Blue Rondo a la Turk

arranged for brass by Roger Harvey

"If you want to express this country,” said Darius Milhaud to one of his students at Mills College in California in 1946, “you will always use the jazz idiom." Dave Brubeck had no intention of doing anything else. At the same time, he learned enough of progressive classical techniques in a year at Mills College to develop an idiom into something more in line with West Coast cool jazz than the kind of thing Milhaud had in mind. What is more, unlike many of his more adventurous contemporaries, he made a commercial success of it. The Brubeck Quartet’s “Time Out” album, released in 1959, included one of the most popular jazz pieces ever recorded - Take Five, which was written not by Brubeck himself but his saxophonist Paul Desmond. The quintuple time of Take Five was regarded as a jazz breakthrough.

Brubeck’s own Blue Rondo a la Turk, which was first issued in the same album, is metrically more radical in that its outer sections are in a 9/8 divided not into three groups of three quavers each but into three groups of two quavers and one of three. Bartók had discovered similar “additive rhythms” in Bulgarian folk music and had used them in his own compositions from about 1930 onwards. Brubeck learned his 2+2+2+3 metre from street musicians in Istanbul when the Quartet was on tour in Turkey - hence the title (alluding to the Rondo “Alla Turca” of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A K.331). In the middle section, which was reserved in the original quartet version for improvisations by Desmond and Brubeck, the metre reverts to the more conventional 4/4.