Take Four

As difficult as jazz popularity is to achieve, it is even harder to sustain over a long period of time. New comets continually invade the firmament; new listeners are added each year and their quick enthusiasms alter the popularity scales. Yet, after 11 years as leader of his own quartet, Dave Brubeck is more firmly entrenched than ever in the often mercurial esteem of the jazz public.

In this year's seventh annual Playboy Jazz Poll, for example, Brubeck's winning margin as both pianist and combo leader was wider than the year before. Of his sidemen, Joe Morello eclipsed all other drummers; Paul Desmond was second again among the altoists; and Gene Wright, almost entirely because of his association with Brubeck, was third in the bass division.

As a harshly dissonant obbligato to this steadily climbing renown, there are the insistent dissents of many of the critics. All jazzmen have to cope with some criticism, but Brubeck's career has been unique in the ferocity and obduracy of the attacks on him. This past November, Brubeck toured England with substantial success, but the jazz writers there were largely unconverted. "His keyboard technique remains gauche," Benny Green wrote in The Observer, "and his jazz conception misguided, completely lacking in the inventive power and melodic fertility that distinguish the great jazz musician."

The same persistent Green had reacted to a previous Brubeck visit in this wounding manner: "To judge Brubeck's music by the highest jazz standards is to marvel at the comparative neglect of so many more musical groups."

Although he has tried, the prodigiously energetic, drivingly optimistic Brubeck has never been able to develop a dense-enough armor to prevent these onslaughts from exacerbating him. "It gets outrageous," he complains, "in a case like that guy on The Observer. The year he first attacked us was also the year he wrote -- for pay -- an 'appreciation' of us in the program book for our English concerts. The critics keep talking about how jazz musicians should remain pure, but they'll praise a man in any direction on assignment."

At the end of his most recent British tour, Brubeck finally exploded in anguish against all his critics. "The critics," he roared at a reporter from the Melody Maker, "are pulling to bits a man who has devoted everything to his music. Jazz is a way of life. People shouldn't tell others how to run their lives."

Jazz has indeed been a thoroughly committed way of life for the tall, rawboned, 42-year-old Californian for more than 20 years, and he has paid more dues on the way up than most critics and even most of his admirers realize. "If I wrote down all the things that happened to me in those waiting years," he told a friend recently, "it would be hard for anyone to understand why I stayed with it. I was 29 before I ever made more than $2000 a year." One of the methods, in fact, by which Brubeck survived in his 29th year was by selling sandwiches for a time in San Francisco office buildings during the lunch hour.

It wasn't until four years later, moreover, that Brubeck's singular jazz conception took hold after a long stretch of short pay, long road trips broken by cheap hotels, and a great deal of derisory skepticism from club owners, record company executives and, of course, critics.

(continued on page 139) Take Four (continued from page 87)

What has been most remarkable about Brubeck personally -- then as now -- has been the inability of this thorny apprenticeship and the bastinadoes of the present to change his temperament. Most jazzmen are defensively opaque, even those with swift smiles for the squares and the writers. They tend to be suspicious of day people, and gain most of their emotional nutrition from the narrow jazz world of their peers. Brubeck, on the other hand, is astonishingly open.

It is even difficult for Brubeck to nurse a rage against specific critics. One man had written a denunciation of Brubeck that equaled in splenetic thrust and adjectival mayhem the worst polemics of Chinese Communists against revisionists within their ranks. "If that guy was here now," Brubeck stiffened as he read the piece, "I'd kill him. I'd really kill him." A few nights later, the critic, drunk, sat through a Brubeck set at Basin Street East in New York. Brubeck ignored him. The critic, half querulously and half tearfully, asked Brubeck's sidemen to bring their leader to his table. "I wanna tell him," he urged, "what I really meant."

Brubeck finally came, and reacting sympathetically to the disorganized state of the critic, he talked patiently with him for a long time. "Can you imagine that?" Brubeck shook his head hard when the night was over. "The guy writes something I'll be fighting all my life, and I wind up humoring him!"

Brubeck also differs from many jazzmen in his passion for family life away from the diversified lures and comfortable anonymity of the big cities where nearly all jazz musicians base themselves. Currently, Brubeck, his wife Iola, and their six children live in a large, white frame house in Wilton, Connecticut. Behind the building are a wide field, a soothing stream and a grove of trees. The house is rented, but Brubeck is about to build his own home in the same peaceful neighborhood.

