Bass playing for musicians like this is very difficult, because it's hard in a harmonically complex piece of music to choose the right note out of the chord to keep the thing going forward. Well, Joe Morello is one of the best technical drummers in all of jazz, and for this kind of work here in which the time were so various, it was important to have a musician who could handle it, make it all seem natural and keep it going together. It's true, because he gets a stunning array of timbres, just a different like, orchestral sound out of the drum kit. Well, Dave Brubeck had taken the band on a tour of the Middle East and India in the late 1950s, and they were struck by the variety of rhythms that they heard. Jazz as you know, has been wed to dance rhythms for most of its history.
American dance rhythms.
Fives and sevens, that we're hearing in all this modal music of the Middle East and of India. So they thought that they would try to see how they could stitch it all together. Not only that, but they thought that they would see what would happen if they changed rhythms during the course of a tune. So you might go from a nine back to a four. And as I say, you might hear them changing that as they go along.