Take Five

I can't think of a better way to start this blog than with DBQ's Take Five from the 1959 experimental album Time Out. You won't get any technical mumbo-jumbo from me about common vs. non-common-time signatures; my musical appreciation is all about...well, appreciation.

I believe I first heard Take Five on my grandparents' hi-fi system some 20-odd years ago. Since then, I've heard it in numerous movies and television commercials and for good reason. Can you think of another jazz tune that can travel time so smoothly? One turn of the record and I'm in a cool apartment in New York City in 1959, windows open, surrounded by like-minded, Kerouac-reading, gin-drinking amies. This was a time when losers were 'chumps' and if a fella you weren't interested in was bugging you at the bar, you'd tell him to 'scram' or 'beat it'. Women dressed like women, men smoked cigars and drank too much at the country club and no self-respecting female ever left her home without a solid foundation on.

Of course, the irony is that Dave Brubeck is an instrumental player in the West Coast Jazz movement and was himself from that Sunny coast but his music always places my daydreams in a metropolitan mid-century Manhattan. Go figure, must be the influence of my grandparents and the cinema and the similarity between Cool Jazz and West Coast Jazz, sometimes also referred to as Cool-Style Jazz. But thank goodness for West Coast Jazz, my entree into the hipster-cool Dave Brubeck Quartet, the wonderful melancholy world of Chet Baker and the distinctly-pop-cultural Vince Guaraldi, even if I do force it all into an East Coast lifestyle. And you youngsters thought the East-Coast/West-Coast rivalry was a new thing...

So, throw the windows open, mix yourself a gin gimlet and Take Five...