Celebrating the Music and Lyrics of Dave and Iola Brubeck

Label: Blue Forest Records
Year: 2015
Released on LP: No
Released on CD: Yes

Tracks

CD 1.

1. In Your Own Sweet Way (Live)
2. Since Love Had Its Way (Live)
3. Summer Song (Live)
4. It's a Raggy Waltz (Live)
5. Autumn in Our Town (Live)
6. Lord, Lord (Live)
7. Ode to a Cowboy (Live)
8. Blue Rondo a La Turk (Live)

CD 2
1. Strange Meadowlark (Live)
2. The Desert and the Parched Land (Live)
3. For Iola (Live)
4. The Duke (Live)
5. Weep No More (Live)
6. Take Five (Live)

Notes

2 CD set with extensive notes and historical photos.

Dan Brubeck (drums)
Adam Thomas (vocals/bass)
Steve Kaldestad (saxophone)
Tony Foster (piano)

An insightful renditions of songs from Dave and Iola Brubeck's musical collaboration.

Album Notes

A labor of love by Dan Brubeck, celebrating songs created by the longtime, but little-known musical collaboration of his mother and father.

• 14 songs, 2 disks
• recorded live by the Dan Brubeck Quartet
• 10 songs with lyrics by Iola Brubeck

The 28-page booklet includes:

• song notes written for this project by Iola Brubeck
• 22 historical images spanning Dave Brubeck’s career
• complete lyrics by Iola

Reviews

Mary Kunz Goldman, The Buffalo News

Buffalo misses Dave Brubeck, who used to come often to our town. It was sad to lose him in December 2012, a day before his 92nd birthday. Brubeck’s wife, Iola, died a little more than a year afterward. This disc, anchored by their drummer son, Dan, is a heartfelt tribute to both of them.

Dave and Iola Brubeck’s careers were intertwined in various ways. Not only did she write lyrics for his songs, but, as Dan writes, she actually influenced jazz, by bringing it out of the nightclubs and onto college campuses. She also helped with his religious music, researching and distilling texts.

This double-CD set includes 14 Brubeck songs, performed in a lighthearted, leisurely manner. There are texts to all the songs and fascinating notes about them by Iola, written down by her in the months before she died. Iola’s lyrics are simple but add so much to an already beautiful melody like “Summer Song.” And she fitted out “It’s a Raggy Waltz,” which I’ve always loved as an instrumental, with lyrics that are nothing less than ingenious. (The melody was there first. I checked.)

The lullabylike “Ode To a Cowboy,” the early song “Weep No More,” the excerpt from Brubeck’s 1979 “Mass: To Hope!” called “The Desert and the Parched Land” … we should hear these songs more, I kept thinking. Jazz singers should sing these more in clubs. Classical singers should put them into recitals, too. Though most of these songs were performed for the first time by Carmen McRae, “Strange Meadowlark” also was sung by the great mezzo soprano Frederica von Stade.

The performances here are lovely, and make such a strong case for the music. They are not overbearing or grating. The saxophone solos, by Steve Kaldestad, are brief and eloquent. Tony Foster’s piano is modest and graceful. Brubeck doesn’t shove his drumming down your throat. And bassist Adam Thomas has a sweet, laid-back, hipster style of singing. The whole project endears itself through its lack of pretentiousness. So much like Brubeck himself – and his wife, too, I imagine. I never met her, though now I feel I have.

C. Michael Bailey, allaboutjazz.com

Drummer Dan Brubeck, son of the late Dave Brubeck, pays homage to his parents in a most appropriate way. He puts the proper frame around the songbook created by his mother and father over their 70-year performance career. Using the saxophone quartet format his father blazed jazz trails with, Brubeck leads his quartet through 14 Brubeck originals at Vancouver’s Cellar recorded in August 2013. Bassist Adam Thomas proves to be a fine vocalist for the special material, never obscuring the pieces with technical attempts to impress. Urbane and amiable, this collection has been a long time coming and now that it is here, we can fully appreciate the art of Dave and Iola Brubeck.

This release is programmed appropriately with perhaps Brubeck’s most well-known composition, “In Your Own Sweet Way.” Thomas' understated vocals set a focused setting that is followed by the rest of the group for the whole performance. A setting that heats up once the solos begin. On “Since Love Had its Way,” saxophonist Steve Kaldestad begins his solo primly before opening up and blowing full-bore. Pianist Tony Foster is aesthetically technical on the rare instrumental from this performance, “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” proving that the blues were a big part of Brubeck’s oeuvre.

The group’s take on “The Duke” highlight's one of Brubeck’s more enduring pieces that was covered by Miles Davis from his great recording with Gil Evans, Miles Ahead (Columbia, 1957). The performance closes appropriately with a lengthy “Take Five,” featuring Dan Brubeck in a driving introduction brought to a simmer by the rest of the band as the familiar famous 5/4 time. For the longest time, “Take Five” was the face of jazz. It is right that it finds its place in this concert by the original bandleader’s son. This is an overall fine recording of some oft- neglected songs deserving a wider audience.


James Hale, downbeat.com

There are some great love stories in the music business, but none greater—or longer lasting— than Dave and Iola Brubeck. Many people who saw Dave Brubeck play over the years encountered Iola. She was usually in the audience, watching and listening as if it was the first rather than the one-thousandth time she’d seen her husband perform. Her role behind the scenes during the 70 years of their marriage is relatively well known (it was Iola who suggested the Brubeck quartet look for bookings on college campuses in the 1950s). Lesser known is her role as a lyricist for many of the pianist’s most famous songs.

Their drummer son, Dan, set out to showcase his father’s music with his Vancouver-based quartet, and discovered that his bassist, Adam Thomas, had an ideal voice to communicate Iola’s wistful lyrics. It’s a light tenor voice with lots of character, and Thomas controls it well, particularly on the tongue-twisting “It’s A Raggy Waltz.” The only piece that stretches him uncomfortably is “The Desert And The Parched Land,” written originally for a liturgical soprano and reinterpr