The Red and Black

Issue date: 2/14/08 Section: Out & About

Media Credit: COURTESY DAVE BRUBECK Legendary jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck takes the stage with his quartet tonight at Hodgson Hall in the final performance of a week-long residency at the University. [Click to enlarge]

It was his own version of a love at first sight - or, in reality, at first listen. Even as the son of a classically trained pianist, a young Dave Brubeck had a knack, and a fiery passion, for less formal methods of learning and performing.

"I've always been playing improvised music or jazz," he said. "That's what I could do."

During his enrollment at University of the Pacific in California, Brubeck nearly was expelled when a music teacher unearthed his best kept secret - he couldn't read music. With testimony from fellow teachers to his startling natural music abilities, the college allowed Brubeck to graduate with a solemn promise from the future icon that he could never teach piano.

"That's a true story," he said with an ironic laugh. "I could write when I couldn't read, and most people don't understand that. I still write a lot better than I read music - I can't really explain it."

'Time Out' and beyond

"'Blue Rondo a la Turk' was the very first tune I ever peeled off a record," says University Director of Jazz Studies Steve Dancz, situated among a cluttered office adorned with the markings of what has become his own successful career as a jazz pianist. "It just grabbed me and I said 'I've got to know what that is!'"

"That" was the time signature experimentations that made Brubeck a household name on 1959's "Time Out" record - a collection that boasts numerous odd and challenging meters.

To the jazz world, Brubeck was running to left field. For Brubeck, it simply was bringing jazz closer to home.

"I heard the Denis-Roosevelt Expedition into the Belgian Condo," he said, describing the recordings of tribal beats from said expedition in the mid 1930s. "I thought if jazz was supposed to reflect African culture, it wasn't in 4/4! It was so complex, most of us couldn't figure it out!"

'Jazz Goes to College'

In many ways, Brubeck's quartet is credited with starting the modern age of on-campus concerts, embarking on an ambitious tour of North American colleges in the early 1950s which led to two of the most successful releases of their storied discography, 1954's "Jazz Goes to College" and the 1957 follow-up, "Jazz Goes to Junior College."

"My wife decided that these audiences were audiences that we should reach," said Brubeck of the tour's origins. We said, 'we'll play for whatever they'll give us,' and sometimes you might lose money, but we were gaining an audience, and that's what we were trying to do."

Brubeck recalls the innate resistance that many of the classically-trained faculty members of the '50s institutions felt towards jazz idioms.

"The students were the ones they didn't think we could play for and reach, but they were so ready because of their understanding of music," he said. "They were a great audience."

Fifty years later, University audiences seem equally ready.

"To have a creative force in your immediate area is just priceless," said Dancz. "It will be something [the students] will remember for the rest of their lives."

Cultural exchange

Music accounts for merely a portion of Brubeck's legacy. To many, the social changes of which he stood on the forefront during the Civil Rights and Cold War eras were equal parts bold and visionary.

In the depths of a segregated South, Brubeck refused to play non-integrated concert halls - once canceling 23 of 25 dates on a particular tour.

"We were able to do things that I think helped integrate the universities or the concert halls," he said.

Likewise, former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower himself saw the power of jazz as a cultural medium with which to improve international relations, sending Brubeck and fellow jazz giants Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie on tours of "cultural exchange."

"Our government needed the goodwill that people felt for Louis and Dizzy and our group," he said.

'I'm still writing!'

These days, Brubeck's face wears his 87 years with a weathered pride, framing the familiar grin that has delighted six decades of audiences and graced countless album covers.

"The road is a tough place - what you go through can leave you pretty tired," he said. "And yet, when I get to that piano, I have an adrenaline rush that overcomes any fatigue - by the time the concert is over, I'm feeling way better than during the toughness of the journey to get there."

It's clear that the journey is the joy for Brubeck, and it's a journey that has earned him distinctions beyond comprehension for most musicians. As far back as 1996, he began receiving "Lifetime Achievement Awards" - that year from the Recording Academy stateside and last year in conjunction with the BBC Jazz Awards in London.Yet, don't waste time convincing him that the achievements are over.

"I'm still writing!" he says, throwing his famed hands in the air.

He didn't smile - it wasn't meant as a joke.

"This is a man who constantly refreshes himself in that way," said Associate Director of Choral Activites Mitos Andaya of Brubeck's ever-present work ethic. "It's still there in his heart and in his eyes."

For the composer himself, the formula for long-term success is simple.

"It takes a good wife," he said in a tone of pure admiration for his most cherished companion, Iola. "One that will go along with the isolation that it takes to compose. You shut out everything else in the world - but if the music is more important, you will do the music."

The musician in Dancz understands and appreciates such a notion.

"It takes an immense amount of creative energy to sustain a career like that," he said. "And tenacity - saying 'this is what I'm gonna do, and I'm gonna keep doing it.'"

In a typical moment of modesty, Brubeck defers all of tonight's anticipated virtuosity to his current quartet of Bobby Millitello (saxophone), Michael Moore (bass), and Randy Jones (drums).

"I hope that I'm not put on the spot to inspire anybody," he said with a chuckle. "I'd rather sit and listen."

Sorry, Dave, but that's a pleasure that's all ours.

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