![]() “I had the middle part kind of vaguely in mind. In a conversation with Gene Lees, Desmond elaborated on the structure and content of the piece. Brubeck came up with the formula for combining them into AABA form and provided the title. ![]() The piece had no name when Desmond brought in the two themes. I said, ‘Well, I’ve got this theme we could use for a middle part, and Dave said, ‘Well, let’s run it through,’ and that”-Desmond whistled the first four bars of the bridge section-“is what made Take Five.’” (Paul Desmond, Radio Canada, probably June, 1976) And the thing that makes Take Five’ work is the bridge, which we almost didn’t use-I shudder to think how close we came to not using that. I was ready to trade in the entire rights of ‘Take Five’ for a used Ronson electric razor. At the time, I thought it was kind of a throwaway. Why don’t you take 5/4?’ And I wrote Take Five and I realize now, that was a genius move on my part. “I still think, basically, it was a dubious idea at best,” Desmond said, “but at that point we had three or four albums a year to get done, and we’d done all our tunes that we’d put together, and standards and originals of Dave’s and he said, ‘Why don’t we do this album and do all different time signatures?’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ I was always argumentative. Brubeck had written for the Octet in unusual meters as early as 1946. The question of initial inspiration for “Take Five” aside, in a 1976 interview on Radio Canada, Desmond gave Brubeck ultimate credit for the radical idea in 1959 of recording an album of pieces in unorthodox time signatures. I hear it every day somewhere, so it was a very lucky thing. ![]() I got more comments on that darn drum solo. So, we recorded the thing in the studio at Columbia, and I think it was the first take or the second take, and Dave was playing the vamp. Morello said that in concert he used to go into 5/4 time in the drum break of a Brubeck piece called “Sounds of the Loop,” which the group recorded in 1956 in its album Jazz Impressions Of The USA.”I’d just mess around in 5, go from 5/4 to 7/4, and I guess they hadn’t heard that kind of thing before, so I kept saying, “Come on, Dave, why don’t you write something in 5/4? He never did, so Paul said one night, ‘Oh, shit, I’ll write something.’ We were rehearsing up at Dave’s house one time, and Paul came in with that. “I read that somewhere and I said, ‘Come on, Paul, no.’ It was Joe Morello who gave him that rhythm.” “Have you ever heard that?” Dave Brubeck said, laughing. He told people that he was inspired by the rhythmic sounds that slot machines make-down, back, click-click-click. His favorite version linked it with his gambling habit. Reprinted with the permission of the author copyright protected all rights reserved.Īfter “Take Five” became one of the most familiar pieces of music in the world, Desmond tired of questions about it and amused himself by concocting stories about the piece’s origins. Extract from "Take Five - The Private and Public Lifes Of Paul Desmond" ©Doug Ramsey.
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