The Darius Brubeck Quartet: Live in Poland

Label: Ubuntu Music
Year: 2019
Released on LP: No
Released on CD: Yes

Tracks

1. Earthrise
2. In Your Own Sweet Way
3. Matt The Cat
4. Nomali
5. Sea Of Troubles
6. Dziekuje
7. Take Five


Darius Brubeck - piano
Dave O’Higgins - tenor sax
Matt Ridley - bass
Wesley Gibbons - drums

Notes

From Ubuntu Music website on reelase of album.

Darius Brubeck grew up in the artistic milieu of his famous father Dave and has enjoyed a lifetime of varied international experiences as a pianist, bandleader, composer, teacher and broadcaster.

Brubeck’s latest release, Live in Poland, was recorded at the prestigious Blue Note in Poznan and celebrates his father’s historic concert tour in Poland in 1958. “I was invited to Poland three times in 2018, the 60th anniversary of the 1958 classic Dave Brubeck Quartet’s tour of this country. With the end of World War I in 1918, it was also the 100th anniversary of Polish independence,” explains Darius. “Szczecin (where I played on stage for the first time when I was 10 years old) was the first stop on the 1958 tour and the first city visited during my initial trip. I appeared for one number, inevitably ‘Take Five’, with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra as part of the celebrations.”

Brubeck was deeply moved to find that the Solidarity Museum in Poland associated his father’s tour with the beginning of the movement that liberated Poland from Soviet domination. The third time Szczecin Jazz invited him back with his London-based quartet was for a tour of the six cities where the Dave Brubeck Quartet had performed; the first American jazz group to play behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, starting in – you guessed it – Szczecin. “Suffused with political meaning for the audience and my boyhood memories of witnessing the devastation left by war with my late brother Michael and my parents, this was no ordinary concert tour.”

The Darius Brubeck Quartet features Dave O’Higgins on saxophone, Matt Ridley on double bass and Wesley Gibbens on drums and has been together for 12 years. The plan was to record every night of the tour and choose the best takes but, in the end, it was decided that the last night at the Blue Note in Poznan was it. “You might say the album should’ve been called Live in Poznan. However, this performance was the culmination of a tour of sold-out concert halls and standing ovations. The band was at a peak, especially in terms of communication with each other and the audience,” concludes Brubeck.

Reviews

All About Jazz ©

Early on in his career, the pianist Darius Brubeck bowed to the inevitable. Accepting that he was always going to be compared to his father, Dave Brubeck, he both embraced his heritage and sidelined it. In the 1970s, embracing it, he was a member of Two Generations Of Brubeck and The New Brubeck Quartet, groups which played original material but had audiences who came along mainly to hear performances of tunes written by or associated with Brubeck père: "(It's A) Raggy Waltz," "In Your Own Sweet Way," "Blue Rondo A La Turk," "Unsquare Dance" and "Take Five."

In 1983, sidelining his heritage, Brubeck moved with his South African wife to Durban, where he taught music at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He founded the first degree course in Jazz Studies at a South African university and, for fifteen years post-apartheid, led the band Afro Cool Concept. He stayed in South Africa until 2006, and then moved to England where, a couple of years later, he formed the Darius Brubeck Quartet.

These strands of Brubeck's life came together in 2018, when the Quartet was invited to tour Poland to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the performances the Dave Brubeck Quartet had given in the country during a US State Department-funded behind-the-Iron-Curtain visit. In Poland, that 1958 tour is remembered as a catalyst for the country's long march to freedom from the USSR: among the exhibits at the Solidarity Museum in Szcecin is a copy of a Polish-language Dave Brubeck concert programme. Aged ten, Darius had accompanied his father on the tour.

Live In Poland was recorded on the final night of the 2018 tour, at the Blue Note Jazz Club in Poznan. It is an engaging, unpretentious, hard-swinging delight. There are three fine Darius originals plus two pieces written by Dave—"In Your Own Sweet Way" and "Dziekuje" (which means "thank you" in Polish)—Hugh Masekela's "Nomali" and Paul Desmond's "Take Five."

It must take some nerve to play "Take Five," particularly for a drummer, for Joe Morello's solo on the original 1959 recording still sounds extraordinarily intense. But Wesley Gibbens' solo is thrilling in its own right, making less use of space and snare-drum rolls and more of iteration and tom-tom patterns. Brubeck shines here and elsewhere. His solo on Masekela's "Nomali" is glorious.


Jazz Views ©


This release comes amidst an upsurge of interest in Brubeck pére as his December centenary approaches: an appraisal of his work as a musician, but equally as a sort of jazz evangelist who took the music to places it had never reached before - the college circuit in the USA, and a range of destinations out in the wider world, including a 1958 tour of Poland - the first American jazz group to play behind the Iron Curtain. Szczecin Jazz invited Darius on a tour to commemorate the 60th anniversary of that momentous occasion, and this album is a document of the last night in Poznan’s famous Blue Note.

The occasion is loaded with meaning and the band rise to the occasion magnificently, whether on the powerful minor key modality of “Earthrise” or the bright bop of “Matt The Cat”. Dave O’Higgins plays with his customary full-toned precision, Matt Ridley is solid in support and flamboyantly virtuosic in his solo breaks , and South African native Wesley Gibbins is swinging and dynamic throughout, grooving subtly on fellow countryman Hugh Masekela’s ‘Nomali’ that shows Darius’ affinity for the gospel-flavoured chording of Abdullah Ibrahim. Brubeck junior shares his dad’s approach to jazz, eschewing the fast-paced flow of the beboppers in favour of a personal synthesis of an older generation of pianists like Teddy Wilson and Errol Garner with his favourite classical composers - ‘Dziekuje’, with its mix of bluesy phrases with a kind of deconstructed rhapsody, is a classic example, given an emotionally charged reading here: Ridley’s sonorous arco is the perfect complement. Darius was deeply moved to find that the Solidarity Museum in Poland associated his father’s tour with the beginning of the Polish liberation movement, and the final, inevitable ‘Take 5’ benefits from the audibly emotional commitment of the whole band - the tune is taken at a brighter tempo and you can hear Brubeck and O’Higgins pushing each other to reach for ever greater heights of expression as the rhythm section respond magnificently to create a really outstanding reading of this oft-cited, seldom played classic.

Reviewed by Eddie Myer