The year 1959 has been widely recognized as unusually significant for the development of jazz. To mark its fiftieth anniversary in 2009, the BBC produced a one-hour documentary with the provocative title 1959: The Year That Changed Jazz. The promotional materials characterized it as a “seismic” and “pivotal” year, and the program was organized around four major jazz albums, “each a high-water mark and a powerful reflection of the times.” These included Time Out, along with Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um, and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come.

Crist, Stephen A. Dave Brubeck’s Time Out (Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz) (p. 41). (Function). Kindle Edition.

And Coltrane’s Giant Steps was right around the corner, recorded in 1959 but released in February 1960.

All five albums expanded the boundaries of jazz in different ways. Miles took the modal approach he introduced on Milestones to a higher level on Kind of Blue. Coltrane introduced “sheets of sound” and third-chord movements that became known as Coltrane Changes. Mingus mingled church music and rough blues with avant-garde jazz and social activism. Coleman blew it all up by dumping the piano and guitars and emphasizing improvisation in what would become known as free jazz. In Time Out, Dave Brubeck combined his lifelong interest in contrasting rhythms by creating compositions set to unfamiliar time signatures that integrated polyrhythms and polytonality.

Only one of those breakthrough albums was an immediate commercial success in the United States. Time Out became the first jazz album to sell over a million copies (topping out at #2 on the Billboard 200 pop charts) and also featured the first jazz single to sell a million. Miles would win in the long run with Kind of Blue (now the best-selling jazz album of all time), but the album never appeared on the Billboard 200.

You may have noticed that the white guy gained greater acceptance than the black guys. Dave Brubeck was indeed saddled with an unwanted and unfair advantage in record sales because of his skin color, but the fault lies with fans and the media, not Brubeck. After Brubeck traded an octet for a quartet and took up residence in San Francisco’s Black Hawk nightclub back in 1951, Dave and co-founder Paul Desmond (Charlie Parker’s favorite saxophonist) began to expand their audience in 1953 thanks to a suggestion from Iola Brubeck (his wife, manager, and occasional lyricist) that they connect with the college crowd. The quartet launched a series of performances on college campuses across the U.S.A., releasing a string of live albums in cool jazz style that turned students into passionate Brubeck fans. “Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, college kids would no more have been without their LPs of Pianist Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Goes to College, Brubeck Time and Impressions of Eurasia than their paperbacks of Steppenwolf or The Catcher in the Rye.” (webarchive.org) During that period, the quartet’s repertoire largely consisted of reimagined versions of tunes from the Great American Songbook, bringing the “easy listening” crowd into the fold. All four albums the quartet released in 1954 (three live and one studio album) made the top ten in the Billboard 200.

That’s when things started to get a bit sticky.

Dave Brubeck was embarrassed. It was 1954, and he was pictured on the cover of Time magazine — only the second jazz musician ever to receive that particular mainstream media recognition [after Louis Armstrong]. The chagrin came, he said, because he felt that his friend Duke Ellington — who was also interviewed for the magazine’s feature on jazz in the U.S. — deserved it more. Many years later, Brubeck told PBS documentarian Hendrick Smith about it:

“Duke and I were on tour together across the country and this night, we were in Denver. … And at seven o’clock in the morning, there was a knock on my door, and I opened the door, and there’s Duke, and he said, ‘You’re on the cover of Time.’ And he handed me Time magazine. It was the worst and the best moment possible, all mixed up, because I didn’t want to have my story come first. I was so hoping that they would do Duke first, because I idolized him. He was so much more important than I was … he deserved to be first.” (npr.org)

Needless to say, there was plenty of blowback:

Ernie Farmer’s prediction of “potential thorns” for Brubeck that accompanied his congratulations for the cover story in Time magazine turned out to be prescient. Indeed, about a half-year later Brubeck revealed his angst to a journalist who had drafted an article about him for DownBeat magazine: “I feel that I am particularly vulnerable to attack at this time and almost anything I might say or be quoted as saying would most likely be misconstrued.” He was weighing the potential costs of pushing back against critics who were not in his corner. Brubeck had always been a controversial figure. But the rhetoric about him intensified after his success in 1954. This is not the place for a comprehensive analysis of the vagaries and complexities of Brubeck’s reception in the 1950s. But several selected examples will suffice to illustrate what was at stake. Ralph J. Gleason’s column in an April 1955 issue of Down Beat may well have been the catalyst for Brubeck’s misgivings. Gleason began with the following provocative statement: “Quite possibly the most unfortunate thing that ever happened to Dave Brubeck was to get his picture on the cover of Time magazine and to have such a laudatory story inside.” On the one hand, “it made him a national figure.” But at the same time, “it crystallized the resentment of thousands of jazz musicians and fans.” Crist, (pp. 32-33).  Kindle Edition.

