Nocturnes

"The music may not be of the barnstorming kind but the whole disc is a valuable document of one of the most versatile of American composers"
(MusicWeb Oct 2006)

I am delighted that John Salmon has chosen to perform these short piano pieces. Many of them have a special significance to me, as I almost always write from personal experience. For example, when I first saw Lake Tahoe as a child, the pristine blue waters surrounded by pine forest seemed like Shangri-la. When I was twenty years old, I spent one wonderful summer at Tahoe with my jazz band playing our very first engagement. When I was married, I had one day on Army leave for a honeymoon, and Lake Tahoe was the place we chose. Blue Lake Tahoe is filled with youthful memories. Growing up on a ranch in Northern California, I often heard the call of the meadowlark as I walked through the grassy fields. The melody of Strange Meadowlark is based on the actual notes of that call. It is one of my favourite songs, with beautiful lyrics by my wife, Iola.

Sometimes my pieces are like postcards. Looking at a Rainbow was written after a rainstorm in Tokyo on my first trip to Japan, when I watched a rainbow arch across the city. I was so impressed with the delicate sounds I heard emanating from a koto concert in a fine Japanese restaurant that I wrote Koto Song, based on the scale of that Japanese stringed instrument. Koto Song is slightly tinged with the blues. Perhaps I was getting a bit homesick at this point. In earlier years I performed in Mexico frequently and always enjoyed excursions to many parts of that fascinating country. The title Nostalgia de México is self-explanatory. Recalling the people and the scenery of Mexico, I composed Recuerdo especially for a Mexican tour and played it for the first time to an audience in Belles Artes, Mexico City. After the concert, I realised I had captured something of Mexico when I heard people singing the refrain "recuerdo" as they walked down the street.

In some of the pieces, if you were to look at the notation, you would notice a visual pun, if that is the right term. For instance, on the printed music of I See, Satie you would see the notes forming a pear shape in the last three measures. This is in reference to a musical precedent. When the music of the great French composer Erik Satie was criticized for its lack of form, his response was to write a piece that was visually formed in the shape of a pear. In the music for Looking at a Rainbow the ties over notes form an arch. In A Misty Morning, picturing the earth shrouded in fog, the melody is hidden in the middle notes for the first twelve bars, instead of the usual placement in the top line.

Other pieces reflect domestic life. There was a period when Iola had gone to California to attend to her mother, who was ill. That is when I wrote Home Without Iola. And when I was writing Lost Waltz, I went around singing to myself, 'I'm so lost. I'm so lost without you'. Undoubtedly those two pieces evoke the same emotions. When I was first dating my wife, I gave her the nickname 'Oli'. After six decades of marriage, I sent her a musical message, I Still Am in Love With a Girl Named Oli.

We are blessed with grandchildren. Going to Sleep, another composition in my favourite time-signature of 5/4, was a successful way I devised to get my grandson, Ben, not to jump up and run around when it was bedtime. He could hear my piano from his bedroom, and I would entice him to lie still and listen to me play, softly, very, very softly, and soon he would be sound asleep.

Five for Ten Small Fingers was composed for a pianist friend after she complained that some of the chords in my music were too difficult for her small fingers to execute. Quiet As the Moon was first written for voices, then adapted as background music for a Peanuts television special about the NASA space programme. Softly, William, Softly was to be an aria in an opera that I never completed.

Sometimes a composition comes out of interest in a certain musical sound or style. Study in Fourths has the harmonization of the melody in chords built on the interval of a fourth. Mr. Fats, a tribute to early jazz pianist Fats Waller, is based on boogie-woogie, the popular piano style recorded by Fats and many other pianists of the era. The first record I ever purchased in my life was a Fats Waller recording. When I play Mr. Fats I think of him and of Cleo Brown, who was the first internationally recognized artist I knew. I played intermission piano for her in a nightclub in Stockton, California when I was in college.

So, as you can see, all of these pieces rise out of my personal life, and it is gratifying to hear them so splendidly recreated by the artistry of John Salmon.

Dave Brubeck

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Notes from the Performer

Dave Brubeck's Nocturnes are small, lyrical pieces that can be played by children and savoured by adults. Longing, tenderness, and nostalgia are the predominant themes, linking them to Chopin's nocturnes. Both composers explore the mystery and melancholy that take over after dark, the nocturne's time to flower.

The musical score to Nocturnes was published by Warner Bros. in 1997, and includes 24 of the present 26 tracks. Mr. Fats and I Still Am in Love With a Girl Named Oli, happy, swinging tunes, are not nocturnes, but included here precisely for their change of character. I play most of them as written though I improvise over Recuerdo, Bluette, and Koto Song. Joshua Redman was composed for the tenor saxophonist of the same name, who recorded it with Dave Brubeck on the 1995 Telarc CD Young Lions & Old Tigers. Audrey is none other than Audrey Hepburn, wistful and delicate.

Three of the pieces revolve around Iola Brubeck, Dave Brubeck's wife since 1942. Lullaby was written during their courtship, when both were students at College of the Pacific, Stockton, California. It is as ingenuous and heartfelt as a character piece by MacDowell. Home Without Iola expresses how Dave Brubeck feels when she is not around. Finally, I Still Am in Love With a Girl Named Oli expresses his glee when she is around.

Unlike much of Brubeck's other piano music for classical pianists, such as the thirty-minute Chromatic Fantasy Sonata or the 25-minute suite Points on Jazz, long and difficult pieces only for the most advanced players, the Nocturnes are brief and easily accessible. One thinks of Schubert, who composed both massive works (like the three last Sonatas, D.958, D.959, and D.960, that require strength, stamina, and sophistication) and minuscule Ländler, whiffs of poetry, gone almost before they start. Short pieces can carry their own kind of truth.

John Salmon