Successful Failure

Back in the days when he was just another struggling West Coast pianist, Dave Brubeck was a critical success, extravagantly admired by the eggheads of jazz. Since then, he has become the biggest record seller in jazz--and some of the critics have yet to forgive him his popularity. Last week Brubeck completed one of the most successful tours ever staged by a jazz musician in England--and still he took a pounding in the press.

Brubeck and his quartet still play much of the same intense, quiet, often dissonant music that brought them mid-'50s fame. Brubeck's Time Out has sold a phenomenal 200,000 copies in the several months it has been out, and his first single--Take Five, by Saxophonist Paul Desmond--had the rare distinction among jazz records of remaining on the pop charts for three months. In Britain, where he drew record crowds and collected $100,000 at the box office, Brubeck was mobbed by squealing teenagers. But the Sunday Times's Iain Lang has summed up the general critical response in one sneering line: "Jazz in a grey flannel suit."

The trouble with Brubeck, according to the Daily Mail's Kenneth Allsop, is that his music has no connection with "the real raw emotions of jazz." Since the insistently cool Modern Jazz Quartet, a favorite of critics on both sides of the Atlantic, is frequently praised for its lack of raw emotion, chances are that Brubeck's real sin is his popular success. One of the more adroit English critics, Benny Green of the London Observer, even managed to praise and condemn the same tour. In the program notes, which he wrote, Green found Brubeck's appeal "to the casual listener as well as to the specialist" to be "one of the most important assets any jazz musician can possess today." In his newspaper column Green grumped that "the quartet is so markedly deficient in certain essential jazz qualities that its popularity can hardly be regarded as a success for jazz at all." Pianist Brubeck was understandably irritated but not unduly worried. His success proved, he said, not that he had "gone commercial," but that "the public is a darn sight smarter than we think they are."

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