TT 436: "In Your Own Sweet Way"
a bit of detective work concerning Dave Brubeck's famous ballad
In the 1950s, Miles Davis was an important curator of the repertoire. If Miles played a tune, everyone else also played that tune.
Miles recorded Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way” twice in 1956, once with Sonny Rollins and Tommy Flanagan, once with John Coltrane and Red Garland.
Bill Evans, Wes Montgomery, and others followed up, recording “In Your Own Sweet Way” in the 1960s. The song entered the repertoire for good with the version found in the Fifth Edition of The Real Book, that “bible” of illegal and frequently inaccurate lead sheets generated at the Berklee School of Music in the early 1970s.
The melody is attractive enough, but the harmonic progression is even more satisfying, mostly II/Vs strung together through diverse key centers.
Everyone uses this chart, although the E-flat dorian indicated at the bottom for a vamp interlude is usually more like A-flat seven, in the manner of the two versions from Miles Davis. (It is the same scale with a different bass note.)
The last time I saw Bobby Hutcherson live he played this chart of “In Your Own Sweet Way” duo with Kenny Barron: it was simply fantastic. John Abercrombie’s 1977 Straight Flight with George Mraz and Peter Donald leads off with a burning version of the Real Book edition.
(Straight Flight offers a pure concentration of the idiom. The musicians all went to Berklee during the era that the Real Book was created, the charts used on the record seem to be from the Real Book, and they even play the most familiar tunes from the Real Book: “In Your Own Sweet Way,” “My Foolish Heart,” “Bessie’s Blues,” “Beautiful Love,” “There Is No Greater Love,” and “Nardis.” Bonus points to Abercrombie and company for including both “In Your Own Sweet Way” and “Nardis,” two pieces for which the Real Book charts are absolutely definitive. It might sound like I am being derisive, but I’m not. Straight Flight is a great LP, perhaps the most creative and virtuosic recorded example of musicians working “straight out of the Real Book.")
Structurally, the Miles Davis or Real Book version of “In Your Own Sweet Way” is not what the composer originally intended.
The first official recording featured the composer on solo piano. Brubeck Plays Brubeck is a good record, one of Brubeck’s best, made at his home studio in 1956. The exposed yet casual setting offers a window into Brubeck at his purest and most experimental.
Keith Jarrett told me he listened to this record a lot as a kid because 1) it was a rare example of modern jazz solo piano, and 2) that the music was transcribed in a folio that anyone could read.
The introduction suggests that Brubeck looked over these transcriptions by Frank Metis before signing off. Probably Metis would also have had some sort of lead sheets from Brubeck to start with.
Metis did a better job with the pitches than the rhythm. Still, the pitches are right. In terms of the harmony and melody, the folio has what Brubeck plays.
The first chorus of “In Your Own Sweet Way”:
The last A into the big finish:
The piece is rarely sung, but an official (and unfamiliar) lead sheet with lyrics by Iola Brubeck can be found online. Presumably this sheet originated with Brubeck himself, although I don’t know how to verify that offhand.
This lead sheet matches the piano solo in many details, but there are also differences, especially in the final chord (major here, minor on the record).
There are plenty of surprises here for those who only know “In Your Own Sweet Way” from the Real Book. To start with, the melody begins quite differently, in order to fit the lyric, “In your own sweet way.”
But that’s not the main issue. Wikipedia says that the song is in B-flat, and surely most musicians would agree. But…Brubeck himself clearly indicates that the song is not in B-flat, but in E-flat!
The key signature of both transcription and lyric sheet is three flats. The composer 1) passes through E-flat at the end of the first two A sections 2) modulates to C minor at the end of the bridge, and 3) resolves the whole form into two bars of E-flat.
The piano version concludes with E-flat minor, a surprising reversal of fate that supports the unexpectedly dark lyric. Indeed, all those peripatetic II/V’s might refer to the inability of the subject to settle down. “I’m nothing but a passing phase.” Suddenly, the song makes more sense!
