The late Whitney Balliett of the New Yorker mastered the difficult skill of bringing an improvisation to life in the mind’s ear, largely by avoiding the use of technical terms. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. We start on a tour bus early this century and that's more or less where we finish but in between Clark takes us back and forth across Brubeck's life and his music.

By the time I was with Milhaud, I could hear that Kenton was putting different keys together and he was adventurous with rhythm-he'd obviously been studying Stravinsky. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.An ideal state of improvisational grace is reached when an "effortless flow of new material" springs from the sub-conscious-"the performer at this level has neither desire nor need for a preconceived pattern because he knows that the music comes from a source of infinite imagination and limitless variety.

In his laudable desire to enlighten and convince, Clark describes many of Brubeck’s piano solos in detail. Blocks of harmony passing between the brass and the saxophones, that was how arrangers tended to think, and i loved those arrangements. Not during my 80+ years, in more than 70 years as a serious jazz player and listener, have I read such an incisive and entertaining book about a jazz landmark such as Dave Brubeck, and his band members. Quite a bit about Dave's early experience of Milhaud, Stravinsky, Bartok and Schonberg (all of who settled in the USA from 1940 onwards), and the effect this had on steering Dave away from the 1950s prevailing bebop (with its characteristic fast, busy and intricate improvisation on melody and chord progressions) towards a sort of cool approach, with the soloist improvising strongly on key changes (discusses Dave insisting on the Bass player staying in a constant key).Each page is so loaded with technical music theory jargon that it becomes almost unreadable to the general reader without a degree in musicology.

I've loved Dave Brubeck for the last 40 years but this is the first biography I have read about the guy and I keep dipping into it.

It also looks at his influence on many strands of popular music since the 1950's and demonstrates he was as influential as any of the bebop players.