Casa Jonsson

My love of Jazz at Oberlin is no secret. This record continues to pay dividends after numerous hearings. I recently discovered in it a handful of classical music quotations hidden in several of Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone solos.

In 1953 jazz was not widely considered an art form worthy of study in American universities and conservatories. This concert at the college town where I grew up was the first time jazz received serious attention on a college campus. I find it amusing to think of Desmond and Brubeck—unconsciously, perhaps, although that seems unlikely—invoking Igor Stravinsky among a crowd of classical music students and scholars.

Without question, Dave Brubeck was and is a pillar of the jazz establishment—my dad has seen him on stage twice, the two dates separated by 50 years!—but he is also no stranger to contemporary classical music. After the quartet’s breakup in 1967 he turned his attention to composing, and the result was works for orchestra, chorus, chamber music ensembles, and ballet (see his biographical sketch). Jazz at Oberlin is brimming with winks at classical music, from baroque fugue-like interchanges between Desmond and Brubeck in “The Way You Look Tonight” and “How High the Moon” to Bartókian dissonance and Gershwinesque pianisms in “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You).” Here I’ll call attention to just a few instances of musical name-dropping that can be heard on this record.

The first reference is to Stravinsky’s music for the ballet Petrushka. An already jazzy woodwind figure in F major pentatonic occurs near the end of “Dance of the Nurses” ( hi-fi or  lo-fi). Desmond and Brubeck wind down an eight-minute rendition of “Perdido” with a passage that pays rhythmic and melodic homage to Stravinsky ( hi-fi or  lo-fi) in the key of B-flat major.

Two more Petrushka sightings occur in “The Way You Look Tonight.” The first is a theme from “Russian Dance” (two different excerpts provided here  hi-fi or  lo-fi). Desmond revises Stravinsky by taking a G-mixolydian figure that starts on the third scale step and moving it to B-flat major, starting it on the seventh scale step. He also swings the semiquavers in a way that I think would have delighted Stravinsky ( hi-fi or  lo-fi).

The second Petrushka quotation audible in “The Way You Look Tonight” is the Dance of the Ballerina theme from “The Blackamoor” ( hi-fi or  lo-fi). Desmond gracefully pirouettes Stravinsky’s F-major phrase from B-flat through modulations into E-flat, D-flat, and back to B-flat ( hi-fi or  lo-fi).

In the last track of Jazz at Oberlin Desmond loots Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring ballet suite—specifically, one of three Dance of the Adolescents themes (in C dorian, beginning on the fifth scale step) from “Adoration of the Earth” ( hi-fi or  lo-fi). This material becomes the bold first step (in G major, beginning on the second scale step) of a nine-minute space odyssey through “How High the Moon” ( hi-fi or  lo-fi).

This begins to feel like an exercise in music trivia. I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of Jazz at Oberlin’s technical marvels and aesthetic sophistication. That jazz went for decades without academic respect in the U.S. can only be attributed to politics and prejudice.