I’ll never understand why the critics and several of his colleagues in the world of jazz blamed Brubeck for the cover and not the white folk who ran Time magazine.

During the period from 1955-1958, the quartet recorded several albums, both live and in the studio, mixing standards with original compositions. Eventually, Brubeck’s nagging desire to explore offbeat time signatures led him to hire Joe Morello, a drummer who was exceptionally comfortable with alternative rhythms. The fire was further fueled when the quartet embarked on a State Department-sponsored tour of Eurasian countries in 1958, during which Brubeck encountered musical traditions that embraced “unusual” rhythmic patterns.

Dave hired a new bassist for the tour, the African-American musician Eugene Wright, who would become the final piece in the puzzle that resulted in Time Out. The Eurasians couldn’t care less about Wright’s skin color, but when the quartet returned home, all hell broke loose.

In January 1960, white jazz pianist Dave Brubeck made headlines after twenty-two colleges and universities across the American South refused to allow his interracial quartet to perform. Initially, eleven of the schools backed out of their contracts with Brubeck upon learning that he and two other white musicians, saxophonist Paul Desmond and drummer Joe Morello, would be performing with African American bassist Eugene Wright. After Brubeck informed the remaining fourteen schools of Wright’s presence in his quartet, eleven more insisted Brubeck replace Wright with a white bassist, leaving only three willing to allow the integrated combo to perform. Brubeck refused to replace Wright, forgoing the $40,000 in revenue (worth nearly $400,000 today) he would have received had he instead performed with a white bassist. Representatives of the various schools insisted, one after the other, that their cancellations of Brubeck’s contracts were not based in prejudice, but on principle and policy. For the schools and their administrators, Brubeck broke his contract; for Brubeck, contracts requiring segregation had no legal or moral basis. (Daedalus)

Well, the Confederacy’s loss was everyone else’s gain, so fuck’ em.

Prior to that disgusting nonsense, Brubeck had to overcome the opposition of Columbia’s marketing staff to releasing Time Out.

The album’s cardinal sins included the abstract art on its cover, which the marketing moguls feared would be off putting to the general public. Equally egregious was the fact that it ended up including seven originals, and no standards that everybody would already know and love. Moreover, those originals used mostly odd time signatures and rhythms that might not be suitable for dancing. All of this led to predictions of commercial failure. Fortunately, Brubeck had at least one heavy hitter on his side. The president of Columbia Records, Goddard Lieberson, was himself a composer and a stalwart supporter of the Time Out project. In an interview on the fiftieth anniversary of the album’s release, Brubeck recalled, “Goddard told me I was on the right track. I remember him saying, ‘I am so tired of “Stardust” and “Body and Soul,” and this is something fresh.’”

Crist, (pp. 52-53). (Function). Kindle Edition.

On the surface, the concerns seemed valid. As Stephen Crist demonstrated in the “Composition and Improvisation” chapter, the music was certainly ahead of its time and quite complex. Here is Crist’s overview of the compositional aspects of “Blue Rondo à la Turk.”

In addition to its formal design and rhythmic profile, the architectural features of “Blue Rondo à la Turk” include its motivic content, its palette of chord types, its tonal blueprint, and the relations between these factors. The piece is noteworthy in its economy of motivic material. Consider, first of all, segment one. The initial gesture is a two-note descending third motive (a′ and f′) that is articulated three times in each of the first three measures. The other component is a three-note scalar figure—first ascending and encircling f′ (m. 1), then descending and encircling a′ (m. 2). M. 3 follows the pattern of m. 1, but the ascending figure is subsequently treated as the first leg of a sequence that continues through m. 4. Meanwhile, the left-hand part consists of the pedal tone f, over which a chromatic line oscillates between e′ and c′. On Time Out, Brubeck plays this four-bar passage first as a piano solo and then repeats it (joined by the bass and seasoned with a few light cymbal strokes) to form segment one. Crist, (p. 73). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Scholars and trained musicians would understand what Crist was going on about, but the record-buying public would dismiss the analysis as pure gibberish. It’s more than likely that the majority of people who bought Time Out knew nothing about time signatures, ostinatos, polyrhythms, rondos, and polytonality, and couldn’t have cared less about the details. What the marketers failed to take into account was the ongoing popularity of instrumental music and film soundtracks with strong melodies during that time period. The seven compositions on Time Out are quite cinematic and full of memorable melodies. Most importantly, Brubeck was insistent that any jazz piece has to swing, and the combination of syncopation and a great rhythm section resulted in plenty of swinging moments.

