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Then, if Dave feels the crowd with him and if his psyche is in good order, a unique event takes place. The rhythm seems to take hold of everybody in the room. Drummer Dodge feels it and starts to bang on his Chinese cymbal (an instrument studded with loose rivets that buzz like a dozen sizzling steaks), and his bass drum whaps out compulsively, unpredictably. Bates hunches closer to his bass. Desmond, his lips without their mouthpiece looking like a nearsighted man's eyes without his spectacles, moves quietly away from the piano. Brubeck seems to cut his ties with the tempo and tears off on a remote pulse of his own. He grabs huge fistfuls of notes, builds them into a sonata-size movement that ignores the divisions of the stock 32-bar chorus. The notes grow progressively more dissonant. Brubeck's head weaves in a wide arc. His fingers seem to take on a life of their own. At this point, both musicians and laymen in the audience are apt to wonder whether Brubeck will ever be able to make it back to home base. He creates an illusion of danger, as if he were a race driver "who," says Dave, "is going to stay out there until he drives faster than anyone else. He's going to crash or make it. That's the way I like to keep my audience—wondering whether I'll make it or not."
Suddenly the rhythm seems to shift gears. Bits of familiar harmonies reappear. In a few moments, it is all over, and the music relaxes. Desmond returns for a bit of polyphonic banter with the relaxed piano, finally swings into a recapitulation of the introduction, and the audience sits back with a sigh before it applauds.
What Makes David Run? Last year Brubeck won Down Beat's popularity and critics' poll, Metronome's "AllStar" Poll. "Man, they wail!" wrote Down Beat Jazz Editor Nat Hentoff of the quartet. "A kind of teamwork which is without parallel in the entire field of music," wrote Jazz Expert George Avakian, who brought the quartet to Columbia Records. "Complicated and extremely cerebral, [Brubeck's music] has tremendous drive and surprising warmth," wrote Critic John Hammond. This kind of music (for 45 minutes three to five times a night) earns the quartet up to $2,500 a week. With income from tours and records, Dave Brubeck at 33 will make $100,000 this year.
Brubeck is as untypical in the jazz field as a harp in a Dixieland combo. In a business that has known more than its share of dope and liquor, Brubeck rarely drinks, and, after seriously and philosophically considering the possible value of mescaline,* rejected the whole idea. While itinerant musicians are apt to dally with the belles along the way, Dave is happily married and has four children (a fifth is on the way). Although a shady background was once almost essential to the seasoning of a real-life jazzman, Dave spent his youth playing nursemaid to heifers and earned his first money ($1 a Sunday) playing hymns in a school. Characteristically, Dave has several priests among his friends, including Boston's Father Norman O'Connor, who used to play the piano in a dance band himself.