Forgotten Gems From The Dave Brubeck Quartet

After Dave Brubeck signed with Columbia Records in the mid-1950s, his quartet made a few albums a year, and now that material has been collected in a 19-disc box set called The Dave Brubeck Quartet: The Complete Columbia Studio Albums Collection. Besides familiar titles like Time Out and Dave Digs Disney, it includes some all but forgotten albums, such as Gone with the Wind and Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A., which have now become available separately as download-only items.

By 1959, the quartet was short of material to record, having exhausted its live repertoire. The album Time Out — with its tunes, like “Take Five,” in odd meters — would point them in a new direction, but it took that stuff a couple of years to catch on. The album Brubeck made just beforeTime Out, called Gone with the Wind, consisted mostly of moldy old tunes, many in the public domain, that the band hadn’t played before. It could have been a throwaway, with trifles like “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” where Brubeck could get heavy handed. But sometimes his playing is surprising restrained. For me that’s Brubeck at his best.  LISTEN……