A compromise was reached that required the quartet to release an album of standards in sync with the release of Time Out. Ironically, the standards album (Gone With the Wind) celebrated the music of the South, and both critics and fans pretty much ignored it, while Time Out took off like a rocket. Its success had nothing to do with white privilege and everything to do with Dave Brubeck’s compositional skills and the quartet’s top-tier musicianship.

A few weeks after Dave Brubeck’s passing in 2012, the eminent jazz pianist Herbie Hancock—twenty years Brubeck’s junior—penned a short but eloquent tribute for Time magazine. After characterizing him as “a legend” and “a master who was instrumental in the shaping of modern jazz,” Hancock shone the spotlight on Brubeck’s compositional abilities: “Let’s not forget that he was also an amazing composer. He constructed his pieces not just as tunes but as real compositions: architectural arrangements that were reminiscent of classical works.” In this connection, Hancock mentioned “Blue Rondo à la Turk” in particular.

Crist, Stephen A. (pp. 69-70). Kindle Edition.

Unlike most rock musicians and many jazz musicians, Brubeck received formal music training from his mother and in college, but he did share one trait with the uninitiated.

Dave excelled in music school. He mastered reed and brass instruments, playing perfect scales, imitating the musical phrases he heard in class and putting off keyboard instruction until his senior year, knowing it would reveal his worst secret: He couldn’t read a note of music. “The piano teacher in my senior year figured it out in about five minutes.” Brubeck says, “And that piano teacher went right downstairs to the Dean and said, ‘That kid can’t read anything.’ And the Dean called me in and he said, ‘We can’t let you graduate with your class.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ And he said, ‘Well doesn’t that disturb you?’ And I said, ‘No, all I want to do is play jazz and I can do that.'”

But in terms of sheer talent, Brubeck was at the top of his class, excelling in composition, harmony and musical improvisation. So when his music teachers got wind that the Dean was going to block Brubeck’s graduation, they came to his defense. “The ear training teacher went to [the Dean] and said, ‘You’re making a mistake. Brubeck’s one of my best students,’ Dave recalls. “And the Dean called me back in and he said, ‘You know, I’ve heard some rather interesting reports on you. If you promise never to teach and embarrass the school, I’ll let you graduate with the class.’ And I said, ‘I promise, I’ll never teach.'” (Hedrick Smith, pbs.org)

Dave may have never stood in the front of the classroom, but a whole lot of musicians like Herbie Hancock learned a lot from him.

*****

All songs composed by Dave Brubeck, except where noted.

“Blue Rondo à la Turk”: Huh. It says “rondo,” but guess what? It’s not a rondo! A traditional rondo follows a repeating pattern like ABACA or ABACADA, and Brubeck’s composition contains only two patterns: one set to 9/8 time and the other to 4/4. The title is a two-part pun, combining Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca” from his Piano Sonata No. 11 and something Dave stumbled upon during his visit to Turkey. “Brubeck first heard what would become the composition’s unconventional rhythm being performed by street musicians in Turkey. Upon asking the musicians where they got the rhythm, one replied: ‘This rhythm is to us what the blues is to you.'” That explains the “blue.” Brubeck heard more than an unconventional rhythm, as one of the major features of Turkish aksak rhythms is that they are played at unusually fast tempos. The aksak employed in the song has a rhythmic pattern of 2+2+2+3 played at 9/8 time at a blazing speed of 226 bpm.

