The members of the Dave Brubeck Quartet were as surprised as everyone else when their album Time Out became such a tremendous success. By 1959, Brubeck's quartet with Paul Desmond had been in existence for nearly a decade and it was highly popular among jazz audiences (the bass player and the drummer changed a few times until Joe Morello arrived in 1956 and Eugene Wright joined the group in 1958/59). They had begun playing in colleges, and slowly made their way into concert halls and jazz festivals. Brubeck appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1954. He was only the second jazz musician to receive this distinction (Louis Armstrong was previously honored in 1949). The Brubeck formation took the challenge to experiment with musical forms foreign to jazz and, in addition to playing standard tunes, they introduced many new compositions that gave the formation its identity. While they had experimented, in one way or another, on many of their previous albums, none of them had such an ambitious concept as Time Out, which only presented tunes written in unusual time signatures. It was impossible to predict that such a novel idea would lead to one of the best selling jazz albums of all time. During a 1962 interview with Les Tomkins, Paul Desmond spoke about the working habits of the Quartet and the making of Time Out: "We rehearse when we have to get new numbers together for a record session. And even then a lot of records are rehearsed and planned, as well as made, in the studio. Most of the Time Out series has been done that way -not the Time Out album itself, although âśTake Five' was. The following two albums, Time Further Out and Countdown, were all new to us when we went into the studio. There's no rehearsal for individual concerts. It's in the book -until we forget it. Like, if we had to do some of the things from, say, Eurasia, we would have to go back and learn them all over again. Some things keep going through the years -like âśSt Louis Blues'. On the old Earl Hines record of âśSt Louis Blues' they said âśPlay it till 1962'â"and we did!"
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