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Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond
Doug Ramsey
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Biography
Paul Desmond was visiting with his friend Doug Ramsey. Desmond was a chain smoker and a legendary drinker, so this visit was to be in a bar. A hotel bar. Desmond and Ramsey took the elevator. The car jerked, dropped. A bell rang.
"What was that?" a woman asked.
Desmond and Ramsey spoke as one: "E-flat."
Great anecdote, don’t you think? Musicians are often as taciturn as they are quick-witted, and that one-word improvised response was like a fine jazz solo — just what was called for, not a note more.
Which was, if you know the music of Paul Desmond, very much his style. And whether you have ever heard of Desmond or not, you do indeed know him — he was the alto saxophonist in the Dave Brubeck Quartet. The highest-paid sideman in jazz. And — oh yeah — he wrote a little tune called "Take Five."
"Take Five" appears on a 1959 Brubeck album called "Time Out." The record company hated it. America loved it. The song was a hit. The album was the first jazz release to sell a million copies. Overnight, Brubeck was famous, and he and Desmond were — at least by musician standards — insanely rich.
Lovers of jazz didn’t have to wait for "Time Out" to know that Desmond was a giant. At a time when alto sax players were almost universally in thrall to Charlie Parker, Desmond went out of his way not to be influenced by Parker — or, for that matter, to imitate the great African American sax players of his time. Musicians noticed. Parker, for one; he called Paul Desmond his favorite alto player.
"Beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination and sincerity" — that was what Desmond sought from music. And it’s what he provided. His tone was cool and hollow, discrete as a priest in the confessional. He described it best: " I want to sound like a dry martini."
Desmond smoked three packs a day, drank prodigiously, ate mostly steak — he lived hard. A Toronto model told a friend: "I haven’t been this tired since the last time Paul Desmond blew into town." Wine, women and song: The cliche was his life. Not surprisingly, he died young.
And now Doug Ramsey has brought forth a coffee-table-sized biography, dotted with photographs and letters and music scores. It will be a great skim-and-scan for the casual jazz fan who loves Desmond’s music and wants to know more about the guy who made it. For lovers of biography, it’s an even more rewarding book.
I say this because Desmond was a genius — that is, he revolutionized his field, invented a new way of doing things, sustained his achievement and built on it. And genius is always interesting. Where does it come from? How does it change a life? And, not least, what can we learn from it?
The childhood often holds the answer, and that’s certainly true for Desmond. Chapter after chapter lays out the dysfunctions in his family; you’re not surprised, decades later, when a friend suggests that Desmond’s trouble was that he never thought he was worth anything. (He even undervalued his music — he thought he should have become a writer!) And so his life is more valleys than peaks: a failed marriage, relationships that go nowhere, even a thankfully short-lived breach with Brubeck.
But this is far from a doom-and-gloom story. Desmond was a wry, witty guy, and there are plenty of amusing snapshots along the way. Like the time he lost a whole night to slot machines and showed up at a gig so tired he went to sleep onstage — and still played a great set. Or the reason he sprayed lemon juice on radishes: "It’s like turning on more lights in the room. It doesn’t change anything. It just makes it brighter." Or the concert he was giving with the New York Philharmonic and another musician missed a note — he wove that error into his solo, making the mistake sound right.
Of course you don’t need to know any of this. The music suffices; below, I suggest some basic Brubeck and classic Desmond. On the other hand, your appreciation for Paul Desmond deepens the more you know. This was one seriously tormented soul — and yet all that came out of his sax was grace, purity, beauty, joy. That, alone, is genius.
To buy " Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond," from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy " Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond" direct from the publisher, click here.
To buy "Time Out," by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy " The Paul Desmond Quartet Live ," from Amazon.com, click here.
