John Cuneo, humorous illustrator whose work appears in many national publications including Atlantic Monthly and Esquire Magazine.
Cuneo published a book of illustration back in 2007 (Fantagraphics publishers):
Like Emily Dickinson, master illustrator John Cuneo has spent years generating a huge oeuvre of work that has never been published… anywhere. Unlike Ms. Dickinson, however, Cuneo’s consists of stacks and stacks of weird, perverse, erotic, hilarious, and disgusting images delineated in his sketchbooks. But make no mistake — these full-color sketchbook drawings are as lushly finished as his prize-winning illustration work for such magazines as Esquire (where he illustrates the sex column), Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Entertainment Weekly, and The Atlantic. nEuROTIC is a sharply designed little full-color hardcover that collects the very best of Cuneo’s humorous erotica. (read more over at Fantagraphics)
More resources about John Cuneo and his artwork:
He’s got a portofolio over at illoz.com: it’s composed of 19 published drawings along with 6 drawings of people (like Bush and Bukowski).
Cuneo also as a presence online over at Drawger.com (a site regrouping illustrator blogs for and by illustrators).
Line and Colors, a blog about drawing, sketching, painting and more, has a small piece about John Cuneo:
His wonderfully lose, sketch-like pen drawings, enlivened with deft applications of watercolor, are a visual treat.
Finally, Illustration Art (David Apatoff’s blog) offer a lengthier essay about the art of John Cuneo, more specificaly about the way he represents the relation between the artist and the world in his artwork. Worth reading.
☛ The Atlantic / In Focus: “The Gulf Oil Disaster: One Year Later” by Alan Taylor, April 19, 2011
Caption for the above photo reads:
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig is seen burning in this aerial photo taken in the Gulf of Mexico more than 50 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana on April 20, 2010. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
The indifference of trees to the historical moment. The indifference of dreams to interpretation. The indifference of the people to its own triumph. The indifference of the body to the revolution. The dazzling metaphysical spectacle of the sameness of faces the morning after the revolution. Their features haven’t changed. You expect a violent illumination and yet it’s just like sleeping with your sister. It doesn’t change your life.
☛ Cool Memories by Jean Baudrillard, tr. by Chris Turner, New York: Verso, [1987]1990 p. 87. Google books.
Here the original French version:
L’indifférence des arbres au moment historique. L’indifférence des rêves à l’interprétation. L’indifférence du peuple à son propre triomphe. L’indifférence du corps à la révolution. L’éblouissement métaphysique de l’identité des visages au petit lendemain de la révolution. Les traits n’ont pas changé. On attend l’illumination violente, et voilà, c’est comme de coucher avec sa soeur, ça ne change rien à la vie. (éd. Galilée, Paris, 1987, p. 112)
It reminded me of this famous quote by French historian Edgar Quinet (famous for being quoted both in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Hemingway’s Green Hills):
Aujourd’hui, comme aux jours de Pline et de Columelle, la jacinthe se plaît dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance; et, pendant qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de maîtres et de nom, que plusieurs sont entrées dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs paisibles générations ont traversé les âges et se sont succédé l’une à l’autre jusqu’à nous, fraîches et riantes comme aux jours des batailles.
This quote comes from Quinet’s introduction to his French translation of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Idées sur la philosophie de l’histoire de l’humanité (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit written between 1784 and 1791). Quinet’s translation was first published in 1827. The quote appears on pages 36-37 (see Google books).
I wasn’t able to find a good English translation of this quote. The one offered by Dictionary.com for example translates “riantes” (laughing) as “smiling”. The best approximation I could come up with is the English translation of James Joyce’s own version of the quote, as provided by Richard Ellmann in his famous biography (James Joyce, Oxford University Press, 1982, Amazon.com):
Today as in the time of Pliny and Columella the hyacinth disports in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins in Numantia and while around them the cities have changed masters and names, while some have ceased to exist, while the civilizations have collided with each other and smashed, their peaceful generations have passed through the ages and have come up to us, fresh and laughing as on the days of battles.
