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UC Jazz Ensembles perform at Yoshi's
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UC Jazz Affecting Lives
Jazz Afficionados
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Kristina Olson

Dave Brubeck was born in Concord, California, in 1920. His mother was a piano teacher. She exposed him and his two older brothers to classical music music early in life. Brubeck enjoyed playing popular tunes when he was only four years old. Dave Brubeck's brothers would eventually become the dean of Palomar College and the head of the Santa Barbara High School music department.

The family moved to a ranch in the Sierra foothills California, when Dave Brubeck was elven yeras old. Dave enjoyed life at the ranch and he would say frequently: "I want to be a cattleman." However he continued to play music and by the time he was fifteen yhers old he played at weekend dances in near nearby towns i the Sierra foothills. Balancing the schedule of being a musician with his work at the ranch was near impossible. He would work from 8 PM at night until 4 AM in the morning. At the ranch work often started at 5AM.

His parents persuaded Dave Brubeck to go to college with the goal to become a vetenarian. When he was eighteen he attended the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California. During the first year of college it became clear that Dave Brubeck was not truly very interested in academics. Rumor has it that he spent more time during anatomy class staring across the lawn at the conservatory than taking notes. Eventually his science department advisor suggested that he might switch to a music major. Once there, Dave Brubeck advanced through the curriculum mainly due to his raw talent. Although he graduated he still could not read music. He coasted through his classes and focused his energies more on his musical gigs at local jazz clubs. He often played as much as six nights per week.

it wasn't until he met Harold Meeske that he became intersted in the theory of music. He always had loved the power of music and how he could move people. Once he met Harold Meeske he developed the desire to become a composer. While in college that he met the director of a weekly campus radio, Iola Marie Whitlock. He fell head over heals in love and asked her to marry him two weeks after they met.

Brubeck graduated from the College of the Pacific with his music degree in 1942 and was immediately drafted for service. His musical talents enabled him avoid abandoning his convictions against fighting in the war, though, as he spent two years in a camp band at Camp Haan in Southern California. He was sent to Europe in 1944 and through the intervention of a jazzophilic army officer kept Brubeck entertaining troops in Europe instead of spending time at the front. He did travel to the front lines at times armed with a piano instead of a weapon. Once the war was over he enrolled at Mills College under the GI Bill to study under French classical composer Darius Millhaud. Millhaud introduced him to polytonality and counterpoints. Milhaud once told him:"If you want to express this country, you will always use the jazz idiom." Millhaud supported jazz style and thereby supported the young pianist's drive to explore and expand upon the prevailing jazz paradigm.

In 1947 by joining a jazz band at a San Francisco club named Geary Cellar where he began playing with alto saxophonist Paul Desmond. In 1949, he left San Francisco to join the Paul Desmond Trio at the Bard Box in Palo Alto, but Desmond left after three weeks. Brubeck retuned to Oakland and formed the Brubeck Trio in November of 1949. Desmond soon began sitting in every night. After only six months Brubeck unjured his neck which ended the Trio.

In June, 1951, Brubeck recovered and formed a Quartet with Desmond, Dodge, and Bates which reshaped American jazz. The Quartet had the good fortune to not only have four talented musicians, but also to be in California in the early 50's, when such luminaries as Brubeck, Chet Baker, and Gerry Mulligan would become the frontmen for the "West Coast Cool Jazz" movement. After three months, the Dave Brubeck Quartet began travelling in Brubeck's station wagon, with the string bass tied to the roof. They played the jazz club circuit and for college students. Despite this reliance on improvisation, he still received ample criticism that he couldn't swing (a hallmark of jazz up to the 1950's), to which he responded that "any jackass can swing. But to try something new and swing at the same time, that's hard."

