Jazz at Oberlin

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Allmusic	[1]

Jazz at Oberlin is a live album by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. It was recorded in the Finney Chapel at Oberlin College in March 1953, and released on Fantasy Records as F 3245.

Critic Nat Hentoff wrote in Down Beat magazine that the album ranks with the College of the Pacific and Storyville sets "as the best of Brubeck on record",^[2] and jazz critic Gary Giddins has written that it would "make many short lists of the decade's outstanding albums".^[3]

The concert is credited with making jazz a legitimate field of musical study at Oberlin, but it and the album did much more than that. The album is further credited with initiating making jazz a subject of serious intellectual attention in a listening-centric environment; Wendell Logan, the chair of Oberlin's Jazz Studies Department, described it as "the watershed event that signaled the change of performance space for jazz from the nightclub to the concert hall".^[4]

In addition, it was one of the early works in the cool jazz stream of jazz; The Guardian's John Fordham wrote that it "indicated new directions for jazz that didn't slavishly mirror bebop, and even hinted at free-jazz piano techniques still years away from realisation"; he further observed that it "marked Brubeck's eager adoption by America's (predominantly white) youth - a welcome that soon extended around the world ... for a rhythmically intricate instrumental jazz".^[5]

Track listing

1. "These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)" (Holt Marvell, Jack Strachey, Harry Link) 6:25
2. "Perdido" (Juan Tizol, Hans Lengsfelder, Ervin Drake) 8:03
3. "Stardust" (Hoagy Carmichael, Mitchell Parish) 6:32
4. "The Way You Look Tonight" (Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields) 7:43
5. "How High the Moon" (Nancy Hamilton, Morgan Lewis) 9:04

(Times are as given on the CD; the album numbers differ slightly.)

Personnel

• Dave Brubeck - piano
• Paul Desmond - alto saxophone
• Lloyd Davis - drums
• Ron Crotty - bass

References

1. ↑ Allmusic review
2. ↑ 'College of the Pacific' CD back cover excerpt
3. ↑ Legendary Brubeck Album Jazz at Oberlin was Recorded Fifty Years Ago Retrieved: 4 August 2012
4. ↑ Legendary Brubeck Album Jazz at Oberlin was Recorded Fifty Years Ago Retrieved: 4 August 2012
5. ↑ 50 Great Moments in Jazz: Dave Brubeck's 'Jazz at Oberlin' Retrieved: 4 August 2012

External links

• Legendary Brubeck Album Jazz at Oberlin was Recorded Fifty Years Ago
• 50 Great Moments in Jazz: Dave Brubeck's 'Jazz at Oberlin'