![]() ![]() Eight previously unreleased, glorious outtakes that, if first heard back in 1959 on Time Out (Columbia) may just as well have ascended the cultural and artistic heights as the album we hold dear has. Now it would appear that same question can be asked of Time OutTakes, the first of a planned deep dive by the Brubeck family into the Dave Brubeck vaults, not only to celebrate the pianist's centennial (December 6, 2020) but also his lasting contributions to music and to civil society as a whole. The fans and essayists will go on and on and on while he pursues other creative avenues, but that's the pure joy and wild obsession of it. “Before we played one of the brothers said, ‘Gene Wright! What are you doing with that group?’ And I said, ‘Well, I was offered a job.’ Afterward he came up to me and said, ‘Man, I owe you an apology, because you made Dave play harder than I’ve ever heard him play.When, for the first and the millionth time Paul McCartney is queried by lazy savants and crazed fans about what he would have cut from epic double White Album (Apple, 1968) to make it the strongest of the strongest single disc ever, the cutely weathered one just replies "It's the Beatles' bleedin' White Album, man" and the discussion, at least for that moment, is done. “One time we were playing a benefit concert in Carnegie Hall for the NAACP, five or six different bands, and we opened the second half,” he says. He appears as a sparkling elder statesman in Clark’s biography, sharing tales that shed a personal light on his time with the band. Wright settled happily into retirement in his later years, becoming a mentor to many bassists in Los Angeles, and a proud keeper of his legacy in and out of the Brubeck quartet. Desmond died in 1977, and Morello in 2011.) (Brubeck, whose centennial was observed this year, died in 2012, at 91. But it was an amicable split, and Wright reunited with the others on multiple occasions over the ensuing decades. The quartet’s reign ended in 1968, as Brubeck decided to focus on larger compositional endeavors. Wright provided just what he needed, and Morello was quick to second the endorsement. While he held down a firm foundation in the band, Wright was no slouch as a solo improviser: consult this footage of a concert in 1964, the year that he appeared on Time Changes, Jazz Impressions of Japan and Dave Brubeck in Berlin.īrubeck hired Wright after hearing him with Tjader and others - and while his earthy, swinging bass playing might seem at odds with the more cerebral aspects of Brubeck’s band, the pianist recognized a perfect odd-couple fit. (Brubeck refused to play the concert without him.) When Brubeck arrived at a college gig in North Carolina, university administrators balked at the unexpected presence of a Black musician in his band. ![]() Wright had experienced this dissonance firsthand, notably during his first week with the band in Feb. State Department that touted jazz as a beacon of democratic equality even as Jim Crow segregation persisted back at home. That piece was inspired by the hypocrisy of a U.S. In addition to Time Out and its later sequels, like Time Further Out and Time In, Wright can be heard on The Real Ambassadors, a jazz musical created by Brubeck with his wife, Iola, with vocals by Louis Armstrong and Carmen McRae, among others. Paul and I might be playing in a different rhythm from either of them.” Oftentimes Joe, on drums, would be playing a different counter-rhythm to what Gene was playing. That foundation, Brubeck adds, made it possible “to play other tempos and do polyrhythmic things and he wouldn’t budge from this grounded beat. “I liked his solid bass lines that grounded the group,” Brubeck attests in an undated journal entry cited by Philip Clark in Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time. ![]() Courtesy of the Brubeck Estate Eugene Wright with Dave Brubeck in the 1960s ![]()
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