We give you Dave Brubeck’s album “All The Things We Are”. Featuring Lee Konitz. And Anthony Braxton. Honestly, I didn’t make this one up. On paper, Braxton and Brubeck sound like the unlikeliest combination. Dave Brubeck, kingpin of college jazz in the 50’s and “Take Five” hitmaker; Anthony Braxton, mad scientist of the jazz avant-garde whose compositions look like a crash course in organic chemistry on the written page, and who most record companies (see his problematic relationship with Arista) don’t know how to handle. At least, that’s what the ayatollahs of jazz cliché would like to reduce them to. But things are never that simple. Both artists would appear to fly in the face of the “Jazz, delicious hot, disgusting cold” brigade (that expression courtesy of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, who I believe lifted it from a music critic whose name I can’t, and don’t wish to, remember), because they know that even tricky time signatures and unfettered abstraction can lead to beguiling results and warm the adventurous heart.
Anthony Braxton had frequently declared himself a staunch admirer of Brubeck and of an unsung giant of modern music called Jimmy Giuffre. This may bring fits of apoplexy to Stanley Crouch, Wynton Marsalis and their followers, but it only seemed logical that the two finally connect. And you know what? It works. Of course, the presence of Roy Haynes on drums hardly makes matter worse. Brubeck duetting with Lee Konitz might seem like a less surprising combination, but is nonetheless just as effective. —Patrick