However one may evaluate the ambivalent reception of the new terror by its Western addressees, it would never have advanced beyond the level of an irritating marginal phenomenon if it had not become an interesting asset in the recalculation of the costs for social peace in Western societies. While the communist threat led to a significant increase in the social costs of peace, the threat of Islamist terror brings with it, at the bottom line, effects that help lower the costs. By exerting imaginary stressful pressure on the attacked collective, it contributes to a feeling of belonging to a real community, a belonging based on solidarity, a survival unit wrestling for its own future in spite of recently severely deepened social differences. Additionally, the new terror creates, because of its undifferentiated hostility against Western forms of life, a climate of diffuse intimidation in which questions of political and existential security enjoy high priority over those of social justice—quod erat operandum.
☛ Rage and Time by Peter Sloterdijk, tr. by Mario Wenning, New York: Columbia University Press, [2006]2010, p. 218.
Sloterdijk continues:
With the exaggeration of the securitarian imperative to the level of being the omnipotent theme of contemporary media democracies, the zeitgeist readjusted itself after September 11, 2001, to a new ecosystem of threats and defense mechanisms—while, this time, as frivolously as it might sound, the threat tendencies of Islamist terror in general point “in the right direction” when seen from the perspective of radicalized capitalism. To feel threatened by the Middle Eastern sources now means to see reasons why one could perhaps be ready to make peace with the drifting away of Western political culture into postdemocratic conditions. The “war on terror” possesses the ideal quality of not being able to be won—and thus never having to be ended. These prospects suggest that the postdemocratic trends will enjoy a long life. They create the preconditions with which democratically elected leaders can get away with presenting themselves as commanders in chief. If political thinking limits itself to advising the commander in chief, concepts such as democracy and independent judiciary cultures are only chips in a strategic game.
What threat does is shift mode of political decision from the objective to the conditional: the could-have-would-have, and treat the conditional as certainty. And it is a certainty, affectively speaking, because Bush certainly felt that Saddam Hussein would have if he could have. But this certainty is not an informed judgment about a set a objective conditions, it’s a gut feeling that there is a potential for something to happen. The thing is it’s impossible to disprove a potential. Even if nothing is happened years later, nothing is disproven because something might still happen years after that. There’s nothing to say it couldn’t: no one can know. The only certainty is that you have to act now to do everything possible to preempt the potential. In the vocabulary of Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the only thing certain is that you have to “go kinetic” even if you don’t really know, and can’t know and know you don’t know. There’re known knowns, Rumsfeld famously said, and there’re known unknowns, but in the post 9/11 era of threat and terror what we’re dealing with and have to act on are the unknown unknowns. As Bush put it in a quote I mentioned earlier, the only path to safety is the path to action against threats that have not yet emerged. And what has not yet emerged can be nothing other than an unknown unknown. The best way to act when faced with the unknown unknown of a felt threat vaguely looming is quickly, otherwise you may have acted to late. We would have waited to long, Bush warned. The only way to act quickly on a unknown unknown is to act intuitively, using the same gut feeling you use to feel the threatened reality. Bush, it is well known, prided himself with deciding with its guts. He once actually said he uses his advisors mainly as mood rings. So not only does preemption locates our actions in the realm of affect, not only does it politically legitimate actions affectively, it makes affect what makes them. All of this short-circuits objective assessment where evidence based reasoning. Hair-triggered action replace deliberation, rapid response tactical capability replace considered strategy. Remember the outrage when members of the Bush inner circle were quoted by investigative journalist Ron Suskind ridiculing what they call the “reality-based community”. While you’re off deliberating all nice and civil about what’s really real, they said, we’re busy making reality, in our gutsy-preemptive way. The phrase “reality-based” was sarcastic. It’s the high of illusion, they were saying, to treat a looming threat as if it were a clear and present danger that could be responded to in the old fashion way, as if the world was still orderly and linear. No, what’s realistic is to go kinetic with the utmost urgency. And when you do that you’re not sitting back reflecting on reality, you’re making it, you’re producing it.
