Dave Brubeck In His Own

16 original albums on 10 CDs!
This Box Set combines the best recordings from the crucial first decade of Brubeck's career. The great live recordings at college and festival appearances, the series with odd rhythmic meters that started with "Time Out," his first solo album, the recordings with musical impressions from his worldwide concert tours, and the totally underrated "The Real Ambassadors ", featuring Louis Armstrong, Carmen McRae and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross with a fantastic libretto by Brubeck's wife Iola.

For all those who have a big axe to grind with Brubeck, for all those who claim the band was only successful because they were predominantly white, or played pop-jazz, or catered to the exotica craze, or any of that, you are invited to have all of your preconceptions, tepid arguments, and false impressions hopelessly torn to shreds by one of the great live jazz albums of the 1960s…

The title of this two-CD compilation of the earliest commercial Dave Brubeck recordings does in fact document some of the early concepts that Brubeck was employing as a young artist in search of his own voice. The well-annotated information included by producer Joop Visser, using much of Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz as a reference, follows the progress of Brubeck’s artistic development, as indicated by the chronological recordings. And the liner notes include some little-known information, such as the poor prognosis, and possible paralysis, for Brubeck after a swimming accident in 1951, leading indirectly to the addition of Paul Desmond (then named "Paul Breitenfeld") to the group - which remained intact, becoming one of the legendary quartets in jazzdom, until 1967…

This is a rather unique release by Dave Brubeck because it features the veteran pianist/composer with four of his sons, saxophonist Bobby Militello, and bassist Alec Dankworth, along with the London Symphony Orchestra in a concert played not long after his 80th birthday in December 2000. Unlike many jazz meets symphony affairs, this is a truly integrated effort that succeeds very well. Brubeck arranged "Chorale" (a powerful classical work primarily featuring the strings); Darius Brubeck, who is also featured on piano, contributed the arrangements for both "Summer Music" and "Blue Rondo à la Turk," demonstrating considerable skill in his writing for strings, as well as an original dedicated to his father, the tense and occasionally rockish "Four Score in Seven"…

Recorded late at night in his Oakland, California, home, it was Brubeck's first full solo-piano recording and also his first all-original record, and it illustrates his marvelously elegant fusion of classical and cocktail conceptions. Brubeck understands blues and swing, but he uses these elements as tools for effect, not as default settings. Brubeck instead offers a fuller palette of emotions and ideas - playful, sober, stern, happy, pensive, cerebral. While "In Your Own Sweet Way" and "The Duke" have become standards, the album includes obscure gems such as the minisuite "Two-Part Contention," with its many tempo, mood, and stylistic turns, and the discreetly swinging "Walkin' Line," although he lapses into melodrama with "Weep No More"…