Brubeck Plays Ottawa
Dave and co. wow a capacity crowd at the Ottawa Jazz Fest
Call him Father Time Signature. 85 year old Dave Brubeck, whose musical experimentation has made him a household name, reveals his more conventional side in Ottawa
For years, he experimented with time. Compositional jazz in 5/4 and 4/8made him a household name back in the egghead fifties, establishing a reputation that has never diminished.
Now, at 85, time, in turn, is messing with him. The result? If last night's performance at the TD Canada Trust Ottawa International Jazz Festival is any watermark, Brubeck has shed the skin of the white-thinking-man's jazz cat for a more mottled and comfortable one: that of happy curator of Tin Pan Alley.
Before a capacity crowd, Brubeck - looking very much like Colonel Sanders in white suit and matching hair - presented a playful evening of standards, each arranged according to formula: a guessing-game intro by Dave, a funkified melody line by sax man Bobby Militello, flashes of Dave's former self in a truncated solo, and, occasionally, a contribution from the muted bass of Michael Moore.
The tone was set with a spirited rendition of "Sunny Side of the Street," which Militello played with comfy soul, until Brubeck broke in to assure us that the dreamy abstraction we've all come to know and love is still part, albeit a smaller one, of his game.
The band then transcended its collective age on a wailing blues, before giving us every recognizable show ditty from "Stormy Weather" to "Somewhere Over The Rainbow."
Through them all, Dave distinguished himself with raggy formality and Militello, a blues and bop man as far away from longtime Brubeck collaborator Paul Desmond as you can get, ran scales like frightened mice, bent notes like warm tin, and honked like a New York traffic jam.
What held the ten thousand plus in complete rapture, however, were Brubeck's unaccompanied solos, exercises that have marked his most recent recordings. Dave's solos have gotten shorter of the years (understandably), but have become hypnotic in an entirely different way. Where once we listened intently to dramatic block chords and classical uses of silence, we now float along on a feeling of sweet, uncomplicated reverie; Dave and the piano are lifelong companions, full of mostly warm memories, happy to still be in each other's company after all these years.
The evening's only disappointment was a raucous rendition of the inevitable "Take Five." Militello tried too hard to sound like Desmond, and Dave, it appears, has played this tune so often, you get the idea that he really doesn't know what to do with it anymore - though its inclusion did give drummer Randy Jones his only opportunity to stretch out.
May Father Time grant Dave and company a long extension, and may they return to the TD Canada Trust Ottawa International Jazz Festival.
