Brass Trax

Few years were as successful for jazz as 1959, at least when you’re counting up five star recordings. From John Coltrane’s Giant Steps to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the list of landmark jazz albums from 1959 is staggering. Columbia Records has recently reissued three of these, Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um, Davis’s Sketches of Spain (recorded in 1959, but released in early 1960), and Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, in deluxe two CD packages, each with plenty of bonus material.

Taken together, the three albums suggest a jazz music in transition, prepared to break from whatever loose orthodoxy bebop still imposed on jazz musicians. You could write a summary of these albums that makes them sound like mere formal experiments. Mingus surveys the history of African American music. Davis dabbles with modern classical and flamenco. Brubeck plays in every time signature except 4/4. But these albums remain significant today because they also happened to be three collections of great tunes. Experimental? Yes. Unlistenable? No.

Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus

The end of the fifties was as good a time as any for a grand statement from Charles Mingus, and Mingus Ah Um fits the bill. Widely seen as a summary of Mingus’s career thus far, the album also maps out the direction that Mingus would take in the sixties.

You can also listen to the album as if it were a crash course in African American music, as taught by Charles Mingus. The first track, the raucous jam “Better Git it in Your Soul,” weaves threads of New Orleans jazz into a tapestry of gospel-inflected blues. Mingus punctuates the tune with shouts from behind his bass, sounding like a man possessed by one holy spirit or another, as the band cascades ahead in double time, buzzing through their lines, pausing only for a Booker Ervin saxophone solo over drums, bass, and handclaps. The main melody, which anybody who has heard the song can instantly recall, could be a religious experience all on its own.

The core of the album, and what makes a tune like “Better Git Hit in Your Soul” work so well, is the relationship between the bassist Mingus and his drummer, Dannie Richmond. The pair had been playing together for two years before recording Mingus Ah Um, and it would be a working relationship that would continue through scores of records. Mingus and Richmond had a rare connection, almost telepathic, that allowed them to switch rhythms on a dime, without ever losing their swing.

Mingus was a bandleader who stressed these types of connections. For him, rehearsing was the thing; precision, even in improvisation, was crucial. In fact, his major complaint with free jazz was that you couldn’t “play the same tune twice.” It’s a lesson he might have learned from his idol, Duke Ellington, whose legacy gets a nod in Mingus Ah Um with the suite “An Open Letter to Duke.”

Mingus’s precision as a bandleader is also on display with the show-stopping “Fables of Faubus,” a slinky melody built over minor key chord changes that gets worked over by the band in several distinct passes before the soloing begins. The track is something of a showcase for pianist Horace Parlan, who finds a lockstep groove with Mingus, sputtering out little percussive figures as the rest of the band takes their solos. (Parlan’s solo is nothing to sneeze at, either.)

The new Columbia reissue comes packaged with the lesser, but still outstanding, follow-up album Mingus Dynasty, as well as a clutch of bonus tracks, including the stunning “Pedal Point Blues” and the haunting “Strollin’ (Nostalgia in Times Square),” a castoff from the soundtrack to Shadows, John Cassavetes’s film about urban race relations. As a package, it’s a snapshot of Mingus working through the implications of his musical heritage, poised to conceive the great modernist masterpieces that he would unleash in the sixties.

Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis

Like Mingus’s albums, Sketches of Spain offers hints of the new directions in which Miles Davis would take his music during the ensuing decade. Davis would end the sixties in the thrall of avant garde European composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Sketches of Spain was his first recorded attempt to introduce modern classical music to jazz. It turns out that they got along pretty well together.

Sketches of Spain was the brainchild of Columbia producer George Avakian, who heard the commercial potential in the Latin-infused sounds of Dizzy Gillespie and chamber music fusions of the Modern Jazz Quartet. He assigned Davis the project of hatching a record that brought jazz, Latin music, and modern classical into the same room, and Davis quickly called Gil Evans for help. Davis and Evans had already collaborated on a pair of albums together (Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess), and Evans was already earning his reputation as one of the best arrangers in the business. It didn’t hurt that he had more than a passing interest in the Spanish composers Joaquín Rodrigo and Manuel de Falla.