Although Brubeck could work every night in the year, he purposely limits his concerts so that he can spend more time with his family and in composing at home. Last year, he averaged 150 concerts. In 1963, he hopes to keep the number down to 100.

To achieve the kind of life he wants, Brubeck has now eliminated night clubs entirely from his itinerary. His is the first jazz group to make a complete break with the clubs, although the Modern Jazz Quartet is moving more and more in that direction. Although he still has to travel a lot -- a concomitant of the jazz life which he increasingly dislikes -- he can get enough one-nighters in the Northeastern states to be home more often than ever before. Nor does Brubeck agree with Miles Davis and many other jazzmen that concerts are constricting, that night clubs allow an improviser to stretch out more. "When you get used to concerts," Brubeck is convinced, "you can be much more at ease than in almost any club. By now everyone in my group plays better in concerts than he usually did in clubs."

Paul Desmond, who has been with Brubeck since the formation of the quartet in 1951, agrees: "By now I can get so relaxed at concerts that I can lean against the piano and fall asleep -- something I'm sure Cannonball Adderley would be the first to believe. After all, it's dark out there. There's nothing to distract you. No cash registers out of tempo." Desmond then reflected ruefully, "And no fine, lovely chicks."

Desmond and Brubeck could hardly be more dissimilar. A wry intellectual -- with other less cerebral interests as well -- Desmond has a mordant sense of humor and is considerably more sophisticated than Brubeck, whose tastes remain essentially simple and rather bucolic. "Every five years or so," Desmond once told a New Yorker writer, "Dave makes a major breakthrough, like discovering room service."

Adding to the Quartet's diversity of temperaments if Joe Morello, who has been a member since 1956. A soft-spoken but stubbornly prideful virtuoso, Morello's strength of musical purpose has made him a third pocket of power in a group in which primary audience attention used to be focused only on Brubeck and Desmond. Occasionally, Morello's crackling assertiveness drives Desmond far into himself. At such times, Desmond stands, hands folded, looking like a penitent for whom no absolution is possible and apparently listening to the exceedingly soft sound of distant, inaccessible drums while trying to shut out those drums that are all too near at hand.

Bassist Gene Wright, who joined this heterogeneous crew in 1958, has a background almost entirely different from those of his colleagues. Wright is a Chicagoan with unalloyed affection for such hard-swinging, blues-rooted jazzmen as Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt and Art Blakey. He has worked with all three, as well as with Count Basie. But Wright maintains that he's become entirely at home amid the polyrhythms and polytonalities of the Brubeck quartet where the blues are often present but hardly in as full-strength proportion as in the combos with which Wright acquired his jazz training. "The reason I enjoy being with Dave," Wright has said, "is that he likes to play in every direction. You can't get stuck in any one groove while you're with him."

Desmond also remains because of his respect for Brubeck and his constant expectation of unpredictable challenges. "We've had a lot of differences musically," says Desmond, "but there are nights which make it to a degree I'd hardly have though possible. And aside from the way he keeps on making you surprise yourself, Dave is amazing harmonically. You can play the wrongest note possible in any chord, and he can make it sound like the only right one."

"I admit, Brubeck observes, "that you could hardly find four more different guys than us. About the only times we agree -- when we do -- is on stand. But that's when we're supposed to. My job is to prevent these guys from getting bored and also to make them want to challenge themselves and one another. There are nights when we've come to a concert after 50 one-nighters. On the way, we'd be grumbling to ourselves and not talking to one another. At those times, I'd rather be whipped than have to go out and play.

"But," Brubeck begins to grin, "all of a sudden -- sometimes -- the guys come to life on stage. And I have to keep them alive even if I have to sacrifice something I want to do. Somewhere in a set, for instance, Paul may drop to a low level because the music has gone too far in a direction he doesn't like. I'll try to bring it back to where he wants it. Or the drummer doesn't realize he'd too loud and is bugging everybody else. Rather than say anything, I'll call a tune in which loud drums would be ridiculous. He gets the point and he hasn't been censured in public."

