Paul Desmond, whose 90th birthday anniversary was November 25, had an agreement with Dave Brubeck that precluded him from making freelance recordings with other pianists. That, as it turned out, was a cloud loaded with silver linings that condensed in the form of guitar players. Jim Hall was Desmond’s most frequent collaborator; beginning with the saxophonist’s 1959 recording, First Place Again, they formed an ideal partnership and produced a body of work for Warner Bros, RCA Victor, and CTI that is among the most beautifully realized in jazz history.
In his authoritative biography, Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, Doug Ramsey says, “Hall matched Desmond in subtlety of harmony, rhythm and melodic phrasing. His soloing and accompaniments covered the range from single-note lines and chords so quiet they were nearly subliminal, to billowing harmonic abstractions.”
The Dave Brubeck Quartet disbanded in 1967. As the saxophonist explained in the candid interview below with the CBC’s Mary Lou Finlay, “fatigue” and “grouchiness” were contributing factors, and partly on the strength of Desmond’s composition “Take Five,” he and Brubeck had secured enough earnings to take it easy. Brubeck went on to accept commissions and explore new music with his sons, but Desmond hardly touched his horn for a few years. Then in 1974, he accepted an offer to play the Half Note with a group that included Hall, Ron Carter, and Ben Riley. Through Hall, Desmond learned of the Toronto-based guitarist Ed Bickert, and with encouragement from the Canadian-born journalist and lyricist Gene Lees, he began playing gigs with Bickert, Don Thompson, and Terry Clarke in 1974 at Bourbon Street in Toronto. The Desmond-Bickert pairing proved to be as inspired as Desmond-Hall. Ramsey quotes him saying, “When I work with Ed, I find myself turning around several times a night to count the strings on his guitar.” Bickert told Ramsey, “We sort of jelled right away and it felt really good. The music that Paul played was always melodic and pleasant, as opposed to the angry fireworks kind of things that a lot of people were doing. That suited me just fine.”
Here’s Desmond at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 1976 playing “Emily.”
And here’s the interview with the CBC from January 1976. It’s introduced by co-hosts Mary Lou Finlay and Paul Soles. In her conversation with the 51-year-old saxophonist, Finlay pointedly remarks on how nervous Desmond seems, but what she couldn’t have known was that the San Francisco native, who was preternaturally shy, was also ill with the cancer that claimed his life the following year.