roy Haynes on drums, both providing the kind of responsive, attentive playing that music this exploratory demands.

Producer Michael Cuscuna assembled a session that sounds nothing like the Brubeck most people know, and that is precisely the point. Brubeck navigates both voices with his characteristic harmonic density, proving that his musicianship was far more adaptable than any single label could contain.

Just the two of them. No rhythm section, no Mulligan, no ensemble arrangements: Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond at the piano and the alto saxophone, playing together the way they had been playing together since 1951. Desmond would die of lung cancer the following year, which makes the late-afternoon quality of this recording feel prescient, though nothing about the music itself suggests an ending.

Without the rhythm section to lean on, both musicians play with more exposure than any of the quartet records ever required. Brubeck fills the low register himself, making his left-hand comping carry the bass function while sustaining harmonic conversations with the alto above. Desmond responds to the nakedness by playing with a fullness of tone and a melodic directness that his quartet work sometimes spread across a longer canvas.

The record has a quality that no studio preparation could have produced: the ease of two people who no longer need to find each other because they are always already in the same place. Standards like "Stardust" and Desmond originals sit side by side without hierarchy. Desmond died in May 1977. This album, recorded two years before, is the most complete document of what the partnership was at its deepest. Five stars.