Live At The Kurhaus

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Label: Fondamenta Devialet
Year: 1967
Released on LP: Yes
Released on CD: Yes

Tracks

1. Three to Get Ready
2. La Paloma Azul
3. Cielito Lindo
4. Swanee River
5. Forty Days
6. Blues for Joe
7. Set My People Fee
8. Take Five
9. Someday My Prince Will Come

Personnel

Dave Brubeck (piano)
Paul Desmond (alto sax)
Joe Morello (drums)
Eugene Wright (bass)

Notes

1.Track 7, "Set My People Free" is incorrectly listed as "Rude Old Man".

"Set My People Free" is also known as "Let My People Go".


From Fondamenta website:

During one of their last concerts in 1967 which remained unreleased until then, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, comprising more or less the same members since its inception, had already been playing for 16 years. Naturally, they were more than well acquainted. Dave and Paul made their debut at the Black Hawk Night Club in San Francisco. Their hallmark: relentless combatting racial barriers, even in the darkest periods of McCarthyism, and making jazz accessible to the widest possible public by revisiting ballads, old favourites and well-known classical themes. But above all, they developed an almost endless variety of complex time signatures.

That evening of 24 October 1967 in Scheveningen, the Dave Brubeck Quartet was not a band playing jazz. They were the worthy ambassadors of American music in Europe.


From Fondamenta website:

October 24 1967.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet, starring more or less the same line-up since starting out, had now been together for 16 years. By this stage, they were more than well acquainted. That evening, live from the Kurhaus in Scheveningen – Paul probably downing his fourth whiskey and smoking his 40th cigarette, Dave his usual abstemious self – they opened with Three to Get Ready, establishing their close-knit dynamic in a matter of bars. Dave set the tone for the ballad while Joe held the rhythm; Paul built a sultriness that drove the audience into a whole new dimension.

There is certainly magic in this live performance – just hear the laughter, the interjections, the very life of it. With "La Paloma Azul", a children’s song that Paul and Dave had brought back from Mexico only a few months earlier, the mood changed: gentle, clear and caressing. It is one of their early performances of this piece, and a privilege to hear. After this tender interlude came unabashed laughter, hammered out by Dave’s disruptive fingerwork in "Cielito Lindo", and a light-hearted nod with "Swanee River". "Forty Days", a Hollywood-worthy oratorio, featured biblical references and themes from the great blockbusters – Exodus, Alamo and maybe even a few others.

That night, the Dave Brubeck Quartet brought the walls between cultures crashing down.

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