Joe Morello born 17 July 1928

Joseph Albert Morello (July 17, 1928 – March 12, 2011) was a legendary jazz drummer whose virtuosity and command of odd time signatures made him an integral part of the Dave Brubeck Quartet on such classic recordings as "Take Five" and "Blue Rondo a la Turk. He appeared on over 120 albums and CDs, of which 60 were with the Dave Brubeck Quartet and three with legendary guitarist Hank Garland, including the landmark album, "Jazz Winds From a New Direction".

Joe Morello was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. As he had a visual impairment, his childhood activities were principally indoor ones – with violin studies a priority, encouraged by his parents from the age of six. His playing advanced, and the celebrated violinist Jascha Heifetz became the young Morello's hero. He was good enough to perform Mendelssohn's violin concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra by the age of nine. At 15, however – when Morello had the opportunity to meet Heifetz and hear the virtuoso's tone at close range – he felt that he would never achieve what he called "that sound".

Morello switched to percussion studies, though his ambition was still classical orchestral playing. He learned at first with the drummer Joe Sefcik, began jamming with jazz-playing high-school friends including the saxophonist Phil Woods and the guitarist Sal Salvador, and took paid work in marching bands. Sefcik put his promising student on to the Boston drum teacher George Lawrence Stone, who taught Morello to read music, to devote many hours to playing drum rudiments and to forget the prospect of a career with classical orchestras.

Morello's accuracy and reliability made him a local legend, but although he briefly toured with such formidable musicians as the guitarist Hank Garland, New York's jazz scene beckoned. After much consideration the drummer moved there in 1952. He worked briefly with the successful genre-bending jazz composer Stan Kenton and with the saxophonist Gil Mellé, freelanced for Woods, Salvador and the guitarists Tal Farlow and Jimmy Raney, and from 1953 to 1956 played with the pianist Marian McPartland's sophisticated trio, where Desmond first noticed the newcomer's sensitivity and fondness for the understatement of brushes.

The Desmond-inspired invitation from Brubeck (who had already sold more than 100,000 copies of his album Jazz Goes to College and become the first jazz musician to be featured on the cover of Time magazine) initially came for a short 1955 tour. The following year, having turned down offers from the swing stars Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, Morello was to become a permanent quartet member alongside Brubeck, Desmond and the bassist Eugene Wright. Morello won Downbeat magazine's best drummer award for five years in a row.

                               

In Brubeck's group, Morello's mix of a classical player's standards of accuracy and a jazz musician's improvisational and on-the-fly participatory instincts came into elegant balance. The undemonstrative calmness with which he executed complex 
polyrhythms seemed to suggest he had a separate brain operating each of his limbs. Brubeck's quartet made a trademark out of

ostensibly "unswinging" classical time-signatures and forms such as the rondo and the fugue, and Morello's crucial contribution was to inject a coolly grooving relaxation into devices that in other hands could have sounded like calculating attempts to woo a classical audience to jazz.

Morello recorded more than 60 albums with the quartet, starting with "Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A." and "Dave Digs Disney" in 1957. He was with the quartet on its 1958 State Department-sponsored tour that took the group to 14 countries, including Poland, India, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq.

That tour inspired Brubeck to explore unusual time signatures on the experimental 1959 album "Time Out," which became the first jazz album to sell more than 1 million copies. Besides "Take Five," it also included "Blue Rondo a la Turk" based on a complicated 9/8 rhythm that Brubeck heard Turkish street musicians playing. Morello's drums were prominently featured on such tracks as "Everybody's Jumpin"' and "Pick Up Sticks." On the follow up 1961 album "Time Further Out," Morello soloed using only his drumsticks on another Brubeck classic, "Unsquare Dance," in 7/4 time.

When the quartet disbanded in 1967, Morello turned to drum-

teaching, occasionally participated in Brubeck and McPartland reunions, and played with his own quartet around New York. He was a columnist for the magazine Modern Drummer and published teaching resources.. He was elected to the Modern Drummer magazine Hall of Fame in 1988, the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 1993, and was the recipient of Hudson Music's first TIP (Teacher Integration Program) Lifetime Achievement award in June, 2010.

Morello died at his home in Irvington, New Jersey, on March 12, 2011, aged 82, and is interred at Saint Michael Cemetery.   (Edited from John Fordham @ The Guardian & Legacy,com)