In the Miles Davis edit, the pedal point interlude is unconnected to the home key of “B-flat.” That hip out-of-key vamp (originally created by Tommy Flanagan for Miles) is one of the reasons the song is a jam session classic. One can see how that A-flat seven vamp relates to Brubeck’s concluding E-flat minor. However, that vamp offers a totally a different structural effect than the original, where Brubeck drives a sophisticated AABA form all the way to a home key both surprising and inevitable.
If Brubeck gave Miles a chart on “In Your Own Sweet Way” (and I don’t know how Miles would have learned it otherwise) it couldn’t have been the clean lyric chart above, unless Miles just really decided to ignore the paper. Maybe Brubeck showed Miles an early draft that was a bit different than the final. Who knows.
Update: Several people sent me a clip of Brubeck talking about Miles and “In Your Own Sweet Way” with Marian McPartland on Piano Jazz, in the last minute of this clip:
He jokes that there “a lot of different ways to do this tune,” and says he handed a chart to Miles. But there’s nothing about keys or interludes or anything I’m looking at in this post. The point of discussion is the melody in bar 8. Miles played E, Brubeck wrote F. But later Miles told Brubeck he thought he was reading the chart right. When demonstrating, Bru plays dominant under E — not lydian like Miles and everyone else — another subtle tell that he thinks the song is in E-flat!
McPartland seems a bit uncomfortable when playing the tune with Brubeck. She plays a C bass note on bar 7 (conflicting with the F altered Brubeck always plays there) and, during her solo, repeats a random-sounding G natural on the E-flat minor coda, as if she thought the form was 32 bars instead of 34 bars. I suspect she had just learned Brubeck’s changes in the last moments before taping. (Brubeck is playing the harmony just like he did in 1956.)
At any rate, it is uncommon for there to be this kind of discrepancy in such a familiar piece. As is well known, the Miles Davis edits of Thelonious Monk’s “Well, You Needn’t” and Benny Carter’s “When the Lights Are Low” also have major problems, but this “In Your Own Sweet Way” conundrum is in a whole other category of mysterious.
While the Miles edits of “Well, You Needn’t” and “When the Lights Are Low” have long been discussed and dismissed by the cognoscenti, the Miles edit of “In Your Own Sweet Way” is still the default of everyone, everywhere.
I haven’t auditioned every Brubeck recording of “In Your Own Sweet Way,” but the Basin Street quartet with Desmond, also from 1956 but not issued until much later, follows the solo piano template in most of the details.
Of notable interest is an extremely detailed lead sheet prepared by Martin A. Totusek, a jazz pianist and Brubeck fan who passed away in 2017. It appears that Totusek listened to every Brubeck record and tried to reduce everything to one simple chart.
(I found this paper on Scribd. Casual research suggests that Totusek interviewed Brubeck for Cadence in 1994; a photo of Brubeck and Totusek together exists in the Brubeck archive.)
Totusek’s work on “In Your Own Sweet Way” is in direct opposition to Miles Davis and the Real Book, but it’s also quite different than the lyric lead sheet.
All three have their uses.
Brubeck was one of those major practitioners who got less interesting over time. But back in, say, 1954, Brubeck was in the running alongside Lennie Tristano. (Both Tristano and early Brubeck were certainly an influence on both Cecil Taylor and Bill Evans.)
It is easy to understand why Miles Davis and Gil Evans appreciated Brubeck as a voice in the choir. One of the most astonishing Brubeck pieces is “The Duke.” The work is dedicated to Duke Ellington, but the casually luminous and unpredictable polytonal harmonic language is influenced by Brubeck’s composition teacher, Darius Milhaud — especially in the bridge, which is not easy to reduce to chord symbols.
“The Duke” is also on Brubeck Plays Brubeck and transcribed for the folio.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Gil Evans wasn’t looking at these very pages when orchestrating the piece for Miles Ahead a year later.
Bonus track: “Gavea” is from Milhaud’s important set of 1920 piano pieces Saudades do Brazil. A connection to Brubeck’s “The Duke” seems palpable. (Jazz trivia: The late Frank Kimbrough told me that the complete Saudades do Brazil was some of his favorite music.)
Nothing short of brilliant.
Great stuff Ethan!