Brubeck is similarly concerned with his associates' feelings during recording sessions. He will not dictate. He listens and often accepts ideas from his sidemen; and in deciding on final takes, he trades. If Desmond or Morello has sounded particularly good on a take and a splice isn't possible, that performance is chosen even if Brubeck's solo could have been better. Conversely, the other men will yield if Brubeck is incandescent on a take in which the others are less than luminous. As an index of Paul Desmond's freedom to dissent, there is the fact that he appears on only one of the five numbers on the second side of Brubeck's Time Further Out album. "Paul didn't like four of the tunes," Brubeck explains. "There wasn't any point in forcing him to play them."

Insuring the unpredictability of any Brubeck performance -- in a studio or at a concert -- is his insistence on almost total improvisation. Brubeck estimates that some 90 percent of any given night's work is improvised. By contrast, there are many jazzmen who juggle favorite licks and otherwise preset a sizable percentage of their solos. "That would be a valuable job for a critic," Brubeck says pointedly. "Find out who's really improvising. Some of the most admired guys in the business play as if they were putting their hands in a bag and pulling out things they know damn well are in there.

"But," Brubeck goes on, "if you're playing jazz and you're not improvising, what's the point? Some of the very best things we've recorded were done entirely on the spot." He cites Stompin' for Mili and Audrey in the Brubeck Time album; Calcutta Blues in the Jazz Impressions of Eurasia album; and Maori Blues in the Time Further Out album.

"Toward the end of Maori Blues," Brubeck points out, "the rhythms became so complex that even Joe can't figure out exactly what we were doing. But we were together. When that sort of thing happens, if proves my strongest belief -- if you really go all out for improvisation, you won't let yourself down. My experience with the Quartet has been that the more chances we take, the better we play. And an audience's reaction is always the most intense when we're in that role. I'm not saying you can't fool an audience at times. They can be hoodwinked into easy applause with certain clichés; and once in a while, when the ideas just aren't coming, you can't help doing that. But we try very hard not to work on that level, and I'm embarrassed whenever one of us does descend to it. My point, however, is that the applause we get by sure-fire devices is never equal to the audience excitement when we ourselves don't know what's coming next."

Brubeck's urge to improvise has been irrepressibly evident from the time he was first drawn to music. He was born on December 6, 1920, in the town of Concord at the foot of Mount Diablo, 20 miles from San Francisco. His father was a cattleman and his mother, a piano teacher, had studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthay. (The latter was one of the most influential theorists in the history of piano pedagogy.) By the time Brubeck could reach the piano, two older brothers were well along in conventional courses in piano and theory. Henry, 53, is now a high school teacher of music in Santa Barbara; and Howard, 46, is chairman of the Music Department at Palomar Junior College in California as well as a classical composer.

The third son thought he was going to become a rancher. His eighth year had been marked by his father's presentation to him of four cows. Nonetheless, music fascinated the boy. He was playing the piano by the time he was four, and a year later had started picking out tunes of his own invention. Although his mother tried to drill basics into this most individualistic of all her sons, he continued to follow his own direction. Brubeck did not, for example, learn to read music fluently until some years later. At home he was too absorbed in improvising bold variations on the traditional children's pieces assigned young learners. He also did not become -- despite the presence of a resident piano teacher -- a virtuoso on the instrument. Technique for its own polished sake has never interested him. "Dave," as Paul Desmond notes, "has a real aversion to working things out. His tendency is to take for granted the things he can do, while spending most of his time trying to do new things."

Like Thelonious Monk, Brubeck through the years has developed a totally pragmatic piano style. While eccentric in the "legitimate" classical and jazz senses, it exactly fits the craggy poly-rhythms, churning harmonies and expansively romantic ballads he prefers. "Essentially, Brubeck explains, "I'm a composer who plays the piano. I'm not a pianist first. Therefore, my style of piano is shaped by the material, the ideas, I'm attempting to express, not by a system or a search for an identifiable 'sound.' Inevitably, because of my own approaches to harmony and rhythm, a Brubeckian sound has come into being, but I never went looking for one. I've always tried to stay free of musical strait jackets. I try to retain freedom of choice within the idiom of jazz so that, primarily, my style is a summation of all musical experience to which I've been exposed."

In his formative years, that experience included an unusually broad spectrum of music. There were the classical compositions he heard his mother and brothers play, the cowboy songs of his father and his father's friends, all manner of pop music, and whatever jazz he could find -- from boogie-woogie and Dixieland to swing-era styles.

