Dave Brubeck - Time Signatures: A Career Retrospective (4 CD, 1992/FLAC)

With material from 1946 to 1991, this handsome box set reveals the enormous breadth of Brubeck's interests, accomplishments, and collaborations. There are tracks, for example, with Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Rushing, Gerry Mulligan, and Carmen McRae. There's even a duo with Charles Mingus. Also here is the full range of Brubeck's studied structures, involved harmonies, and elements unusual to jazz, including expansive time signatures and the use of fugue form and 12-tone theory. Included, of course, are such signature hits as "Blue Rondo a la Turk" and "Take Five." Brubeck came up playing hillbilly, swing, and Dixieland, and at college studied modern composition. All of that--and little constraint--informed his complex, idiosyncratic style. The package includes an 80-page booklet with his biography, rare photographs, and descriptions of every track. 

VA - Golden Jazz Box: The Six Best Albums From The Six Best Jazzmen (6 CD, 2015) [FLAC]

 

Son of the Blues, Jazz is one of the deepest expressions in music. With improvisation as its foundation, the genre includes multiple artists that are embedded in gold letters in the history of popular music. Golden Jazz Box is a celebration of that legacy, presenting the 6 best albums of each one of the genre's biggest icons: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans and Duke Ellington.

Golden Jazz Box works as a true musical encyclopedia, the definitive collection of these wonderful singers in one six-CD box. Golden Jazz Box is a fantastic album, suitable for any moment and mood and an opportunity to get closer to these timeless artists.

Tony Bennett & Dave Brubeck - The White House Sessions, Live 1962 (2013/FLAC)

Since both were performing their own sets at the White House Seminar American Jazz Concert on the Sylvan Theater grounds on August 28, 1962, Tony Bennett and Dave Brubeck decided to perform an impromptu collaborative set together that day, and although one song from it was eventually released, a version of "That Old Black Magic," the rest of the hour-or-so-long tape ended up lost in the vast Sony catalog vault, filed, as it turned out, with several classical tapes, until it surfaced again shortly after Brubeck's death in 2012. Now finally available, it reveals two master performers at the very top of their respective games. Bennett's signature song, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," had been released only a couple of weeks before the concert, while Brubeck's "Take Five" had just begun to take on its iconic significance. Brubeck and his quartet, Paul Desmond on alto sax, Eugene Wright on bass, and Joe Morello on drums, played a four-song set, followed by a six-song set from Bennett and his band, with Ralph Sharon on piano, Hal Gaylor on bass, and Billy Exiner on drums. Then came an unrehearsed and impromptu four-song set from Bennett and Brubeck, with Wright on bass and Morello on drums (alto saxophonist Desmond sat out) that included versions of "That Old Black Magic" (the only track previously released before this), "Lullaby of Broadway," "Chicago (That Toddlin' Town)," and "There Will Never Be Another You," each of which purveys a loose, fun elegance that makes this archival find a true treasure. Bennett and Brubeck would not perform together again until both appeared and briefly reunited on-stage at the 2009 Newport Jazz Festival.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet – Anything Goes! The Dave Brubeck Quartet Plays Cole Porter (1967/FLAC)

The Quartet performs eight of Cole Porter's most famous songs on this enjoyable outing. Few surprises occur but the music often swings hard, pianist Brubeck and altoist Paul Desmond take several excellent solos and bassist Eugene Wright and drummer Joe Morello really push the group. 

•     Dave Brubeck – piano
•     Paul Desmond – alto saxophone
•     Gene Wright – double bass
•     Joe Morello – drums
•     Teo Macero – producer 

A1 Anything Goes

A2 Love For Sale

A3 Night And Day

A4 What Is This Thing Called Love

B1 I Get A Kick Out Of You

B2 Just One Of Those Things

B3 You're The Top

B4 All Through The Night

Dave Brubeck Quartet with Paul Desmond - The Complete Storyville Broadcasts (3 CD, 2014/FLAC)

 

In the history of jazz, there have been a handful of iconic figures who have transcended popular music styles of their era to create a new generation of jazz devotees. The late Dave Brubeck was one of these. 

Beginning in February of 1951, shortly after the Brubeck Quartet was formed the prior August, George Wein signed Brubeck to perform at his jazz venue called Storyville which was located in the Copley Square Hotel in downtown Boston. This was the beginning of a series of broadcasts by Brubeck from Storyville over the next three years. This release gathers all these broadcasts in a 3 CD set which is an absolute must for Brubeck fans for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the aural evidence of the development of the Quartet's style as personnel changes took place over the three year span of these recordings. The fact that Brubeck and Paul Desmond anchored the groups lent stability and direction which evolved into the golden years of the Quartet before Desmond's departure for a solo career. There is very little to critique here. The playing is wonderful - the improvisations are elegant, unique, and ultimately Brubeckian - in short, essential to any serious jazz collection. The notes are extensive and the sound reproduction is superb. The transfers are clean and immediate. 

Dave Brubeck - For All Time (5 CD, 2004) [FLAC]

Popularity is double-edged, and perhaps no jazz artist exemplifies this better than Dave Brubeck. The unparalleled success of his classic quartets with Paul Desmond, which expanded the market for jazz into colleges and the homes of suburbia, often obscured his very real musical innovations. The ever-increasing professional sheen of Brubeck's '60s albums for Columbia, his interest in writing for orchestras, the quartet's base in traditional swing rather than bop, and their largely white, middle-class fan base have all led some to brand Brubeck as a lightweight, or worse yet, an 'entertainer.' Although there is a grain of truth to this characterization, extended exposure to Brubeck's best work argues otherwise.

Columbia Records' long-overdue reissue program of classic Brubeck albums has gone some way towards rehabilitating Dave's reputation. The latest release is a 5- CD box set entitled For All Time , which brings together all of the classic quartet's albums devoted to exploring unusual time signatures and rhythmic combinations: Time Out (1959) and Time Further Out (1961), which were already available in remastered editions, along with three records that have never appeared on CD domestically; Countdown: Time In Outer Space (1962), Time Changes (1964), and Time In (1965).