A much-revered icon of jazz, Dave Brubeck is, as Doug Ramsey calls him, “one of the most celebrated and successful jazz musicians of all time.”
It’s About Time, Fred Hall’s biography, explores the many influences on Brubeck’s life and music: his youth on a cattle ranch in the foothills of the Sierras; a stint in Europe with Patton’s army during World War II; the development of the West Coast jazz scene and the rise of the Dave Brubeck Quartet; musical relationships with Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright, Joe Morello, and many more jazz greats; his phenomenal experiments with polytonality and polyrhythm; his fifty-three-year marriage to Iola, manager, collaborator, and mother of their six children; and important career breakthroughs, such as the first-ever million-selling jazz single, “Take Five.”
Including an annotated discography, It’s About Time is much more than an upbeat examination of the Brubeck phenomenon. It is also a penetrating view of the culture, the music, the musicians, the recording industry, and race relations of the country and the century that gave birth to jazz.
Fred M. Hall has been in music and radio broadcasting since 1941 and writes prolifically on jazz and big bands. He is producer and distributor of Fred Hall’s Swing Thing, an internationally syndicated radio show heard in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, and Wales, and has worked with and known many of the greats of the Golden Era of Swing. He lives currently in South Lake Tahoe, California, with his wife, Gita.
“Pianist and composer Dave Brubeck led a jazz quartet that produced the pop hit “Take Five” and achieved acclaim during the 1950s and 1960s. Hall, a veteran radio broadcaster, writes a fan’s account of Brubeck’s personal journey from boyhood up through international celebrity. Through interviews with Brubeck and others, we hear tales of “life on the road,” meet Bru’s peers, and learn something about his music, mostly about his later orchestral works. Questions about Brubeck’s entire musical corpus and its place in jazz are better answered in Ilse Storb’s Dave Brubeck: Improvisations and Compositions (Peter Lang, 1994). Hall’s discography lists American-issued recordings but excludes the many European releases and reissues. Appropriate for general audiences.”
—Library Journal (Paul Baker, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison)
