Brubeck and Breweries

Dave Brubeck brought alive the most endearing melody in 5/4 time. It must have taken some courage to move away from the traditional time signatures and attempt something like Take Five. I have never found a jazz melody more repeatable and hummable than this one. I heard it again at lunch yesterday at Amit's place. It went so well with the beautiful vista of the Arabian sea that their house faced and the dull, sultry Saturday afternoon. Of course, it couldnt have been the same without that chilled glass of Califirnian white wine and the warm hospitality extended by our host. If one takes a stroll down 100 feet road in Indira Nagar, Bengaluru, he can find 3 storeys above the only Cafe Coffee Day outlet on that road, a pub inspired by the name of Dave Brubeck's evergreen melody. I have spent countless evenings at Take Five and other than the name and the very appropriate music that they play, one of the greater attractions is the three dozen types of beer that they serve. You can find golden, dark, amber - almost every kind of tint that beer can carry and with it flavours ranging from caramel to walnut to fresh wheat. Chimay dominates the other brands available in Bengaluru but it deserves that place. So, one can spend a great evening at Take Five in the psychedelic company of Brubeck's and Belgium's finest.
Jazz always brings to my mind the visuals of young Charles Ray from the movie Ray where he is desperate to find a teacher who can help him master the piano and eventually he does become one of the legends of Jazz and a completely self-trained one at that. Hundreds or Thousands of musically gifted black folk must have undergone the same trials and tribulations in the early part of the last century when learning the piano or the violiin or for that matter even the trumpet was a privilige of the non-coloured population while to the rest it was almost a forbidden passion. But its owing to this fortunate tragedy that today we have Jazz music. The same coloured community put together its self taught technique of western music and the genetic sense of Afro rhythm to come out with a new music form that would take the western world by storm over the next half a century and give sleepless nights to many white parents in the U.S.A and Europe because of the ferver with which their kids were consuming this sinful music. Some sense of the abhorrance can be sensed in the movie 'The Talented Mr.Ripley' where Jude Law's character takes an immense affinity to Jazz and makes regular visits to clubs in Italy playing this near censored form of music in annonymous night clubs, much to the dismay of his rich and 'cultured' parents in New York. The early critics of this music even compared it to something alike to the noise made with pots and pans by Siberians to drive away wild bears. Jazz's etymology is much disputed but its origins lie in the southern states of America. Some say it was a slang word Jass that gave the artform is eventual name.
For a moment the initial rejection of this music could also be attributed to not just the racial flavour that it provoked but also the dramatic difference in the way this music was performed. The age old tradition of repeating works written by masters was suddenly being destroyed by these handful of self trained, rebellious musicians who believed in improvisation. For them, the true reflection of the musician's ideas in his music seemed more important than playing out the exact reproductions of someone else's ideas that were stored in a three hundred year old manuscript. This would have been a blunt, blasphemous act in the eyes of the classical pundits in the west. Surprisingly, for Indian classical musicians this would mean nothing too different than what they have been practising for the last many hundred years. There couldn't be a better example of this convergence than the group Shakti formed by Zakit Hussain, Hariprasad Chaurasia and John Mclaughlin in the 70's.
While Dave Brubeck and his quarter followed a so to say traditional Jazz route, its interesting to hear Al Jarreau's expression of Jazz. The seven time Grammy Award winner, has reproduced Take Five in a Scat version which is so Al Jarreauic with all the accompanying madness. Another one of his takes is on My Favourite Things from the movie soundtrack Sound of Music. The guy's just so original. Maybe one of our Indian composers can take a cue and do an Indian take on Take Five.