Brubeck wastes no time getting down to business, surprising his listening audience with a stunning display of double-handed dexterity at high speed. The main motif features a pattern of five F chord variations (Fmaj7, F7, F6, F+, F), hidden by the speed of the arpeggios, making the piece fairly challenging for the average pianist. Some time during high school, my mother challenged me to stretch my wings and learn the song, so she handed me the sheet music and put Dave on the turntable. I did “okay” on the right hand but completely blew it on the left because the placement and off-key dissonance of some of the notes threw me for a loop. I finally nailed it during the pandemic, but I still fuck it up from time to time due to a bout of pianist brain farts. Let’s just say that Brubeck’s compositional skills were far beyond the norm and move on.

The arrangement builds beautifully, with Brubeck soloing on the first pass, Eugene Wright providing rhythmic stability on the bass and Joe Morello adding soft bell hits on the second pass, and Paul Desmond taking over the lead on the third pass, extending the melody with a subtle and warm turn on the alto sax. From there, the quartet begins to move in new directions, adding greater dissonance and increased tension to the mix. The 9/8 segment feels like music to accompany the hustle and bustle of the big city as you rush to get ready to go to work, navigate the roads or your public transit options, and suffer through a high-pressure day in the office.

The shift to 4/4 time in a 12-bar blues form signals a change to smooth, nightclub jazz . . . with a twist. During the first two passes, Brubeck ends each line with the intense opening motif, reflecting the truth that it takes a while to relax after dealing with all the bullshit modern life has to offer. Brubeck finally hangs back and hands things over to Desmond, who delivers a laid-back, bluesy sax solo backed by Wright and Morello’s gentle work on the cymbals. At this point, I head for my favorite restaurant and watering spot to order a vodka martini, and look forward to having a cigarette without being hassled (it’s 1959, after all). As soon as I put the cigarette to my lips, the waiter arrives to give the lady a light. I spend the next few minutes drinking, smoking, and immersing myself in Paul Desmond’s oh-so gorgeous tone. Brubeck returns to join in the fun, getting into the groove pretty quickly with help from Eugene Wright’s spot-on bass runs. Alas, the dream of a nightclub paradise comes to a close with a restatement of one of the more dissonant themes in the 9/8 segment, but I get the sense that what the quartet is really conveying is, “Yeah, life can suck, but you’ll always have music to raise your spirits.”

A daring opening thrust indeed, and despite the worrywarts in marketing, the listening public ate it up.

“Strange Meadow Lark”:

“Perhaps the most important observation about “Strange Meadow Lark” in the present context is that it is not a time experiment. On an album devoted to breaking the hegemony of 4/4 meter in jazz, it stands out in bold relief as the only cut in straightforward common time.” (Crist (p. 91). Kindle Edition.)

Well now, hold on there, partner. Brubeck does mess around with time by employing rubato, a technique where the performer speeds up the music or slows it down, leading to longer or shorter bars. It may not be as tricky as an odd time signature, but the mini-tempo shifts do make a piece more interesting.

The song is quite beautiful, and Brubeck’s exploration of the melodic possibilities of the Eb major/Cminor complementary keys flows like water from a calm, steady stream. Dave varies his touch instinctively, as if he’s allowing the piano to guide him rather than vice versa, mixing crescendos and decrescendos with aplomb. The piano-only intro lasts a bit more than two minutes, giving way to a well-executed laid-back solo from Desmond and due restraint from the rhythm section. When Brubeck makes his return to the fore, he takes a more playful, slightly blues-tinged touch before returning to the original exploratory mood. The song’s placement between the two centerpieces was a stroke of genius, allowing the listener to relax after and before the more intense music.

p.s. I have a special attachment to this song that I’ll explain in the next segment.

“Take Five” (Paul Desmond):

“Take Five” is the best-known cut on Time Out and the most famous composition associated with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Even listeners with little affinity for jazz have heard it—whether they are aware of it or not—on the playlists for background music in restaurants and other public places, or elsewhere in popular culture. One writer, the New Jersey poet Joel Lewis, referred to it as “a cultural and musical landmark” and “a part of musical Americana.” Surprisingly, it was the first record that Billy Joel purchased as an adolescent, and the famous pop musician later said that “Take Five” was as important to him as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper was to rock and roll aficionados in the 1960s. (Crist, (pp. 106-107). Kindle Edition.)