Brian Massumi’s video was produced by the Histories of Violence initiative and published by The Guardian on September 2, 2011. It’s a 5 minutes excerpt of an hour long intervention that should soon be published in its entirety on the Histories of Violence website (see “Full Lectures” in the “Symposia” tab). Some of those thoughts (about threats, terror and the 9/11) are analyzed by Brian Massumi in a paper published in 2005: “Fear (The Spectrum Said)” (positions, Duke University Press, vol. 1, no. 13, pp. 31-48). The paper focuses on the color-coded terror alert system:
The necessity for a pragmatics of uncertainty to which the color system alerts us is related to a change in the nature of the object of power. The formlessness and contentlessness of its exercise in no way means that power no longer has an object. It means that the object of power is correspondingly formless and contentless: post 9/11, governmentality has molded itself to threat. A threat is unknowable. If it were known in its specifics, it wouldn’t be a threat. It would be a situation—as when they say on television police shows, “we have a situation”—and a situation can be handled. A threat is only a threat if it retains an indeterminacy. If it has a form, it is not a substantial form, but a time form: a futurity. The threat as such is nothing yet—just a looming. It is a form of futurity yet has the capacity to fill the present without presenting itself. Its future looming casts a present shadow, and that shadow is fear. (p. 35)
• • •
“Reality-based community” (read Suskind article here) and “threat-driven community” (as one may call them) could be understood as two descriptions (among others) of different ways by which we live together today. In that perspective, I wonder what it means in regard to Agamben’s “coming community” announced more than 20 years ago? How do they compare?
Also, when it comes to what may brings a community together (in certain circumstances), Massumi speaks of affects, Sloterdijk writes about feelings and Nancy points to passions, needs, desire and anxiety (previously here). What then, one may asks, is the role of reason today in the theater of our democracies? How does the actual conditions of this problem relate to the ways by which is was approached before (for example by some members of the Frankfurt School)?
This famous image by Man Ray is actually a photo reproduction of a movie still from the very end of his film Retour à la raison (1923). It shows the nude torso of Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), a famous artist model and painter who happened to be Man Ray’s mistress for most of the 1920’s. The photo was published in the very first issue of La Révolution surréaliste in 1924, on page 4 (see below).
In the 1923 silent short of the same title [Retour à la Raison], Man Ray filmed barely discernible scenes of Paris at night along with his own enigmatic photograms and conglomerations of spiraling or gyrating objects. The resulting sequence of near-total abstractions seems devoid of sense or purpose. The “return to reason” in the film comes finally in the form of a woman’s torso–modeled by cabaret personality Kiki de Montparnasse–turning to and fro beside a rain-covered windowpane. Man Ray reproduced the seductive finale, as well as other moments from the film, as photographs, singly and in strips.
Although the film Retour à la raison quickly faded from memory, a photograph of the same name was an instant classic. As with a number of Man Ray’s cinematic images (and increasingly more often as the decade progressed), a still from Retour’s final sequences—Kiki’s nude torso undulating in raking light—was reproduced as a photograph in the pages of La révolution surréaliste (no. 1, 1924). From the inaugural issue of this first full-fledged surrealist mainstay, the image became an icon of the movement in the pages of Das Kunstblatt (1926), L’art vivant (1929), and as the introductory nude in the summation of Man Ray’s 1920s photographic work, Photographs by Man Ray, Paris, 1920–1934 (1934), produced by James Soby. The title Retour à la raison quickly came to denote this “photograph” of Kiki rather than the film from which it was culled—a tendency that has been reinforced through brilliant recent scholarship that, however, pays little attention to the film. (Grey Room, no. 30, Winter 2008, pp. 22-23, subscription may be required)
More resources online about “Torso” by Man Ray:
Below is a reproduction of page 4 from the inaugural issue of La Révolution Surréaliste (1924) where Man Ray’s photo was first published. The whole issue is available online as a PDF file (9.5MB). The complete text from this issue is also available online over at the Centre de recherches sur le surréalisme.
La Révolution Surréaliste, issue no. 1, 1924, p. 4
The book Man Ray: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum has more details about the relationship between Man Ray and Kiki de Montparnasse:
At about the same time he was establishing himself as a photographer in Paris, Man Ray met Kiki (Alice Prin), the most celebrated woman in Montparnasse, the city’s bohemian quarter. Kiki was a country girl who became a nightclub star in the 1920s by singing risqué songs with an innocent demeanor. Although she had worked as a model for many painters, she was reluctant to pose for the camera, considering the photographic image too clinical. Man Ray convinced her of his prowess as both an artist and a man, and she soon became a frequent subject of his workas well as his lover. (Getty Publications, 1998, p. 32)
The blog where I found the hi-res version of “Torso” has an interesting post about “coincidence, influence and originality in artistic creative practice”. Reviewing the book Double Take: A Comparative Look at Photographs by Richard Whelan (C.N. Potter, 1981) the author found a strikingly similar photo to Man Ray’s “Torso” taken by American photographer Edward Weston three years before, in 1920. See “Thoughts on Influence & Originality in Photography” by Christopher H. Paquette, July 2011.