The album opens with Evans’s arrangement of a section of Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez.” It was an ambitious move; Rodrigo’s original was a guitar concerto, an unusual arrangement since orchestras tend to drown out guitars, with a complicated harmonic structure. Evans’s arrangement captures the somber melancholy of the original—he transposes the guitar parts for Davis’s trumpet—on a chassis of multiple, independent melodic lines.

The resulting recording, revolutionary at the time, hasn’t aged particularly well. The orchestra sounds stilted; Davis ill-at-ease. The rehearsal takes, included in the new Columbia reissue, confirm suspicions that the recording session didn’t go as well as the performers would have liked. Thankfully, the reissue also includes a 1961 live rendition of the piece, conducted by Evans, that does justice to the written material.

The rest of the album fares much better. “Will O’ the Wisp,” swiped from Manuel de Falla’s 1915 ballet El Amor Brujo, sets the tone for what is to come. It’s a delicacy of muted horns layered carefully over a basic flamenco groove, topped off with swirling flourishes from Davis’s trumpet. The rest of the album, arranged from original Evans compositions, follows suit. It retains the essence of flamenco, and its potential for extended grooves, while introducing dissonant and, eventually, blues elements, that results in a wholly new type of fusion. Ideas from the album, particularly from Davis’s nearly static, modal solo on “Saeta,” would find their way into Davis’s music throughout the sixties. Listen to “Saeta” and In a Silent Way side-by-side if you want to get the drift.

Time Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet

The third element in Columbia’s recent reissue trifecta, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, might be the best known. “Take Five,” released as a single, remains one of the best selling jazz recordings in history, and it can be found in the songbook of most competent jazz ensembles. It’s been covered by reggae bands, included in hip hop songs, and might be one of the few instrumental jazz numbers to have entered the American collective consciousness.

The ubiquity of “Take Five” can obscure just how experimental and weird it sounded when it was released. “Take Five,” as any jazz fan knows, was written in the time signature 5/4, which is extraordinarily difficult to play. (Hint: It’s a waltz with a two-beat follow-up, emphasis on the four.) The tune wasn’t a Brubeck composition. It was actually written by Brubeck’s superlative saxophonist, Paul Desmond. A copy of a typed note from Desmond that accompanies the new Columbia reissue introduces the tune to the wary:

If the problem of beating time to this disturbs you, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t, a good way is to tap your fingers, one at a time. (One is where the thumb is.) The melody, such as it is, was assembled rapidly in the studio, and consists of fragments which occurred to me here and there, mainly at a slot machine in Reno which produced an ominous but regular series of 5 clicks as the coins vanished.

The tune, as recorded, exudes the same casual irreverence, which is why it is a great song rather than a tedious exercise.

With a few waltzy exceptions, jazz had always been in 4/4, standard time. In Time Out, 4/4 is the exception. When it does make an appearance, more often than not, it’s a soloist’s sly way of making an odd time signature swing. From “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” in 9/8, to “Pick Up Sticks,” in 6/4, Brubeck’s group played with time signatures the same way that bebop played with key changes. Without ever losing its cool.

The new Columbia reissue includes live recordings—and even video—of Brubeck’s quartet playing the tunes from Time Out, and they are evidence that the tracks never were a mere exercise in cleverness. Live, the band brings a bluesy expressiveness to the material that belies Brubeck’s reputation as a West Coast ironist.

50 years on, Time Out, like Mingus Ah Um and sections of Sketches of Spain, has become part of jazz’s foundation. To say that this music has remained fresh would be to ignore the way that has infiltrated the cultural consciousness. To say that it remains vitally compelling, however, would be an understatement.

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