Marking time and sounding difference: Brubeck, temporality and modernity

In critical writing on the music of Dave Brubeck, little attention has been paid to the use of polyrhythm, despite the fact that this has been central to Brubeck’s approach to jazz since the late 1940s. Focusing on work recorded by the ‘classic’ Dave Brubeck Quartet, the article aims to re-evaluate Brubeck’s use of polyrhythm by situating it within a cultural history of modernity, rather than the established discourses of jazz musicology. The article revisits the early 1960s to reconstruct the context provided for the music not only by articles printed in the music press, but also by news stories and features run in the popular press, and by the visual signifiers that coalesce around Brubeck. Articulated through the key tropes of modernity and difference, the press’s construction of Brubeck during this period signals the broad cultural context of Modernism as an alternative frame within which his musical practice might be usefully situated. The article explores how two key cultural artefacts emerging from this context – Brubeck’s Oakland home, and the Miró canvas featured on the cover of the album Time Further Out – might serve to provide a productive means by which to re-evaluate the radical potential of Brubeck’s polyrhythm.