Man Ray’s short film Retour à la Raison can easily be found on YouTube. It is embedded below (2’55”). One can also download a copy of it from the always resourceful UbuWeb.
Without question, the most socially and economically significant technological event of the last quarter-century has been the invention of the surrogate. As this paper will show, never before in human history has the consumer been offered a product capable of delivering such a dramatic personal change. The ramifications of the surrogate’s rapid assimilation into everyday living can be witnessed in virtually every facet of culture, particularly in the United States where in the twenty years since their introduction the portion of the adult population that either owns or has operated a surrogate has risen to an astounding 92%. With surrogate technology in a constant state of refinement, there is no evidence to suggest this trend will be reversed. The improvements and transformations enjoyed by the operating public are here to stay, which leaves us with the question: What, if anything, remains to be overcome?
– LASLO Wiliam PhD (2054). “Paradise Found. Possibility and fullfillment in the age of the surrogate”, Journal of Applied Cybernetics. Full paper in PDF.
“Paradise found…” is a fictional paper appearing in the first volume of the comic book series The Surogates, created and written by Robert Venditti. The film was recently adapted into a film by Jonathan Mostow, starring Bruce Willis.
Evgeny Morozov and Malcolm Gladwell are the two most visible skeptics of the utopian claims made for “Liberation through Facebook.” Their arguments seem sensible to me, though I think they lose sight of the distinction between the architecture of the Internet, which is the fundamental value brought to people by services like Facebook and Twitter, and the shallower qualities unique to those services. My impression of what has gone on in the Middle East is that the fundamental character of the Internet- connecting anyone to anyone, asynchronously, on demand, with persistent data sharing – is genuinely helpful to people on the ground.
☛ Jaron Lanier: You Are Not a Gadget‘s Frequently Asked Questions
He goes on:
The particular designs of today’s top social networking sites might come back to haunt emerging democracies as they try to bring societies together while the connecting software is trying to regiment people into corrals for ideal advertising targeting.
For the moment, I am super delighted that digital technologies are symbols of youth and freedom, and the potential for a better future. I also note that ordinary people in the Middle East are trusting American services in difficult times, and that is a hopeful sign in a world that sometimes seems to be locked in hopeless “civilization clash.”
On the other hand, the intense American focus on the roles of the fashionable brands – Twitter and Facebook – amounts to an orgy of narcissism that once again makes the story be about us. It turns into yet another way to not listen openly to what someone in Egypt might be saying. Let’s make sure to make it a two-way exchange.
About Jaron Lanier:
Lanier’s name is also often associated with Virtual Reality research. He either coined or popularized the term ‘Virtual Reality’ and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. In the late 1980s he led the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays, for both local and wide area networks, as well as the first “avatars”, or representations of users within such systems. While at VPL, he and his colleagues developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, virtual sets for television production, and assorted other areas. He led the team that developed the first widely used software platform architecture for immersive virtual reality applications. Sun Microsystems acquired VPL’s seminal portfolio of patents related to Virtual Reality and networked 3D graphics in 1999. (Jaron Lanier’s Bio)
His official website is a rich repository of resources about him and his work. Here’s the page about his latest book You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf, 2010). It offers multiple FAQs, related material and blurbs about the book. The following review was retrieved from Amazon.com:
For the most part, Web 2.0–Internet technologies that encourage interactivity, customization, and participation–is hailed as an emerging Golden Age of information sharing and collaborative achievement, the strength of democratized wisdom. Jaron Lanier isn’t buying it. In You Are Not a Gadget, the longtime tech guru/visionary/dreadlocked genius (and progenitor of virtual reality) argues the opposite: that unfettered–and anonymous–ability to comment results in cynical mob behavior, the shouting-down of reasoned argument, and the devaluation of individual accomplishment. Lanier traces the roots of today’s Web 2.0 philosophies and architectures (e.g. he posits that Web anonymity is the result of ’60s paranoia), persuasively documents their shortcomings, and provides alternate paths to “locked-in” paradigms. Though its strongly-stated opinions run against the bias of popular assumptions, You Are Not a Gadget is a manifesto, not a screed; Lanier seeks a useful, respectful dialogue about how we can shape technology to fit culture’s needs, rather than the way technology currently shapes us.
