![]() Justin London is a professor of music at Carleton College in Minnesota who specializes in music perception and cognition, particularly with respect to musical meter. "It seemed very natural to them to be playing in this rhythm," Langham says. Within his travels he would go and hear other musicians and hear what they were doing, and he would incorporate that into his music." In the case of "Blue Rondo a la Turk," Brubeck picked up the rhythm from street musicians in Turkey. Langham says that Brubeck "was a very worldly person. Of course, novelty is in the ear of the beholder. It even gets a bit more complicated: for most of the piece, there are three measures of the unusual 9/8 rhythm followed by one measure of the usual groups of three. In 9/8 time, the nine eighth notes are usually divided into three groups of three, with the stress pattern one two three one two three one two three, but "Blue Rondo" has the pattern one two one two one two one two three. "Blue Rondo a la Turk" has a time signature of 9/8. "This allowed college students to be different, in the sense of adding a funky twist to it." "Take Five," which was conceived by Brubeck's saxophonist Paul Desmond, is in 5/4 with the accent pattern one two three four five, so each measure can be thought of as being split into two uneven chunks. Langham says that from a dance point of view, the meter of "Take Five" combines a waltz and a two-step, both of which were popular in the 1950s and 1960s with the parents of teenagers. 4/4 means that there are four beats and a quarter note lasts for one beat, yielding four quarter notes in each measure.) " Take Five" and " Blue Rondo a la Turk," two of Brubeck's most popular works, are both on Time Out. (The first number, which is the top number of the time signature in sheet music, represents the number of beats in the measure, and the second number represents the note value that receives one beat. Time Out, the hit 1959 album by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, was one of the first popular jazz works to explore meters beyond the traditional 4/4 and 3/4. "He sort of tired of the traditional patterns of jazz," says Patrick Langham, a saxophonist and faculty member of the Brubeck Institute at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. The pianist and composer was an innovator, especially when it came to combining rhythms and meters in new ways. He kind of anointed it.Jazz legend Dave Brubeck died December 5, just one day before his 92nd birthday. "He made an art student's day," Brill said of Brubeck and that magical afternoon. However, most people never knew that an icon of the jazz world had once bounced on its sheet-metal surface-until the notice of Brubeck's death was posted on UCSC's Facebook page this week and another alum recalled a faint memory of Brubeck paying a visit to campus. Today, the 12-foot-long, two-section sculpture sits in a small graveled yard in the shadow of redwoods, carefully preserved during the renovation of Porter A and B residence halls, according to James Blaine, college programs coordinator for Porter. However, he noted, the title had two other references: the 1981 name change from College Five to Porter College (thus taking away "Five") and the idea of taking a short break. Now a clockmaker/musician and living in Redwood Valley in Northern California, Brill said he named his sculpture "Take Five" partly as a tribute to Brubeck, whose music was an almost steady backbeat to Brill's college life. "He liked how they sprang up and down," Brill said. Brubeck dutifully cut the red ribbon and sat on the springy sculpture, which resembles crashing waves or chaise longue chairs, depending on a visitor's point of view. ![]() Somehow, said the Porter College art history major, his girlfriend persuaded Brubeck's manager to bring the legendary jazzman to campus for a sculpture dedication.īrubeck arrived to find Brill, five or six of his hallmates, a student photographer, and Brill's girlfriend holding a couple of bottles of bubbly. "He was just happy to help a college kid live out a piece of his dream."Īccording to Brill, it was "1984 or so" when his then-girlfriend heard Brubeck was in town for a concert at the Kuumbwa Jazz center. "He (Brubeck) was just a gracious, nice man," said Monte Brill, now 53 and the artist behind the sculpture, which was completed in 1982 and titled "Take Five"-a name shared with the Brubeck Quartet's famous instrumental. Not a single administrator or faculty member had been invited. Seven or eight students attended the event. The occasion for the music legend's appearance was the dedication of a red-metal sculpture that sits outside what is known as the "bat caves" of Porter College's B Building residence hall. On a sunny afternoon in the early '80s, jazz great Dave Brubeck slipped onto the UC Santa Cruz campus for a visit that would remain a nearly invisible slice of university history - until the pianist and composer's death this week at the age of 91.
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