Spirited Men by Brian Doyle

Author:Brian Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cowley Publications
Published: 2004-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

How Many of You Are There

in the Quartet?

The late saxophone player Paul Desmond, whose martini-dry sound was the engine behind the Dave Brubeck Quartet, was reportedly working on a memoir up until he died in 1977. He never finished it. There are a number of theories as to why he never finished it. One story is that he would tear it up and start over whenever he got close to a finished manuscript. Another story is that he talked about it but never actually wrote any of it—a tale belied by the appearance, in 1973, of an ostensible chapter of the book in Punch. A third story is that he wrote only when he was not sipping Scotch, and so never wrote much.

Desmond himself liked to talk about the book, although he conceded to a reporter, “It’s largely a fraud. That’s my cover story. I had thought of writing a book before I began hanging out at Elaine’s, and found that most of the heavy writers there had Walter Mitty dreams about being jazz players.”

But this cover story that he didn’t really work on the book was itself a cover story, because perhaps he did work on it a good deal without telling anyone, says his friend Dave Brubeck. Or maybe he wrote some and then scrapped the results, suggests his friend Iola Brubeck, Dave’s wife. Or maybe he didn’t write it at all, says his friend Gene Lees, because you could never be sure of anything with Paul, a man of smiles and shadows and illusions who was just as adept at telling stories that might or might not be true as he was at playing the alto saxophone.

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