From the essay “Dealing with a stray dog” by Akira Hasegawa comes a first-hand account, by Daido Moriyama himself, of how this photo was taken:
The photograph first appeared as a single image within the series Nanika he no Tabi (En Route to Something) in the March 1971 issue of Asahi Camera. As Moriyama himself recalls, “right after New Year 1971, I took a picture of a stray dog in Misawa up north in Aomori where there was a US military base. I was heading out in the morning with my camera in hand and took one step out of the hotel, when right there in front of me was this stray dog wandering around sunning himself. Just like that I pointed my lens at the stray dog and clicked the shutter a few times; later on, his moment in the light was printed as a full spread for a photo magazine series I was doing at the time”. As simple as that. Yet, now that same photograph “catches the eye of photography fans and somehow remains a favourite in Japan and around the world. It’s become a print that wanders around between museums and galleries and private collectors” (from an Asahi Shimbun newspaper essay by Moriyama). A turn of events the young photographer could never have imagined. (the essay “Dealing with a stray dog” is published in the book The World through My Eyes by Daido Moriyama, Milano: Skira, 2010, p. 17)
In 1999, fellow photographer Leo Rubinfien wrote an exhaustive essay on Moriyama’s work for the Art in America magazine. What’s especially interesting about this essay is that it provides us with a good explanation of the symbolic of the “stray dog” both for postwar Japanese culture and for Daido Moriyama (in an argument divergent from Kazuo Nishii’s comment quoted above):
Since the Second World War, the image of the stray dog has wandered into Japan’s best art often enough to have us ask what, in that famously rule-bound, rank-conscious land, such a pariah might mean. As nearly as I can tell, its earliest appearance was in Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 film Stray Dog, where it was not a character but the metaphorical name for a young, murderous pickpocket, demobilized from the Emperor’s army into the bomb-blasted city with no home to return to. At the start of the chase, the stern senior detective warns that such mined men am stray dogs, to be put down before they turn into mad dogs, but his despondent acolyte pleads for compassion, recalling that in the chaos of 1945 he might easily have become such a dog himself. The stray is there again in Susumu Hani’s exquisite She and He (1960), this time as the companion of a pathetic ragpicker who is one of the two principals of the story. The dog is pretty much this outcast’s alter ego, and when at the film’s denouement it is hideously tortured by the children of a cell-block town of materialistic salary-men, the man suffers equally, and we with him. […]
For Moriyama to identify himself with these beasts is remarkable. The West maintains a pantheon of alienated heroes, and in its romantic modernist tradition, the bohemian, rebel, tramp or hollow-hearted etranger have been thought bearers of authenticity and moral legitimacy. But in Japan an outsider is truly an outsider. The hero-outcasts of its premodern folklore, the dispossessed lord Yoshitsune, for example, or the 47 vengeful ronin, are not so much opponents of society as plaintiffs for a justice that society has refused but could easily give. The true renegade–with no home village, no pedigree, no uncles or cousins to protect him, no company, guild, obligations, diploma or calling card–is suspicious even to the most free-thinking Japanese. In the less liberal he provokes revulsion and anger. (“Daido Moriyama: Investigations of a Dog” by Leo Rubinfien, originally published in Art in America, October, 1999)
In Phaidon’s monograph simply titled Daido Moriyama, this photo is reproduced on page 55. The author, Kazuo Nishii, proposes the following explanation on the opposite page:
Two versions of this picture exist, printed with the dog facing in opposite directions. Moriyama went to Misawa in New Year 1971 and observred that it had much in common with many base towns, with its øbarbers, cabarets, boutiques, beauticians and oculits… all lined up” and “dogs everywhere”. Urban dogs were often featured in postwar European photography, fighting and snarling, symbolizing animality. Moriyama’s dog, on the other hand, seems to have been taken from a kindred dog’s-eye point of view, as if merely encountered rather than elevated into a symbolic order. (New York: Phaidon, [2001] 2012, p. 54).
About Daido Moriyama:
Born in Ikeda, Osaka, Daidō Moriyama studied photography under Takeji Iwamiya before moving to Tokyo in 1961 to work as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe. He produced a collection of photographs, Nippon gekijō shashinchō, which showed the darker sides of urban life and the less-seen parts of cities. In them, he attempted to show how life in certain areas was being left behind the other industrialised parts. Though not exclusively, Moriyama predominantly takes high contrast, grainy, black and white photographs within the Shinjuku area of Tokyo, often shot from odd angles.
