DAVE BRUBECK Answers His Critics - Downbeat, August 10, 1955 by Don Freeman

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra. All rights reserved.

“The critics deny it, of course, but it's too obvious not to be true. They don't like success. They're restless, these jazz critics we have today. They want to discover an unknown talent, build him up but make sure he doesn't get too popular because that's when they start getting picayune in their criticisms. When an artist gets popular, the critics hunt for flyspecks."

- Dave Brubeck, pianist composer, bandleader

As this edition of Downbeat would indicate, it started early - the criticism of Brubeck’s approach to Jazz.

And, it really never stopped throughout the first 30 years or so of Dave’s career until around the mid-1970s when the hacks lost their national press platforms because Jazz was in decline by then with the greater listening public.

So there was nowhere to write and publish this negative nonsense and along with fewer people interested in the music to read it.

There is no one way to create Jazz: the music isn’t a “how” it is a “what” -  a process. If you do certain musical things a certain way, then you create Jazz.

As regards, the end result of a particular Jazz musician’s creation, as Louis Armstrong once said: “The music speaks to you or it don’t.”

I feel fortunate that I’m one of those lucky ones who heard and enjoyed Dave’s music.

This is an example of a rather obscure article about Dave and his music which will ultimately become part of A Dave Brubeck Reader which I hope to self-publish as both a paperback and an eBook later this year.

© Copyright ® Downbeat. All rights reserved.

DAVE BRUBECK Answers His Critics - Downbeat, August 10, 1955

A Lot Of Them Are Being Unfair, Insists Jazz Controversial Pianist

By Don Freeman

DAVE BRUBECK is deeply grateful to the reviewers who have helped his career to date. And, in general, he is not opposed to criticism as one of the livelier arts. But of this he is certain:

He is sick and tired of the bulk of the written criticism which he considers manifestly unfair, often misinformed, at times irrelevant and frequently, he says, based on a woeful lack of understanding and background.

In San Diego for a Irving Granz Jazz a la Carte concert, Brubeck said he has kept his feelings largely to himself, but now he is ready to hit back.

"JUST WHAT," he demanded, "what do the critics want from me? In the first place I can think of very, very few critics with the musical training to do their jobs properly.

"I don't expect critics to be great musicians. But I do think they should have put in a number of years studying music, and they should know what they're trying to evaluate.

"They should know, for one thing, that our group is always improvising. They should know that we never play the same tune twice the same way.

"I just read a couple of record interviews—one of our group and the other of a group that has every note they play out in front of them. Yet, both records were judged from the same set of standards. That simply> isn't right. And the critic just didn't know enough to judge.

"SINCE WE'RE constantly improvising, a critic should spend, say, 30 nights in a row seeing us in a club. I know that's impossible. But fans do it, night after night. And that's the only way the critics could get a thorough idea of what we're doing.

'The critics say I don't swing. I say we always swing — sometimes we don't swing very much, but it's always enough to be considered jazz. That much I guarantee. The critics say our touch is heavy. They say I pound the piano. To them, I say why don't you listen to Audrey or to Stardust.

Brubeck said each man in his group expresses himself differently in each song.

“If occasionally I sound heavy, he said, "it's because I want to sound heavy. It's because the mood we want to create is a heavy mood. We want to create all kinds of moods in our music, not only the mood that the critic feels like hearing.”

SOME OF THE critics haven't liked the combo from the start, Dave noted. At least they're consistent, he added, but the critics who bug him the most are the ones who've turned on the unit since the Time magazine cover . . . "since we made it."

"This is following the old pattern,” Brubeck said. "It's happened before —to Nat Cole, to Stan Kenton, to Gerry Mulligan, to Sarah Vaughan, to George Shearing in a most flagrant example, and even to Duke Ellington.

'The critics deny it, of course, but it's too obvious not to be true. They don't like success. They're restless, these jazz critics we have today. They want to discover an unknown talent, build him up but make sure he doesn't get too popular because that's when they start getting picayune in their criticisms. When an artist gets popular, the critics hunt for flyspecks."

DAVE SAID THEY'RE criticizing him for all kinds of things now—"for not, of all things, being a Negro!"

"Tell me," he declared, "what does that have to do with the music we play? And they say 'Brubeck never struggled.' Never struggled? They should have seen me in 1946- livin’ in a one-room apartment in a housing project. Do the critics think all of this came easy?

"And then if I call up a critic personally and object even mildly to something they've written, one of them will say: 'But Dave, you've made it now. What difference does it make to you what we write?'

"That's exactly what a critic told me. Well, it makes plenty of difference what they write about me whether I've been on the cover of Time or not.

"YOU'D THINK I'D betrayed jazz by getting on Time. One jazz critic actually thought so. He told me he wished we wouldn't get so popular, and he wondered if it were wise to take jazz away from the smoky dives!

“Maybe he thinks we’ll play better music if we'd go bark to the bordellos in New Orleans. I think it's wonderful to get jazz on the concert stage. Frankly, however, I would really like to see jazz somewhere between the night club and the concert hall. It's bound to happen.

Night club owners, he said, have been fine to him, and he says he's happy to see them make money. But a lot of kids who come to see the group really get hustled in night clubs, Dave maintains. He says it embarrasses him to see what happens — the kids simply don't get their money's worth.

“GETTING BACK TO the jazz critics," Brubeek continued, "I want to say that I am all for constructive criticism —if it's really constructive. Now, I see that some of the critics are impatient with us. They say we should move on and do more originals. Well, it so happens we are going to do a lot of originals.

"But if the critics really knew their business, they'd know that back when the group was starting, in 1946 and '47. we did nothing but originals. Where were the critics then?

"I remember once, back in 1942, I went up to Stan Kenton and showed him one of my compositions. Stan said he liked it very much, but it was too advanced. 'Bring it hack in 10 years,” Stan told me.

"I guess I'm three years overdue."