23. The Dave Brubeck Quartet — Time Out (1959)

Digestible abstraction

1. or: Ah, it’s That Song From The Commercials. Everyone knows Take Five. Everyone. So let’s jump in there, shall we? It’s really easy to lose sight of how wild this tune is, a swing song in the unthinkable time signature of 5/4 where the namesake artist is relegated to a repeating piano line while an alto sax snakes into your brainspace. This is catchy, digestible, the kind of tune you hear once and immediately can’t get out of your head. That’s not supposed to happen with songs in 5/4 time. But Dave Brubeck pulled it off.
2. That encapsulates the whole album, really. Blue Rondo A La Turk, a song that sounds straight out of a Wes Anderson movie or the Pink Panther or really any lighthearted action-ish scene, rolls along at a smooth…9/8. Except for when it flips to 3/3. Or 4/4. Sure, you do you, Dave. The important, and insane thing, is that we get it, too.
3. I previously took on Thelonious Monk’s Brilliant Corners here. That was an album that lived entirely in the abstract, but kept the listener at arm’s length. This welcomes everyone in. This is avant garde shit where you don’t even realize it’s avant garde. The fact that my mother could listen to this and enjoy it speaks volumes.
4. It’s also a bright record which, well, is very welcome right now. This isn’t sit and brood music, like Kind of Blue or any number of other jazz classics. This feels like a summer day. I’m sitting on my apartment’s fire escape pretending I have a balcony right now, the sun shining down on me while I sip a glass of red wine, and it’s right.
5. A final note: it appears Take Five was actually written by Brubeck’s saxophonist, Paul Desmond. That…totally tracks with the tune. I suspect we won’t see Desmond’s name pop up in the remainder of the 1001, but I love the occasional discoveries of artists like him. If he could write a bop like “Take Five,” I can’t help but wonder what else was in him (recorded or otherwise).

One Essential Song:

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