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Swing in the '30s put Chicago jazz into large bands with massed rhythms and careful arrangements. In the late '40s bop became briefly fashionable, with its air-splitting protests against swing stereotypes, but bop's own offbeat, spastic rhythms quickly palled. The jazz style called modern does not protest against anything very much except dullness. At its best, it swings as vigorously as any of its predecessors, but once it starts swinging, it seems to move on to more interesting matters, such as tinkering up a little canon à la Bach or some dissonant counterpoint à la Bartok or even a thrashing crisis à la Beethoven.
Dave Brubeck thinks that it reflects the American scene, and that may be true. It is tremendously complex, but free. It flows along, improvising constantly, and yet it is held together by a firm pattern. It sometimes recalls a machine that always sounds as if it were going to fly apart, but it never quite does. As always in jazz, its essence is the tension between improvisation and order—between freedom and discipline.
All this is apparent when Dave Brubeck and his men play.
A Session with Brubeck. Brubeck bends his lanky torso over the keys, concentrating like a child on a jigsaw puzzle, but his eyes are closed. The other members of the quartet—Alto Saxophonist Paul Desmond, Drummer Joe Dodge and Bass Player Bob Bates—go to work. Desmond's tones are plaintive and pure, the rhythm of drum and bass is as rich and firm as a deep-pile carpet. Like Bach starting off to improvise a passacaglia, they lay down the tune—say, Let's Fall in Love—as a kind of groundwork. Desmond's eyes close, his long fingers glide over his alto's mother-of-pearl keys, and he is off on a flight that may take him into Moorish arabesques or old English folk tunes or Confederate Army songs.
While Desmond's horn sighs its fancies, Brubeck punctuates with syncopated figures, listening intently, now smiling secretly, now pursing his lips, ticking off the tempo with one brown suede shoe. When Desmond is through, Brubeck picks up the last idea and toys with it. He ripples along for a while in running melodic notes, builds up a sweet and lyrical strain, noodles it into a lowdown mood, adds a contrapuntal voice, suddenly lashes into a dissonant mirror-inversion, then subsides into a completely disconnected rhythm that momentarily garbles the beat. The listeners lose all contact with the original tune, but they can dimly perceive other things: a favorite forgotten song, a hymn, a twinge of sadness or an insolent snicker.