Review: The Dave Brubeck Quartet's 'Jazz at Oberlin'

For their first LP, The Dave Brubeck Quartet released a live set caught at Oberlin College in Ohio. Although the makeup of the band would change a bit over the years, the cornerstones of Brubeck's elegant yet harmonically adventurous piano and Paul Desmond's cherubic and searching alto sax are in place, although there are not yet those wonderfully imaginative original compositions like "Time Out", "Blue Rondo a La Turk", and "Bluette" that would cause the group's later albums to be widely regarded as classics. Instead the group worked with a quintet of standards such as Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust" and Morgan Lewis's "How High the Moon". Nevertheless, Brubeck and Desmond's effortless interplay is already fully formed, and the latter wastes no time in showing off his fluttering skills on set opener "These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)". The former begins the song in deceptively reserved mode before aggressively stumbling out strident chords that lay waste to his reputation as some sort of purveyor of tepid white-wine jazz. 

From there, they're off, pumping through a sprightly "Perdido", a cooly swaying "Stardust", and hard boogying renditions of "The Way You Look Tonight" and "How High the Moon". Really, the only thing missing is those extraordinary original compositions, but if you just want to hear two of jazz's most distinctive players do their thing, you can't go wrong at Jazz at Oberlin.

And if you've already sampled any of the titles in the audiophile "Original Jazz Classics" series, you can probably already surmise that you won't go wrong with Craft Recording's new reissue of Jazz at Oberlin. Kevin Gray remastered the original master tapes using an all-analog process that is usual for the Original Jazz Classics series yet too few others. The music sounds open, full bodied, and utterly natural, as if the guys are jamming away in your living room.