After establishing his own record label, Fantasy Records, Brubeck released the Quartet's first album, Jazz at Oberlin, in 1953. It was famous for being one of the first jazz LP's of a live concert. The album landed the Quartet a contract with Columbia Records. Their first album on Columbia was Jazz Goes to College in 1954, which sold over 100,000 copies and placed Brubeck and his Quartet in the national spotlight. In this same year Brubeck became the first jazz artist to grace the cover of Time magazine as part of an article which described him as "the most exciting new jazz artist at work today" and the Quartet's music as "some of the strangest and loveliest music ever played since jazz was born."

1956 the group replaced drummer Joe Dodge with Morello and bassist Bates was replaced by Wright on bass. After that the Quartet became well-known for its balanced and energetic collaborations.

In 1959 the Quartet released the now classic, Time Out, a collection of songs which experimented with different time signatures. It included hits like "Take Five" and the "Blue Rondo a la Turk". "Take Five", was officially composed by Desmond who derived it from Morello's original 5/4 beat. "Blue Rondo a la Turk" was a venture into 9/8 time, a remake of Mozart's "Rondo alla Turca". The wild success of the album and "Take Five" in particular catapulted the Quartet into world-fame. A Time magazine article heralded Brubeck as the leader of "the birth of a new kind of jazz age in the U.S." "Take Five" garnered the top spot in the Billboard reader's poll in '65 and '66; for twelve consecutive years. The New Yorker proclaimed that the Quartet was "the world's best-paid, most widely travelled, most highly publicized, and most popular small group now playing improvised syncopated music." It became the first million-selling jazz record in modern jazz history.

They followed their success with Time Further Out. In 1960, Brubeck wrote "Points on Jazz" which was accepted into the repertory of the American Ballet Theatre. Brubeck was invited to write for a Broadway show, "The Real Ambassadors." The historic performance of that tune at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1962 with Louis Armstrong will always be remembered as a high-light of Brubeck's career.

The Quartet then toured extensively in Europe and Asia. The Dave Brubeck Quartet was so overseas Brubeck that comedian Mort Sahl joked that "whenever John Foster Dulles visits a country, the State Department sends that Brubeck Quartet in a few weeks later to repair the damage." During their tour they produced "The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe" in 1958, " Jazz Impressions of Eurasia." That same year they toured Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Although the Quartet enjoyed continued success until they disbanded in 1967. They regroupied only once in 1976 for a twenty-fifth anniversary tour.

After he stopped touring Brubeck devoted himself to his compositions. He persists as a grand old man of jazz through his forays into popular jazz and by suffusing his compositions with a number of jazz influences. They mostly were jazz-inspired ballets, scores, oratorios, cantatas, symphonic pieces, classical compositions, liturgical compositions (including a contemporary mass), and Native American-inspired compositions. His performance credits include Stevie Wonder, The Four Tops, The Bolshoi Ballet Orchestra, Ray Charles, American Ballet Theatre, The Miami City Ballet Orchestra, Larry Elgart, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, and numerous others.

Later in life he collaborated in a Quartet with his sons Dan, Darius, and Chris, all jazz artists of their own merit.

Brubeck was popular and much honored as a performer, composer and author. .He had the chance to perform for presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, and Clinton. He was elected to the Down Beat Hall of Fame, San Francisco Jazz Festival Laureate, and made an appearance at the Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow Summit in 1988. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, National Medal of the Arts. His score was chosen for the Pope John Paul II's visit to San Francisco in 1987. Despite his humble academic beginnings he received six honorary doctorate degrees and was named a Duke Ellington Fellow at Yale University, and received doctorate degree from Duisberg University. This is told to be one of the first doctorate degree awarded to an American jazz musician from a German university.

Dave Brubeck is arguably responsible for initiating more listeners into jazz than any composer since the 40s. While many of the classic jazz artist worked less as Rock became the popular and was preferred by young audiences. Dave Brueck's Quartet, headlined by Brubeck and alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, helped to reawaken and maintain public interest in jazz after World War II and was an integral part of "West Coast Cool Jazz."