Moriyama’s photography has been influenced by Seiryū Inoue, Shōmei Tōmatsu, William Klein, Andy Warhol, Eikoh Hosoe, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Moriyama has written a memoir titled Memories of a Dog. (Wikipedia)
Below are some more resources about Daido Moriyama (this section is likely to be updated from time to time):
[UPDATE–Oct. 3, 2012] Daido Moriyama just did a short interview for The Guardian’s “My Best Shot” series, where “Photographers come clean on how they created their favourite works”. In the interview, Moriyama mentioned “a shot of a stray dog taken in 1971”. This part of the text links back here. See “Daido Moriyama’s best photograph: my girlfriend’s legs in fishnets” by Sarah Phillips, Oct. 3, 2012. See all entries tagged Daido Moriyama on Aphelis.
“Daidō Moriyama: Tokyo Photographs” was the name of an exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (February 28, 2009 – August 23, 2009).
The International Center of Photography Library blog: “The Daido Moriyama Photobook Collection at the ICP Library” by Russet Lederman, May 14, 2012.
I remember my husband’s purchase of our first Daido Moriyama photobook. In fact, I remember it very well because it was also the very first Japanese photobook we ever bought. At the time, 10 years ago now, neither of us knew that this seemingly innocent purchase would signal the beginning of what we now fondly refer to as our Japanese photobook acquisition disorder. In 2002, he attended a gallery opening for `71-NY: Photographs by Daido Moriyama, an exhibition that took the then risky stance of presenting both photographs and photobooks as equals within a gallery installation.
Michael Hoppen Gallery has numerous photos from various series, including the Shomei Tomatsu series and the Thights and Lips series.
[UPDATE–March 31, 2013] Steven Kasher Gallery has 94 reproduction of Moriyama’s photos shown in medium and large formats alongside detailed information. From March 28th through May 4th, 2013, the Steven Kasher Gallery is hosting what it claims to be “the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Moriyama’s work ever mounted in an American art gallery”: Daido Moriyama: Now and Now
“Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog of Tokyo” is a documentary produced in 2001 by Viz Pictures [March 2013–link is dead] for its New People Artist series. Check its official page [March 2013–link is dead], read a review of the DVD over at Blog Critic, buy it on Amazon or rent it for $2,99 (48 hours) on Filmbinder. Watch the trailer bellow:
Dave Brubeck, a pianist and composer whose distinctive mixture of experimentation and accessibility made him one of the most popular jazz musicians of the 1950s and ’60s, died Wednesday morning in Norwalk, Conn. He would have turned 92 on Thursday. […]
In a long and successful career, Mr. Brubeck helped repopularize jazz at a time when younger listeners had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop single. His quartet’s 1959 recording of “Take Five” was the first jazz single to sell a million copies. (The New York Times: “Dave Brubeck, Who Helped Put Jazz Back in Vogue, Dies at 91” by Ben Ratliff, December 5, 2012)
I bet the album Time Out played in quite a few headphones and speakers today. It did in mines. The artwork for the vinyl sleeve ―seen above― was designed by American graphic designer S. Neil Fujita. Fujita is known, among other things, as the designer of the iconic typeface of The Godfather which was used both on the jacket of the book and on the movie poster (see previously: American Graphic Designer S. Neil Fujita Dies (1921-2010)). The reproduction used here was retrieved from Discogs.
At the very end of this post, I’ve embedded a video of The Dave Brubeck Quartet performing “Take Five” in front of a live audience in Germany, in 1966. “Take Five” is probably one of the most recognizable jazz composition ever recorded. A few quotes from different sources makes it easier to appreciate a couple of things about this musical piece; namely, the singular nature of its time signature, just who was involved in its composition (three of the band members) and its overall value in regard to the history of jazz.
First, Fred Kaplan tells the story of the “oriental” influence which gave the whole album its innovative and unique rhythm:
Walking around Istanbul one morning [while on tour], Brubeck heard a group of street musicians playing an exotic rhythm, fast and syncopated. It was in 9/8 time―nine eight notes per measure―a very unusual meter in Western music, and the players phrased the notes in still more jarring way: not 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, as might be expected, but 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3. […]
All during the 1958 tour, Brubeck heard odd meters and raga rhythms from local musicians, and when his quartet played with them, they were all astonished that his drummer, Joe Morello, could match these rhythms precisely.
