Jazz This article is more than 12 years oldObituaryJoe Morello obituary
This article is more than 12 years oldUnderstated drummer who anchored the Dave Brubeck QuartetFor more than a decade after 1956, the pianist Dave Brubeck's quartet was the most famous and feted modern jazz band on the planet. The quartet's drummer Joe Morello, who has died aged 82, was the most perfectly appropriate occupant of its rhythmic engine room.
Morello was a master percussionist with exacting standards, and in his years on the road with them, he was the cornerstone of the hitmaking quartet (one of the few jazz groups to reach the pop top 10, as they did with Take Five in the UK in 1961). The group depended more than any of its contemporaries on time-signatures rarely used in jazz.
The critic Don Heckman described him as "a drummer's drummer ... he played with such sensitivity and accuracy, and he was always a support for what was happening while keeping the rhythm alive." Morello came into jazz at a time when drummers were often expected to provide showbiz bravura and spectacle as much as momentum, and an economical style was often just an indication that you knew your limitations. But Morello generated intensity and heat without raising his volume, or exaggerating his movements beyond wrist actions as steadily undemonstrative as if he were chopping vegetables.
His implacably mathematical, yet hypnotically dramatic solo over the piano vamp at the close of the band's most famous piece, Take Five, is a jazz landmark, and a tutorial for generations of drummers. The tune itself (composed in the then rarely used 5/4 time by the quartet's saxophonist Paul Desmond) was inspired by one of Morello's practice routines.
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.
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.
The quartet's album Time Out, released in 1959, was a huge seller that ended up in the collections of every broadminded listener, jazz-lover or not. It made No 2 in the US album chart. The group then globetrotted for a decade, playing for world leaders, converting jazz fans (after a suspicious start with the rootsier cognoscenti who at first thought they were too European) and winning citations everywhere.
When the quartet disbanded in 1967, Morello turned to drum-teaching (among his high-profile pupils were Bruce Springsteen's drummer Max Weinberg and the Pat Metheny Group's Danny Gottlieb), 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 such as Rudimental Jazz: A Musical Application of the Rudiments to the Drumset – a title that captures the rigorously formal focus he combined with the most unfettered instincts of a jazz improviser.
"Many people consider the rhythm section of Eugene Wright and Joe Morello in my quartet as being one of the most consistent, swinging rhythm sections in jazz," Brubeck said on hearing of Morello's death. "His drum solo on Take Five is still being heard around the world."
Morello is survived by his wife, Jean.
Joseph Morello, musician, born 17 July 1928; died 12 March 2011
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