When I think of Dave Brubeck, the first image that comes to mind is not that of a jazz institution laden with honours, the grand old man of modernism who led the most popular jazz group of the 1950s, or the patron saint of legions of buskers belting out ‘Take Five’.
Instead, I think of London’s Royal Festival Hall in 1992, where the pianist had just finished a rapturously received concert that almost didn’t happen. Two days before, he’d had to cancel a Glasgow concert when his heart began fibrillating, requiring hospital treatment and putting the London event in doubt, as well as cancelling our Radio 3 interview.
An unselfconscious American trailblazer
But Brubeck insisted on going ahead, with his doctor and wife sitting apprehensively in the front row. After the applause had finally stopped, I followed Brubeck’s rangy, white-haired figure through the backstage labyrinth of the Festival Hall to where his wife and team were waiting. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I made it.’
For me, that phrase captures the essential Brubeck spirit – committed to his art and to performance, determined to express the music he felt whatever the circumstances, an unselfconscious trailblazer in the American grain who did what he had to to get where he was going.
- We named Dave Brubeck one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time
But his path was never easy. Brubeck’s parents seemed a spectacular misalliance, his father the manager of one of the biggest cattle ranches in northern California, a rodeo champion and man’s man whom Brubeck adored. In total contrast, his mother was a piano teacher who’d studied with Myra Hess in London and hoped for a solo career.
Jazz gigs and cattle herding
Brubeck grew up surrounded by the classical repertoire she played with her pupils, though he utterly resisted her attempts to teach him. But he obviously had talent, playing by ear in his own way and picking up the jazz music he heard on the radio. By the time he was 14, he was good enough to be offered jobs at local dance halls, though that often meant coming home from a gig at four in the morning to get straight on a horse and help his father herd cattle.
To the young Brubeck, that seemed an ideal life, which was ruined by his mother’s insistence that he go to college. As Brubeck once summed up his view of academe to me, ‘I hated school with a vengeance.’ His father didn’t want him to go either, but a compromise was reached whereby Brubeck would study veterinary science, which could help on the ranch. But in the event Brubeck proved totally unsuited to the sciences, devoting all his attention to the sounds coming from the nearby music school, which is where the exasperated science faculty finally suggested he should go.
'He only wanted to play jazz'
However, Brubeck’s progress as a music student had problems of its own. Though he impressed his teachers with his talent, particularly for writing counterpoint, there was no disguising the fact that he still couldn’t read music, even in his last year as a graduating senior. Indeed, when the dean of the school found out, he told Brubeck that it was impossible for him to graduate.
Brubeck replied that he really didn’t care since he only wanted to play jazz, which he was already doing six nights a week. But his mentors on the music faculty came to his rescue, and it was agreed he could graduate if he agreed never to besmirch the good name of the college by teaching.
There was no chance this would happen, since despite accusations in later years that he was too ‘academic’, Dave Brubeck was always a complete original, self-taught even in the ways he applied academic training. He said his jazz playing during his college years was already ‘wild’, with the polytonality and polyrhythms that would be his trademark. In 1944, when he first played with his future partner Paul Desmond, the altoist thought he was ‘stark raving mad’, and more conventional jazzmen, following the new bebop orthodoxy, couldn’t cope with his free-wheeling way with rhythm and chords.
Studies under a French master
But during World War II, Brubeck’s musicality and professionalism saw him appointed leader of a touring army band, the Wolf Pack. Then, after the conflict, he returned to California for a pivotal period of study with the French master Darius Milhaud, whose other pupils included Burt Bacharach.
In Milhaud, Brubeck finally found a teacher after his own heart, who combined freedom in composition with strict study of counterpoint, who had a keen appreciation of jazz - and who didn’t care that his pupil couldn’t really read music. Milhaud simply said, ‘You must be a composer’, and with his inspiration, Brubeck formed an octet with other Milhaud students to give full rein to his imagination.