When Brubeck got back to the United States, he was inspired to make an album that would break out the standard 4/4 time that marked almost all jazz tunes, no matter how adventurous they might otherwise be. And he especially wanted to write something based on the 9/8 folk tune he’s heard in Istanbul.
[…] Columbia’s executives were loath to underwrite an album that consisted entirely of original music composed in weird meters. They finally agreed, but only if Brubeck first recorded an album of traditional songs from the South […]
Two month later, having fulfilled his side of the bargain, Brubeck and the quartet flew to New York and―over three sessions, on June 25, July 1, and August 18―made the album that he’d wanted to make. It was called Time Out, and it would become, after Kind of Blue, one of the biggest-selling jazz albums ever. (1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2009, pp. 130-132)
The 9/8 time would later be used by Brubeck to compose “Blue Rondo à la Turk” which was also included on the album Time Out. Kaplan’s anecdote comes from an interview he did with Dave Brubeck while researching his book. See the commemorative post he wrote today for Stereophile: “Dave Brubeck, R.I.P.” Dec. 5, 2012; see also the official website for his book.
In another book published in 1996 –It’s About Time: The Dave Brubeck Story by Fred M. Hall– we find another first account both by Dave Brubeck and Joe Morello of just how “Take Five” was composed. As it turns out, it really was a team effort:
In the entire history of the Classic Brubeck Quartet, the most important recording session was that of July 1, 1959.
Dozens of singles had been released by Fantasy and Columbia, both in 78 rpm and, later, un 45 rpm formats, but Dave had never had a hit. A hit, in fact, was an unheard-of concept for contemporary jazz group. Time Out produced “Take Five,” and “Take Five” took off like the Boeing 707, which made its commercial debut that year. Each selection in the album had a different time signature. It was 5/4 for “Take Five”. Dave says, “We credit Paul Desmond as composer. But I know the whole story, and I’d have to credit Joe Morello with coming up with that beat. I used to say to Paul, ‘Why don’t you put a melody to this rhythm Joe is playing?’ So they’d mess around backstage. And I’d say, ‘Now write something, Paul, that goes with it.’ So he came in with some themes, but he didn’t have a completed composition. I put two of Paul’s themes together, so we gave the composition credit to him. But when people want to know the full story, they should talk to joe. Because Joe said ‘Take Five’ was basically his 5/4 beat. And I have to agree with him.”
According to Morello, it all stemmed from his being bored with 4/4 during his solos. He says he started doing 5/4 just for fun. “Even after ‘Take Five’ was recorded,” Joe says, “nobody expected it to be successful. It was written just to close a show with a drum solo. That’s all it was. It was a good vehicle for me because I was very comfortable in that time signature.” Now of course, Dave can’t do a concert without including that piece. (It’s About Time: The Dave Brubeck Story by Fred M. Hall, University of Arkansas Press, 1996, pp. 62-63)
Finally, Chris Smith provides a few words about how the album was received both by professional critics and by general audiences:
Although very complex and cerebral, and despite the unusual time signature, Time Out never loses this ability to swing, making it all the more an extraordinary achievement. Critics were initially hesitant to appreciate Brubeck and Desmond’s ingenuity, feeling they had violated the rhythmic underpinning that made jazz what it was. But Time Out was a surprisingly popular success, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard charts, something wholly unexpected from an avant-garde jazz album. The album remained on the charts for more than three years, buyoed by the hit “Take Five,” and has gone to become one of the best-selling jazz albums in history. (101 Albums That Changed Popular Music: A Reference Guide by Chris Smith, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 15)
For more, see also Steve Huey entry for Time Out in All Music Guide to Jazz (ed by Vladimir Bogdanov, Chris Woodstra and Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Backbeat Books, 4th edition, 2002, p. 169)
Below is a film recording of The Dave Brubeck Quartet performing “Take Five” in front of a live audience (Germany, 1966). It’s the same version as this recording (uploaded by YouTube user Astrotype on May 24, 2007), but with a slightly better resolution. It was uploaded on YouTube by user TheDathi on December 22, 2010.