When Brubeck was 11, the family moved to Ione, a small town in the foothills of the Sierras. His father had become manager of a 45,000-acre cattle ranch. At 15, Brubeck began to play for dances in Ione and neighboring towns. His ambition, however, was to remain on the ranch. With the idea of becoming a veterinarian, he enrolled in a premedical course at the College of the Pacific in Stockton. After a year, however, he had switched to a music major and was playing in local night clubs where he set up his own seminars in improvisation.

Working in Stockton at the time was Cleo Brown, a vintage boogie-woogie pianist. She encouraged the gawky young man, but, like some critics since, she frowned at the thumping ferocity with which he accompanied himself with his sizable feet. "Dave," she said, leaning over one evening as they were rolling through a duet, "why don't you let more of that music come out through your hands instead of your feet?" In any case, there were more musical drives -- and questions -- in Brubeck than could be handled at the conservatory.

Brubeck almost didn't graduate. The dean, perplexed and annoyed by Brubeck's singularly nonacademic temperament, threatened to flunk him unless he returned to the path of musical righteousness. Brubeck, unintimidated, replied that if that was the way the dean felt, he should follow his conscience, a route Brubeck himself felt compelled to take. With reluctance, the dean relented, and Brubeck got his degree.

One faculty member, J. Russell Bodley (now head of the music department at the College of the Pacific), did become intrigued by the refractory young man's uncategorizable music. In Brubeck's senior year, Bodley firmly encouraged him to continue in music, and Brubeck finally abandoned the idea of spending his life ministering to cattle. Another vital source of strength was a sophomore at the college, Iola Marie Whitlock, an aspiring actress and writer. Brubeck married her in 1942, shortly after he had entered the Army.

When Brubeck later went into jazz full time as a leader, Iola functioned for many years as combination bookkeeper, paymaster, publicist and answerer of fan mail -- as well as cook, wife and rearer of children. "She was indispensable," Brubeck says in recurring tribute to Iola. "If I'd had the money and could have hired seven people to do everything she did, they collectively wouldn't have done nearly so good a job." More recently, Iola has increasingly worked as a lyricist for Brubeck's ballads and such ambitious works as The Real Ambassadors.

While in the Army and stationed outside Barstow in Southern California, Brubeck tried to continue his musical training. He decided to find out what he could learn from Arnold Schoenberg, the composer who had been most responsible for introducing the 12-tone row (and the consequent attack on tonality) into classical music. A lesson with Schoenberg cost $20, and Brubeck was making $21 a month. Nevertheless, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles, was interviewed by the contentious composer and, soon after, hitchhiked back for his first and last lesson with Schoenberg.

That lesson was short and stormy. Brubeck had brought along one of his compositions. Schoenberg asked him to explain the reason for every note. "They're there," Brubeck explained, "because they sound good."

"That's not enough," Schoenberg insisted. "There has to be a musical reason, backed by logical theory, for every note you write."

Never one to be politic, Brubeck asked Schoenberg what right he had to set up the rules for all music composition. In a rage, Schoenberg answered that he had the right because he knew more than anyone else about music. Brubeck left, but in retrospect, he regards the $20 as having been well spent. "Years later," he says, "I realized Schoenberg hadn't been entirely wrong. He probably did know more about music than anyone else, and the experience did instill in me the realization that I still had an enormous amount to learn."

In the Army, Dave was able to continue playing, first in California for nearly two years, and then in Europe. He had been sent overseas as an infantryman, but his superiors considered him more valuable as a leader of bands which played in combat areas for frontline troops. Discharged in 1946, Brubeck returned to California and studied for three years under the GI Bill with Darius Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland.

The French composer was much more suited temperamentally to Brubeck than Schoenberg had been. "Milhaud," Brubeck recalls, "was very strict when teaching counterpoint and other elements of theory; but once a pupil had absorbed correct procedures, Milhaud expected him to compose with as much individuality as he could muster. Milhaud abhorred anyone who used a mathematical formula or any other kind of rigid system." It was Milhaud, moreover, who reinforced Brubeck's basic preference for a jazz career. At one point, discouraged because no one would play his venturesome jazz pieces, Brubeck considered concentrating on classical composition. "Do not give up jazz," Milhaud advised him. "If you're going to say anything, it will be through the music that is part of your roots. You're an American, and jazz is the most important product of American musical culture."