At the same time, Brubeck was attracting attention and selling records with a trio, and in 1951 he formed the quartet, with altoist Paul Desmond, that would truly mark his breakthrough on the national jazz scene. The group owed its success to the stamp of Brubeck’s originality and its unique pairing with Desmond’s distinctively personal sound.
Brubeck and Desmond: a perfect marriage of opposites
Whereas the altoist was the epitome of cool – elegant, lyrical, witty – the pianist was hot, unleashing passionately unpredictable solos that overturned structure and rhythm and culminated in thunderous block chords. But their shared speciality, and one of the hallmarks of the quartet, was their improvised counterpoint, spontaneously generated within the flow of the tune, which captivated listeners with its air of hip invention and charm.
In fact, without intending to, the style of the Dave Brubeck Quartet seemed to have captivated a generation. Part of its success was due to having cannily targeted college audiences – Brubeck’s wife Iola, acting as manager, booker and publicist, wrote letters to scores of schools, setting up a network of concerts which, across the country, became go-to events of the season.
And their popularity was repeated and extended in a series of live campus recordings. For the booming youth market, the Dave Brubeck Quartet became one of the defining sounds of the 1950s, a status confirmed in 1954 when Brubeck became the second jazz musician after Louis Armstrong to appear on the cover of Time.
'I want you to meet my son'
In fact, Brubeck’s first reaction to that honour was an embarrassed apology to Duke Ellington: ‘it should have been you’. But he did take pleasure in the Quartet’s popularity not just with white college kids, but with black audiences, giving the lie to critics who sneered that the Dave Brubeck Quartet didn’t swing. The legendary Harlem stride pianist Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith was a huge Brubeck fan and Brubeck proudly recalled the time on a European tour when an interviewer asked the Lion, ‘isn’t it true that no white man can play jazz?’ Whereupon Willie turned toward Brubeck and said, ‘I want you to meet my son.’
But for Brubeck, the essence of jazz remained what he called the ‘right to take big chances’, and in 1956, he took the Quartet in a prophetic new direction, realising his lifelong passion for polyrhythmic freedom with the addition of virtuoso drummer Joe Morello. With Morello, the rhythmic sky was the limit, and Brubeck began writing pieces that broke the standard four-to-the-bar mould of jazz.
1959: a seminal jazz classic
In 1959, the historic result was the iconic album Time Out which, despite the initial misgivings of Columbia Records, became an instant hit and went on to sell a million copies. Ironically, its most celebrated track was its only non-Brubeck composition: the ubiquitous ‘Take Five’ was written by Paul Desmond, with help from Brubeck.
So the Brubeck brand took another great leap, with the Quartet turning out four albums a year and touring virtually non-stop. Brubeck finally brought the punishing routine to a halt in 1967, both because he wanted time to think and compose and because, amid the turmoil of the 1960s, he wanted to keep an eye on his six kids.
Subsequently, he resumed touring and recording with a quartet featuring baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan (one of the greatest jazz saxophonists of all time), various groups with his four musician sons, and a last quartet with altoist Bobby Millitello. In addition, there were many symphonic projects, including four gala birthday concerts in London with the London Symphony Orchestra, and a series of oratorios, beginning with The Light in the Wilderness in 1968.
'You should be trying to get out there’
Brubeck displayed remarkable physical and artistic stamina right up to the end of his life in 2012, and the last of his studio recordings, a solo piano disc called Lullabies, got a first release, on Verve, as recently as 2020. It’s a gentle coda to an exemplary jazz life, lived in a spirit of improvisatory adventure and creative discovery from the beginning and summed up, for me, in Brubeck’s statement in a Radio 3 documentary made when he was 82:
‘I’ve always realised that, if I’m brave enough and daring enough… I can play something that’s more complicated than I can ever write, ever think about, ever practise… And this is what you should be trying for, instead of all this polished playing. You should be trying to get out there.’ And he always did.