I don’t think that it’s particularly surprising that a budding pianist would develop an attachment to “Take Five,” but whatever. Billy obviously bought the single version that came out in 1961 and became the first jazz single to sell a million. By the way, the single is not a cut-and-paste job, but a shortened version capturing the highlights of the album track the quartet recorded specifically for the singles market.

If you’re looking for an article that explains the song’s origins, beware! Our friend Crist was thoughtful enough to expose the fake news.

Desmond’s claim that the melody “was assembled rapidly in the studio, and consists of fragments which occurred to me here and there” is similar to the canonical description of the tune’s origin, which Brubeck repeated for the rest of his career, and which will occupy us presently. But Desmond’s tale about receiving inspiration from “a slot machine in Reno which produced an ominous but regular series of 5 clicks as the coins vanished” is apocryphal. His biographer noted that Desmond “amused himself by concocting stories about the piece’s origins,” and he quoted Brubeck’s reaction to this particular yarn as, “Come on, Paul, no.”

The true story of the composition of “Take Five” is more workaday. The version Dave and Iola Brubeck told their son Darius in an interview during summer 2001 includes the essential elements. In response to Darius’s query about the contributions of each member of the Quartet to the making of Time Out, Dave took credit for the idea of doing “an album using different time signatures.” Dave recalled hearing Morello play a rhythmic pattern in 5/4 when he was warming up backstage, over which Desmond would improvise. Dave asked Desmond to compose a tune along those lines, saying, “Just write down something [in which] Joe has a five-four drum solo and bring it to rehearsal when we rehearse [for] the Time Out album.” According to Dave, Desmond “came with two melodic ideas, but he didn’t have a tune.” So Dave helped to shape those inchoate ideas into an intelligible tune that could be included on the album. Though “Take Five” was essentially written by Desmond, clearly Morello and Brubeck both had a hand in its genesis as well. Crist, (pp. 112-113). (Function). Kindle Edition.

The bulk of the song follows a simple two-chord vamp of Ebm and Bbm7, while the 5/4 rhythm is grouped into a 1-2-3/1-2 beat with a brief rest between the two patterns.  The bridge shifts to the key of Gb major, where Desmond’s soaring solo is set to a pattern of Cbmaj7-Bbm7-Abm7-Gbmaj7. The contrast between the bluesy vamp and the major key bridge gives the song an amazing, joyous lift that brightens my soul every time I hear it. Some people grumble about the length of Joe Morello’s drum extravaganza (four times as long as Desmond’s contribution), but I find his counter-rhythms and his feel for the groove positively amazing.

We know that the marketers were worried about the danceability factor, but my ass starts to shake as soon as Brubeck starts his vamp, and I do my best to imitate a ballet dancer during the bridge. Before you start thinking that this chick is fucking weird, I had good reason to pretend I was a prima ballerina. When I lived in Seattle, I was a regular patron of  Pacific Northwest Ballet and had the great fortune to see the performance of Susan Stroman’s “Take Five . . . More or Less,” a ballet featuring three tracks from Time Out: “Take Five,” “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” and “Strange Meadow Lark.” I’ve included a brief YouTube sample of the performance below the full version (if the video is subject to a country ban, click here). 

So hell yes, you can dance to weird time signatures! Get down and get weird!

“Three to Get Ready”: Brubeck’s opening thrust (if you could call it that) sounds like music designed for the high tea room at a posh and rather stiff hotel. Fret not, my friends, for the phrase is a deke and there’s plenty of jazz in your very near future. The composition mixes three-four waltz time with standard 4/4, further enhanced by truncated or extended bars and Joe Morello’s counter-rhythmic talents. The high tea phrase appears several times throughout the arrangement, and after all the jazz and shots of blues from the sax and piano, the phrase has me laughing because it’s so deliberately corny. Brubeck’s music is often playful, and I’m sure everyone in the quartet had a good time with this piece.

“Kathy’s Waltz”: I love a good researcher, and Stephen Crist was fortunate enough to land an interview with the subject of this song a little more than a year after her dad passed away right before his ninety-second birthday.

