week of 1/29/03
 
 
 

All for one — one for all
Piano icon Dave Brubeck leads jazz weekend at the Grove Park
By Hunter Pope

Brubeck’s music didn’t really grab me at first.

Of course, my initial experience with the jazz icon was hearing him talk. He was introduced to me through Ken Burns’ “Jazz” - the award-winning documentary on PBS for folks (like me) who needed TV explanations to decipher the equations of jazz. The segment discussed jazz musicians who entertained troops stationed in Europe in WWII. Brubeck had been immediately drafted after graduating from Pacific in 1942 and served under General Patton in Europe.

In the interview, Dave recalled playing with black musicians overseas, which was taboo back in the States. There was an ember in his eyes when he reflected on performing with these men for the first time, while Axis bombs begged for attention. However, his mannerisms darkened once he began to discuss his arrival back in the USA. Segregation snarled like a diseased lion whenever Brubeck tried to bring his fellow black musicians to a lunch counter, many he had made bonds with overseas. At this point in the interview Brubeck openly wept, stammering that he could not fathom why a black man could fight and die for his country, but he still couldn’t be allowed to sit alongside a white man at a lunch counter.

I told myself that if a man — a celebrated jazz musician nonetheless — believes that strongly in decency, then I couldn’t wait to hear what he could do to a mild-mannered piano. I’d heard the album, “Time Out” at friends’ homes before, but I never tied it to Dave Brubeck Quartet, a feisty bunch of musicians that never settled for the obvious. The time signatures in the 1959 jazz classic put a silver-lined dent in the once un-malleable concept of jazz.

The genre (for many jazz musicians and critics of the late 50s) had been chained to a 4/4 time. The 9/8 rhythm of “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” and the 5/4 signatures of “Take Five” (composed by sax-man Paul Desmond because drummer Joe Morello loved to play 5/4 solos) turned jazz on its belly and began tickling. The jazz world screamed heresy (critics called Brubeck’s playing “heavy-handed”), but an uncanny thing happened — the album sold well. The success of “Time Out” shattered the 4/4 Gordian and unleashed a ravenous jazz on fresh time signatures.

Not too shabby for a guy who almost had his college degree withheld because his professors found out that he couldn’t read music.

Brubeck was born in 1920 in Concord, Calif. His mother, an able piano teacher, had the boy composing by four. Still, he went to Pacific College in 1938 with the intentions of being a veterinarian. His initial interest dulled quickly and he rapidly switched to a Music major. After graduating in 1942, he was immediately drafted and didn’t come back until 1946.

Upon his return, Dave enrolled at Mills College under the tutelage of Darius Milhaud, a French classical composer. Milhaud bequeathed the younger the secrets of odd time signatures. The elder had married Latin and jazz rhythms in the 20s and 30s, three decades before “Take Five” incinerated the boundaries. Other students of Milhaud — Jack Weeks, Dave van Kreidt, and Bill Smith — all joined Dave’s first band, the Dave Brubeck Octet.

The Octet disbanded in 1949, and Brubeck joined the Paul Desmond Trio. Brubeck met (saxophone legend) Desmond in WWII and their lives would intersect for the next 25 years. Desmond seemed (at least in the way the media played it) to be Brubeck’s nemesis, despite the music they crafted communally. Many “experts” on jazz thought (to Brubeck’s chagrin) that Desmond should be the leader and one critic remarked: “Desmond’s alto work is playful and childlike ... his airy and jumpy lines are sublimely lyrical, humorous, and very well constructed. Desmond’s alto was the perfect foil for Brubeck’s serious, angry, and tense piano, which often owed more to classical music than to jazz.”

Their initial union was disastrous. Three weeks after Brubeck joined the Trio, Desmond left his self-titled group to chase another job. Dave was livid and he renamed the group The Dave Brubeck Trio. The trio worked hard and their reputation around the Bay Area ascended. When Desmond’s gig fell through, he was allowed to sit-in, but not be a full member. Dave did not extend the employment offer until several years later, thus, spawning the first Dave Brubeck Quartet. The jazz outfit’s popularity blew up when Dave made the cover of Time in 1954. He was the first jazz musician to claim the cover.

The addition of pizzaz drummer Joe Morello in 1956 (replacing Bob Bates) created uneasy ripples. At first Desmond hated the flamboyant drummer and even threatened to quit. Brubeck weathered the angst and made use of Morello’s ability for uncommon time signatures. “Time Out” soon followed in 1959.

And Dave made sure that he spread his music to everyone — from segregated schools to a performance for the Pope. When Brubeck grew weary of the jazz club circuit in the 50s, he decided to go scholarly. Realizing the impact he could have on collegiate music departments, he got his wife, Iola, to contact a list of compiled colleges and offer “the world famous Dave Brubeck Quartet in concert.” Fifty colleges accepted in the first year, and for most of them, it was their first sponsored jazz concert.

He created another first by enlisting Eugene Wright (a black man) as the Quartet’s bassist. Several Southern colleges tried to block Wright from playing. Brubeck refused to play without the bassist, and the furor of local fans made the schools relent. His persistence also paved the way for the integration of concert halls.

“It was very hard, but it was important to bring about integration,” Brubeck told Erroll Nazareth of The Toronto Sun. “We were scared to play certain places, we had police escorts, pickets out front. We played in black nightclubs and theaters but the critics love to leave that out. They said I was playing college campuses and liked to leave out that I was playing black college campuses. They keep repeating these myths and the truth never seems to surface.”

The band also created seismic charges on a global scale. In the 60s, when the Quartet toured the world (twice over), comedian Mort Sahl joked: “Whenever John Foster Dulles visits a country, the State Department sends that Brubeck Quartet in a few weeks later to repair the damage.”

The quartet would play together until 1967. Brubeck disbanded the foursome in favor of his own compositional forays. Over the years, he has written ballets, orchestral and chamber music, and he even has his own Dave Brubeck Institute at Pacific University. Among the plethora of awards Brubeck’s won over the years, his two biggest may be the Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1995, during a White House ceremony, President Bill Clinton awarded Dave the Presidential Medal of the Arts.

Now in his 80s, Dave still takes risks as both a musician and a human being. In 1998, he set 19 poems by acclaimed African-American poet Langston Hughes for chorus and quartet. The concert featured an inner-city choir from Trenton, N.J., mixed with young people from Princeton.

“The aim was to bring different communities together and for us to recognize the similarities,” Brubeck told Nazareth. “That’s what Langston Hughes wanted and that’s what Malcolm X wanted at the end of his life.”

And when asked by James Standifier about his past history as a controversial figure in jazz, the elder Brubeck replied, “The controversy hasn’t gone away.”

If you have the good fortune of seeing Dave Brubeck at Grove Park, bask in the knowledge that you’re seeing a quality performer, as well as a splendid human being. Yes, he will play music that will make the brain distort, while simultaneously sewing the audiences’ tapping feet to his cadence, but his daring on the keys looks paltry compared to his bettering of humanity.