Outside the classroom, Brubeck found acceptance on his own terms exceedingly difficult to attain. Most jazzmen in the San Francisco Bay area couldn't fit him into any familiar stylistic category and consequently refused to take him seriously. Gradually, however, Dave did begin to experiment with musicians who were as empirical and insatiably curious as he. One of them in 1947 was Paul Desmond, whom Brubeck had first met three years before when both were in the Army.

Desmond has described that initial meeting in a dialog which has gained wide currency in the international jazz press. He claims to have been so stunned by Brubeck's eldritch harmonies that he approached the pianist and proclaimed: "Man, like wigsville! You really grooved me with those nutty changes." In this fanciful recollection, Brubeck, who, Desmond feels, has an Indian cast of face, replied: "White man speak with forked tongue."

It is indicative of the remorseless diligence of Brubeck's critics that even that apocryphal quote has been turned into a tomahawk. It was quoted in a 1961 record review in the prestigious British journal The Gramophone. The critic continued: "The truth is that Brubeck does not play often enough with a forked tongue. He lacketh, you might say, the subtlety of the serpent. By contrast, his playing is unflinchingly explicit, hammered home with eight fingers and two thumbs, and it makes, I think, for monotony."

Whatever reservations one might have about Brubeck's music, the charge of monotony is strange in view of the wide range of textures and ideas with which Brubeck has experimented throughout his career. There was, for example, the Octet he formed in 1946. Composed in part of fellow students at Mills College, the unit explored the use in jazz of extended counterpoint, polytonality, polyrhythms and several other devices before such fusions were being attempted almost anywhere else among jazzmen. Those original 1946 recordings, incidentally, are still available as part of The Dave Brubeck Octet album.

Three years later, Brubeck organized a trio, and in 1951, Paul Desmond made it a quartet. There was some local encouragement, notably in San Francisco from KNBC disc jockey Jimmy Lyons (now in charge of the Monterey Jazz Festival, Playboy, October 1962). The road East, however, where jazz reputations are made, was long and rough. But gradually, the Quartet's early releases on Fantasy, a label Brubeck had helped from, attracted attention, particularly in the colleges. By 1953, Brubeck had almost by himself opened the college circuit which is now an important source of work to a growing number of jazz combos.

After a couple of trips through the East and Midwest, Brubeck began to acquire a volubly enthusiatic following among noncollegians as well. It is a source of pride to him that many of those first partisans were Negro. "We played a lot of Negro rooms," he remembers, "and the customers somehow seemed to expect -- and get -- more from our group than they did from many of the others. These days, although we supposedly no longer appeal to hard-core jazz listeners, I bet we could play the Apollo any time."

By 1954, Brubeck was recording for Columbia, had appeared on the cover of Time, and was clearly in the ascendant. Now his annual income averages more than $200,000; he has also had a hit single (Take Five) in this country and in England; and his public continues to increase. Musically, however, the pyramiding of fame and fortune in the past nine years has not in the least diminished Brubeck's restless preoccupation with finding new ways to express himself. In the early and middle 1950s, he and his sidemen emphasized improvised counterpoint with Desmond and dense, bristling harmonies. During the past couple of years, he has been focusing on formidably difficult rhythms seldom utilized by other jazzmen. In Time Out, Time Further Out and Countdown: Time in Outer Space, Brubeck and his colleagues have been improvising in 9/8, 5/4, 6/4, 7/4, 11/4 and various combinations of these and other meters.

There have been accusations that Brubeck's absorption in odd meters, like his foraging in polytonality, represents little more than problem-solving in public. Brubeck cannot understand the charge. "Look," he says with characteristic intensity, "jazz has been stuck in 4/4 much too long. If it's ever going to reflect its Afro-American origins again, it can't stay in so limiting a meter. Jazz has to be freed from all unnecessary restrictions if it's to continue to develop as the expression of a free individual."

Because he is convinced he has done so much to "free" jazz, Brubeck is puzzled that he and his Quartet have received so little credit for his direction-setting. "The use of so many different forms by the Octet in 1946," he says rather aggrievedly," was somewhat ahead of everybody else in jazz and was way ahead of the 'third stream' approach. I don't say we were always the very first, but we certainly were working in jazz adaptations of counterpoint before the Modern Jazz Quartet. When I started, my goal was to introduce polyrhythms and polytonality into jazz. At that time, most jazz musicians I talked to didn't even know what the terms meant.

