One of my favorite records is the thing that was taped at an afternoon rehearsal at Storyville they were just playing, the two of them. Even if two people, maybe different personalities have different interests when they leave the stand if they can have a meeting of the musical minds, then you have a chemistry that’s unique and that’s what I think they had. GITLER: Well I think it happens on the bandstand. Why did they have such magic together and how did they fit? You got to know Desmond, you know Brubeck a little bit. They’re about as unlikely a combination as you can imagine. SMITH: Talk a bit about Desmond and Brubeck. So when we got to the festival Cannonball was playing there, too, and they staged this photo op where Brubeck is brandishing his fist at me and Cannonball’s actually choking me. I had in the same time period reviewed Cannonball Adderley’s record of Dish Here and I panned that I said it was contrived funk. He was very nice about it and we had a nice discussion about that and other things. GITLER: I met Dave Brubeck actually on the way to Detroit for a jazz festival. SMITH: I wonder if you had any personal encounters with Brubeck yourself. Now Stan Getz got it, even though he was considered a very cool jazzman, although he could swing hard but his sound was cool. You had to swing in a certain way to get to the black audience. The black audience liked certain white jazz men and they didn’t like others. The implication is there were some reservations about Brubeck and Desmond ‘cause they were white. SMITH: You’re saying Miles Davis’s endorsement was important and you said here was a black musician finally saying it so more blacks had to accept it. GITLER: Well because Miles Davis, in giving his stamp of approval to these Brubeck compositions by recording them here was a black jazz man who was respected in both the black and the white circles, and when he did it black people had to say, you know, ‘that’s cool.’ SMITH: It’s interesting, Davis could give it the stamp of approval in a way that Brubeck couldn’t. In Your Own Sweet Way and The Duke became jazz standards and of course, when Miles Davis played them, that gave them the official stamp of approval. I love Dave’s ballads, Strange Meadowlark, and of course, The Duke was something that - and it wasn’t on that album but I liked that very much. SMITH: So looking back on it, do you reassess or you still come out the same place? It wasn’t just because it was in an odd time signature that I didn’t like one and like the other. That I liked perhaps maybe I liked the theme as well, but I liked the way it was stated. But on the other hand, I like Blue Rondo a la Turk and that was in nine eight. I didn’t like Take Five, I thought the five four was boring, repetitive, the patterns that Joe Morello was asked to play got monotonous. And when I was at Downbeat, I was called upon to review Time Out which was kind of a revolutionary record using all different time signatures. GITLER: I first heard Dave Brubeck in the early fifties, I became more aware of him when he started appearing on Fantasy which was a newly minted West Coast label. SMITH: When did you first hear Dave Brubeck’s music? In 2000 Hendrick Smith interviewed Ira for his documentary on Dave " Rediscovering Dave Brubeck" He wrote a very critical review of "Time Out" for Downbeat in 1962.
Ira Gitler is a college professor and the former editor of Downbeat Magazine and The Encyclopedia of Jazz. Time Out - Other Commentary Ira Gitler - 2000
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