Blue Rondo à la Turk (Previously Unreleased)

Blue Rondo à la Turk - Time OutTakes (Previously Unreleased Takes from the Original 1959 Sessions)
Time OutTakes will be available on December 4, 2020 in time to celebrate Dave’s 100th Birthday on 12/6/2020. It will contain never before heard takes from the original 1959 session.
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"Blue Rondo à la Turk"
From the album Time OutTakes (Previously Unreleased Takes from the Original 1959 Sessions)
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
Dave Brubeck, piano
Paul Desmond, alto sax
Joe Morello, drums
Eugene Wright, bass
Looking back, I’m sure ‘Blue Rondo’ influenced my choice of ethnomusicology (world music) as my major at university. My generation was searching for sources of inspiration beyond the conventions of jazz, based on show tunes and there was a vast world of exotic rhythms and scales east of the Mediterranean. The well-known story of ‘Blue Rondo’ is that Dave heard this 9/8 rhythm performed by Turkish street musicians during his famous 1958 US State Department Cultural Exchange Tour. ‘Blue Rondo’ is the only instance on Time Out (and the whole ‘time series’) of using a pre-existing rhythm from another culture. What really counts is Dave’s subsequent realization that he could invent rhythms that hadn’t been used in jazz. ‘Three to Get Ready,’ two bars of 3 /4 followed by two bars of 4/4, is an alternation of waltz and swing that implies a humorous dialogue between styles. The rhythm itself sets up tension-release expectations that tell a ‘story’ just as harmony and melody do in standards.
Naturally, the takes chosen for release on the Columbia Records’ Time Out were the most polished performances of this newly composed music. Sixty years later these ‘heads’ are familiar and this time around we can focus on the great improvisations that were held back because of little mistakes in the pre-composed sections. The Columbia ‘Blue Rondo’ picked itself on the basis of fewer mistakes, but here on Time OutTakes Paul and Dave refer to the main theme and Turkish-sounding scales in blues choruses that extend and unify the main idea, so the solos are more interesting and better serve the composition. I would have chosen this version of ‘Three To Get Ready’ even then because Dave’s solo is so adventurous and compositionally advanced. The ‘dialogue’ becomes an ‘argument’ with overlaps and interruptions and flashes of virtuosity leading to reconciliation.
Time Out opened new territory for experimentation with non-western music and odd times by artists like John McLaughlin and Chick Corea. And me. ~ Darius Brubeck