"For another example," Brubeck continues, "we were playing 3/4 and 4/4 together years ago. Now nearly every group in the world is doing it, and they probably ascribe its origin to Miles Davis or Bill Evans. Then there's Paul. He kept lyrical playing alive in jazz for several years when everybody else was honking and screaming and going to nutsville. I suppose it's hard for musicians to think of the most publicly recognized group as also being the one that introduced the most innovations."

There have been, of course, prominent jazzmen who have resisted the consensus of their colleagues and have lauded Brubeck. Duke Ellington was an early enthusiast, and was telling friends in the East about the pianist before the Quartet made its first cross-country trip. Charlie Parker expressed admiration of Brubeck as "a perfectionist -- he knows what he wants to do, which is more than a lot of the other guys, the followers, do." Similarly, the embattled Charles Mingus, who is quite chary with praise, affirms that he likes Brubeck "because he has the only white group that isn't copying. He has a sound of his own."

Miles Davis, also disinclined to be liberal with his endorsement, has praised Brubeck's way of playing ballads. Davis, moreover, has recorded Brubeck's In Your Own Sweet Way as well as his affectionate tribute to Ellington, The Duke, and is about to include Brubeck's Strange Meadowlark in a forthcoming album. "Miles has done the most to introduce my tunes into other groups' libraries," says Brubeck. "Once he gives his seal, they follow."

Brubeck remembers with particular gratitude the encouragement he received from the usually laconic Coleman Hawkins during one of Dave's first appearances in New York. The critical fusillades were already heavy when Hawkins walked over one night, nodded magisterially, and said: "I dig what you're doing very much. No matter what anyone says, you keep on doing it."

As a matter of fact, throughout his career, the more Brubeck has been criticized, the more daring he has become musically. A proud as well as a vulnerable man, he is constantly proving himself; and it may be that the critics have unwittingly done him a service by intensifying his determination to follow his fierce muse -- wherever it leads him. Brubeck's level of consistency might even be raised if the critics who irritate him most were to show up more often at his concerts. Once, after reading an especially stinging review, Brubeck plunged into a scarifyingly creative set. Afterward, still steaming, he wrote a poem to extirpate the residual rage. "I still don't like the bastard," he says, referring to the critic in question, "but I suppose I should have thanked him for having caused me to write that poem. It was a pretty good one."

Brubeck has lost the poem, but he remembers that it compared the work of a dredger to that of a wholly improvising jazz musician. "We dredge," he explained the symbolism, "as far down inside ourselves as we can go. And then we bring it all up so that the whole world can see it -- without stopping to polish what we find or to throw out the inferior material. That takes guts."

Another time, the photographer Gjon Mili was thinking of making a film of Brubeck in action. He attended a recording session and was unmoved by what he first heard. "My first impression was right," Mili volunteered. "You're no good." Brubeck's reaction can be heard in Stompin' for Mili in the Brubeck Time album. It is one of his most turbulently stimulating performances.

"It came out well," Brubeck says, "because I got all my anger and frustration out in it."

When he is in a calmer state and not reacting to critics, Brubeck looks forward to the years ahead when he will have more time to write and will, therefore, see less of the critics. He currently has five offers to do film scores, including one for The Summer Music, a screenplay by Richard Condon. There is also a jazz opera in progress -- a transmutation of Gertrude Stein's Melanctha, on which Brubeck is working with his wife and Liz Blake, another writer.

Brubeck also wants to move his Quartet into what he terms "a balanced summation and extension of all we've done so far -- the improvised counterpoint, the polytonality and the work with rhythms. I think we can now fuse those directions and do more in all those areas simultaneously than we have ever done in any one of them before."

As for the direction of jazz as a whole, Brubeck is thoroughly sanguine about the decades to come. "More and more different cultures are coming into jazz," he says happily, "and each one brings in its own native devices and forms on which we can all draw. Jazz, I'm convinced, is entering its most creative period. There is going to be an extraordinary synthesis of the world's music, and jazz is bound to play a vital part because it is so free and so open to all kinds of influences."