Catherine told me that when she was little her mother, Iola, gave her a blue tutu as a Christmas or birthday gift. “When my father would come home from the road, he’d be so tired . . . , but to relax he would . . . play with the boys. . . . At the time I think Mike was playing drums, Darius played trumpet, and my dad would be on the keyboard, and Chris, who was just a year and a half older than me, would sit at the piano . . . and try to follow the bass line. . . . [Dad] would say, “Hey, let’s play,” . . . and we’d all get together, and then I took that as my cue. So I go booking down the hall to put my tutu on. And when I went back in the room, I was trying to dance, and there were all these crazy time rhythms going on. . . . I think I was crashing into coffee tables . . . , trying to twirl around, and everybody was laughing, as usual. But I got a song out of it, and it was “Kathy’s Waltz.” Catherine wasn’t sure of the year her waltz was penned. But if it was early in 1959, as seems most likely, she would have been five years old. A photo taken at the Brubeck’s’ home by the renowned photographer Bob Willoughby (1927–2009) during the last week of January 1959 shows the scene of the family music making and dancing. (Crist, pp. 88-89. Kindle Edition.)

Yes, Columbia screwed up Cathy’s name, but made the correction in future releases. When the song opens, you might think that they screwed up the title as well, because the quartet is playing in 4/4 time. As it turns out, the beat switches to waltz time shortly after the minute mark. Things get more interesting around the three-minute mark when Brubeck switches to 4/4 time while the band continues in triple time. The polyrhythms meld fairly well, largely due to Joe Morello’s orientation: “Polyrhythms? No sweat!” Keyboard instruments like the piano allow a single musician to play polyrhythms, and though I found it a bit difficult at first, I learned to think of them as forms of syncopation to get my left hand to behave.

Cathy told Crist that the downward shape of the melody was connected to her attempts to dance to those crazy rhythms. “When I listen to the melody, I do think of somebody sort of twirling and falling, because the line of it is like [sings] ‘da-da-DUM, da-da-DUM.’ . . . I don’t know if he meant it that way, but that’s how I think of it. It’s just twirl and plop, and twirl and plop.” It’s also likely that the un-waltzy opening passage and the polyrhythms were inspired by her performances in those family get-togethers. In any case, “Kathy’s Waltz” was a beautiful gift from father to daughter (and Brubeck would go on to write songs for all six children).

“Everybody’s Jumpin'”: This piece follows the traditional head-solo-head format where the theme is stated in the beginning, followed by a few rounds of soloist improvisation, ending with a restatement of the main motif (the head). The musical structure is essentially a 12-bar arrangement with varying time signatures (4/4, 3/2,/3/4). While the musicianship is excellent, the composition doesn’t exactly move my needle as much as the other songs on the album—except for Joe Morello’s drum solo, where he attempts to mimic the melody on his drums. Clever lad!

“Pick Up Sticks”: This modal composition in 6/4 time is more to my liking, though I question the use of an ostinato. What’s an ostinato? Well, it’s a riff that is played over and over again. If a riff is only played a few times, it’s not really an ostinato. The purpose of the ostinato is to serve as a rhythmic or melodic anchor and reference point for the other musicians to follow.

As Crist reveals in his analysis of “Pick Up Sticks,” Eugene Wright was tagged to play the ostinato . . . and he played the six-note riff ninety-nine times in a row. Desmond felt that the ostinato interfered with his feel for the song, an understandable reaction when one of your colleagues is undergoing the equivalent of water torture. If you ignore the ostinato, you’ll find that the song does have a nice groove thanks to Morello and the influence of African drumming, identified as a variation of one of Morello’s drum compositions entitled “Watusi Drums.” Brubeck strengthens those rhythms with a typically solid block chord performance. In the end, the song is a nice way to end an exceptional album, and I’m happy to report that Eugene survived the trauma.

*****

Man, I really needed to write this review to take my mind off Voldemort’s visit to the Emerald Isle. Dave Brubeck was the polar opposite of that asshole, a decent man, loving husband, and caring father who stood up for the oppressed instead of viewing them as undesirables. I’m happy to report that the Dublin protests attracted a large crowd, but like most of the protestors, I’m disgusted that the government let the prick into the country and taxpayers have to foot the bill for his security. The positive vibes of Time Out proved to be an effective antidote to the stench.

I’m not sure when or what I will review next, but before I disappear into the ether, I want to thank all of you who visited the site this year, because I have some surprising news. A few months ago, I wrote about how my stats were plummeting, and guess what happened? I received so many visitors in the last few months that I broke the record for yearly hits and visitors in the middle of August! Thank you, thank you, thank you!