Time Out, the hit 1959 album by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, was one of the first popular jazz works to explore meters beyond the traditional 4/4 and ¾. (The first number, which is the top number of the time signature in sheet music, represents the number of beats in the measure, and the second number represents the note value that receives one beat. 4/4 means that there are four beats and a quarter note lasts for one beat, yielding four quarter notes in each measure.) “Take Five“ and “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” two of Brubeck’s most popular works, are both on Time Out.
Justin London is a professor of music at Carleton College in Minnesota who specializes in music perception and cognition, particularly with respect to musical meter. He says that Brubeck actually inspired much of his research into rhythm and meter. “I knew that it had a visceral, toe-tapping sense of beat and rhythm,” he says, “but according to most theories of rhythm and meter developed in recent decades, it couldn’t, given its uneven beat structure.”
London says that Brubeck’s rhythms can play with the listener’s innate toe-tapping ability—the technical term is entrainment. “Whenever you start doing anything in rhythm the whole motor center of the brain starts lighting up.” He notes that musicians and nonmusicians do equally well on tests of this ability. It appears to be an innate skill, part of the way we interact socially. Asymmetrical meters may be appealing because they test people’s native entrainment ability and keep the brain more active while listening and performing. “The asymmetrical meters do make you work a little harder to make you stay along with them, and that’s part of their appeal, attraction and charm,” London says.
Brubeck wasn’t too caught up in the psychology or numerology of his music. “Of course, rhythms can be looked at in a mathematical kind of way,” Langham says, “but I think as a musician he was more focused on making sure that the music reflected a type of emotional content, that it was able to reach people and move people, even if it wasn’t in a standard time signature like 4/4.”
Vale, Mr Brubeck.