Time Out: Deceased Artiste Dave Brubeck

A quick DA salute — I know, I know, I missed a bunch of 2012 departures, I hope to catch up soon — to the great Dave Brubeck, who died this week at 92. I was lucky enough to see Mr. Brubeck at Carnegie Hall back in 2003 (free tix from a friend, the only way for me to score great seats at that venue since Harry Chapin left us), and it was a terrific concert, with a master pianist plyin’ his trade at the tender age of 83.

The obits ran through the details of his landmark life — son of a cattle rancher, he ditched working with cows to play the piano; formed an integrated quartet that played college campuses throughout the Fifties (if the deans found out they had a black member and told them the main stage wasn’t open to them, they’d play the cafeteria instead); upon the quartet breaking up in ’67, he devoted himself to writing concertos, oratorios, ballets, and cantatas.

But what was this oh-so-calm-and-dedicated musician best known for? Creating two of the melodies that we have come to know as “signifying” the cooler side of the Fifties in films and TV episodes. They both were featured on the 1959 million-selling album (first jazz LP to do so; by now it’s sold two million) Time Out, and you KNOW them even if you can’t name ‘em.

The first one, the perfect “Take Five,” was a hit single that reached #25 on the pop chart. The notion of a jazz instrumental hit (that was not a movie theme) in the post-big band era was a rarity indeed, but “Take Five” is just so infectious that it actually made jukeboxes around the country. It now is THE go-to song for movies and TV eps that want to convey the hipper side of the Fifties (even though it was released just as the decade was ending).

Here is the Dave Brubeck Quartet performing the song on German TV in 1966. On the sax is Paul Desmond, who wrote the song and willed the royalties from it to the American Red Cross (who reportedly receive $100,000 a year in “Take Five” money).

The other, super-evocative piece that has been used in several films depicting the "beatnik era" is “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” the opening track from the same album. Here the Quartet perform the track on a TV show called The Lively Ones on July 25, 1962:

“Blue Rondo…” has been used in a LOT of film and TV shows trying to evoke the Fifties, my personal favorite being Paul Mazursky’s charming  Next Stop, Greenwich Village. Mazursky clearly felt the tune was emblematic of an era, so he shifted it chronologically — Next Stop takes place in 1953, but the Time Out LP didn’t materialize until ’59.

As a bonus, here’s a song that doesn’t show up on movie and TV soundtracks, but is equally ear-worm-ish and was “visualized” via dance on an unidentified Sixties variety show. Here, kats and kitties, is the “Unsquare Dance”:

The Funhouse interview: Marina de Van and Bertrand Bonello (on Jean-Pierre Leaud)

I’m very happy to revisit the interviews done for the Funhouse TV show, as they often involve people who are honest to a fault (as is the case with the first subject here) and other times shed light on not only the interview subject’s work, but that of their colleagues (as is the case with the second).

Marina de Van is an actress-filmmaker best known to American “arthouse” aficionados for her terrific work in films by Francois Ozon (See the Sea, Sitcom, and the script for the very moving Under the Sand). She’s written and directed three features as of this writing (the second, Don’t Look Back, has come out on DVD in the U.S.; the third remains unreleased).

Her first feature, In My Skin, is a fascinating and very disturbing character study that focuses on a woman (played by de Van) who is “losing control” of her body. As a filmmaker, she offers up some impressively stylish scenes (that owe a bit to both Cronenberg and Bunuel) and a few quite harrowing ones in which her character, feeling alienated from herself in the extreme, begins to cut herself. When I interviewed her in 2003, upon the film’s NYC debut, I asked her about this aspect of the film. Her bluntness was quite refreshing:

Bertrand Bonello had a big arthouse success recently with House of Pleasure, but that was not his first piece of cinematic erotica. His 2001 film The Pornographer is an extremely well-acted character study that includes one hardcore sex scene that made certain the film would never appear on “arts cable” in the U.S. (to think, it was only a few years ago when we did still have such a thing).

The film starred the great Jean-Pierre Leaud, perfectly cast as a former radical filmmaker who has turned to commercial sex cinema. He has several superb scenes in the film, particularly a final monologue delivered to a reporter (Catherine Mouchet). I asked Bonello in my 2002 interview with him to talk about his motivation for casting Leaud in the film and what the “New Wave” icon was really like in person. I was fascinated by his answer: