Brandenburg Gate
(Dave Brubeck)
Theme and variations, 1961
Originally written for the Dave Brubeck Quartet
from the album Brandenburg Gate: Revisited
1963
Brandenburg Gate (Revisited)
Arranged by Howard Brubeck
a Serenade
b Night Song
c Awakening
d Morning Song
e Pivot Dance
f Exhilaration Dance
g Movement
h Triolet
i Repercussion
j Final Dance
Dave Brubeck Quartet, The:
Dave Brubeck, piano
Paul Desmond, alto sax
Gene Wright, bass
Joe Morello, drums
Howard Brubeck, conductor
Teo Macero, producer
" Brandenburg Gate: Revisited was Brubeck's 1961 collaboration with his brother Howard, who orchestrated Dave's Bach-like "Brandenburg Gate" into a suite of 18-and-a-half minutes, a voyage in the third stream. Howard Brubeck's melding of strings and classical forms with the quartet took into account the nature of the jazz players and their instruments. Consequently, there was little of the heavy-handedness or boredom that doom many such ventures.
The Brubecks' treatment of "Brandenburg Gate" points up the universality of the cycle-of-fifths harmonies that also inspired John Lewis' "Django" and the Pachelbel canon, among hundreds of other compositions. There is a lovely section of the intuitive counterpoint that was a trademark of Brubeck's partnership with Desmond. "
Doug Ramsey, JazzTimes, March 1999
