Light On Dark Water

Weekend Music

The past couple of weeks have seen the passing of these two musicians who did much to broaden the horizons of music lovers in the 1950s and 1960s. Even people who didn't care much for jazz owned The Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out. Everybody knows "Take Five" (actually written by Paul Desmond, the saxophonist in the group) and "Blue Rondo a la Turk." Here's one of the less widely know tracks from that album, "Three to Get Ready."

Brubeck was by all accounts a supremely decent man. He became a Catholic in 1980. When asked about his conversion, he said, "I didn't convert to Catholicism, because I wasn't anything to convert from. I just joined the Catholic Church." (Wikipedia). 

As everyone who was alive then knows, there was a brief and superficial vogue for Indian music in the late '60s, catalyzed by the Beatles' use of the sitar on a few songs and George Harrison's championing of Ravi Shankar's music. The instrument was never really integrated into Western music, though, and the vogue quickly faded. For a time the sound of the sitar seemed to be no more than a way to announce the entrance of a hippie or an Indian in a movie or TV show, and I've even heard people joke about a Shankar album as a silly relic of the '60s, like the lava lamp. But of course that's a great disservice to the music. I thought it was beautiful, and still do, though I don't understand it all. This is from the first of two or three Ravi Shankar albums I bought, Sound of the Sitar.