Featured Book: The Jazz Ear by Ben Ratliff, cont'd

Copy at Case Memorial Library
"Next on [Andrew Hill's] list was 'Blue Rondo à la Turk,' from Dave Brubeck's fluke-hit 1939 album, Time Out. The song is famous for its meter shifts: it flicks between a fast 9/8 and an easy, midtempo 4/4 swing, though it doesn't try to make them flow into each other. 'I keep hearing the different rhythm-melodies,' Hill said as the song played. 'The rhythm-melody that the drummer plays, for example. But this also represents when people weren't as comfortable playing rhythms like that' — he meant the 9/8 — 'all the way through numbers, as they are now.' With pieces like this, Brubeck made jazz seem sensible for many who came to it cold; it's a playful piece of music and very schematic. He phrased almost right on the beat and kept swing roped off in the song's 4/4 section" (p. 51).
I would just add that the rhythm in the 9/8 sections is more eccentric than that description implies. Traditional 9/8 is a three-beat bar subdivided in triplets, a fairly conventional sound. Here the 9/8 sounds to me like it is mostly subdivided (4+5)/8 or maybe (2+2+2+3)/8.