orn in 1920 into a musical family his two older brothers were
professional musicians at the age of four he began piano lessons from his
mother, a classical pianist. When his family moved to a 45,000 acre cattle ranch
in the foothills of the Sierras, his life changed dramatically. He stopped music
lessons and began to work with his father as a cowboy. On weekends he played the
piano with a local dance band. He entered the College of the Pacific, Stockton,
California, as a pre-med student with the idea of becoming a veterinarian and
returning to ranch life. Working his way through school as a pianist in local
clubs, he became increasingly involved in jazz, and decided to switch his major
to music. After graduating with a bachelor of music degree in 1942, he married
Iola Whitlock, who was a fellow student at Pacific, and enlisted in the Army.
While serving in Europe under General Patton, he led an integrated GI jazz band.
After his discharge in 1946, he began his studies at Mills College with the
French composer Darius Milhaud, who encouraged him to introduce jazz elements
into his classical compositions. This experimentation of mixed genres led to the
formation of the Dave Brubeck Octet that included Paul Desmond, Cal Tjader and
Bill Smith. In 1949 Brubeck formed an award-winning trio with Cal Tjader and Ron
Crotty, and in 1951 established the Dave Brubeck Quartet with alto saxophonist
Paul Desmond. This historic collaboration lasted seventeen years, and even after
the dissolution of the "classic" Quartet, Brubeck and Desmond frequently
performed together.
The Quartet's recordings and concert appearances on college campuses in
the 1950s introduced their individual style to thousands of students, many of
whom became lifelong fans. Their audiences were not limited to campuses,
however. The Dave Brubeck Quartet with Paul Desmond played in jazz clubs in
major cities and toured in package shows with such jazz artists as Duke
Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz and Gerry
Mulligan. They repeatedly won top honours in trade magazine critics' and
readers' polls, including the Black newspaper
The Pittsburgh Courier. In
1954,
Time Magazine ran a cover story about Brubeck's remarkable
ascendancy in the jazz world. Also in 1954, the Dave Brubeck Quartet
"breakthrough" album,
Jazz at Oberlin, made the charts in Billboard
Magazine. In 2005 his CD
London Flat, London Sharp was also
charted by Billboard, making Dave Brubeck the artist who has appeared on
Billboard charts over the longest period of time.
In 1958 the Quartet performed in Europe for the first time and toured
Poland and the Middle East for the U.S. State Department. This led to the
introduction of music from other cultures into the Quartet's repertoire. Then,
in 1959 the Dave Brubeck Quartet recorded an experiment in time signatures,
Time Out. To everyone's surprise, the album sold over a million copies,
and Dave Brubeck's
Blue Rondo a la Turk, based on a Turkish folk rhythm,
and Paul Desmond's
Take Five began to appear on jukeboxes throughout the
world.
In 1959 Brubeck first performed and then recorded his brother Howard's
Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra with the New York Philharmonic
under Leonard Bernstein. In 1960 he composed
Points on Jazz for the
American Ballet Theatre, and in later decades composed for and performed with
the Murray Louis Dance Co. His musical theater piece
The Real Ambassadors
starring Louis Armstrong and Carmen McRae was recorded in 1960 and performed
to great acclaim at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival.
Early in his career Brubeck wrote primarily for the Quartet, and some of
those pieces, such as
In Your Own Sweet Way and
The Duke became
part of standard jazz repertoire. His first orchestral composition,
Elementals, written for an improvising jazz combo and symphony orchestra,
was first performed and recorded in 1962.
The "classic" Dave Brubeck Quartet with Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright (who
joined in 1958) and Joe Morello (1956) was dissolved in December 1967; and
The Light in the Wilderness, the first of many works combining classical
and improvised elements, was first performed by the Cincinnati Symphony
Orchestra in February 1968 with conductor Erich Kunzel. Brubeck's second major
work
The Gates of Justice (Naxos 8.559414), a cantata based on the words
of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Old Testament, was also first performed by
Kunzel in Cincinnati in 1969.
The baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan joined a newly formed Dave
Brubeck Trio (with Jack Six, bass and Alan Dawson, drums) in 1968 and they
recorded and toured the world together for seven years. In the mid-1970s Brubeck
performed with three of his musical sons, Darius, Chris and Dan. He later led a
quartet that featured former Octet member clarinettist Bill Smith with son Chris
on electric bass and Randy Jones, drums. In 1988 this group, along with former
bassist, Eugene Wright, had the honour of accompanying President Reagan to
Moscow to perform at the Reagan-Gorbachev Summit. Since the Quartet's first
appearance at a State Dinner for King Hussein of Jordan during the Johnson
administration, Brubeck has performed at The White House on many special
occasions.
Through the decades that followed the dissolution of the "classic"
quartet Dave Brubeck composed many fully notated compositions. These include
ballet suites, a string quartet, chamber works, pieces for solo and duo-piano,
violin solos, orchestral works and large-scale works for chorus and orchestra,
most notably a Mass
To Hope! A Celebration that has been performed
throughout the English-speaking world, Germany, Russia and Austria. In 2002
Classical Brubeck was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and
London Voices. The double CD includes his Easter oratorio
Beloved Son,
Pange Lingua Variations, his exciting Pentecost oratorio,
The Voice of
the Holy Spirit and a composition for string orchestra,
Regret, all
under the baton of Russell Gloyd, who since 1976 has been associated with
Brubeck as conductor, producer and manager. Throughout his career Brubeck has
continued to experiment with interweaving jazz and classical music. He has
performed as composer-performer with most of the major orchestras in the United
States and with prestigious choral groups and orchestras in Europe and America.
While increasingly active as a composer, Brubeck has remained a leading figure
in the jazz mainstream, appearing at jazz festivals (Newport with Wynton
Marsalis in 2005), recording (for Telarc) and touring internationally with
today's version of the Dave Brubeck Quartet - Bobby Militello, sax and flute,
Randy Jones, drums, Michael Moore, bass.
Dave Brubeck is a Duke Ellington Fellow at Yale University and holds
numerous honorary degrees from American, Canadian, English and German
universities, including an Honorary Doctorate in Sacred Theology from Fribourg
University, Switzerland. He has received national and international recognition,
including the National Medal of the Arts presented by President Clinton, A
Lifetime Achievement Award from National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences,
the Smithsonian Medal, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In the year
2000 the National Endowment for the Arts declared him a Jazz Master. His
international honours include Austria's highest award for the Arts, a citation
from the French government, and the Bocconi Medal from Italy. The Library of
Congress has declared Dave Brubeck a Living Legend. He serves as chairman of The
Brubeck Institute established in his honour by his alma mater, the University of
the Pacific in Stockton, California.
