Probably no other single musician has been as influential in the development of contemporary jazz as Dave Brubeck. A composer and pianist of wide-ranging interests and sensibilities, he has shaped not only the music but also the audience for jazz in our time. He has toured the world as an enthusiastically welcomed ambassador of this peculiarly American artform. His personal musical world embraces all forms--instrumental and choral, classical and popular, Eastern and Western, secular and sacred.
Born in California in 1920, Brubeck took his first piano lessons at the age of four from his mother, a professional singer and part-time choir director. She also taught his two older brothers, both of whom followed more academic careers. Henry, the eldest, headed the music department at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California; Howard, the second eldest, held a similar position at Palomar College, retiring six years ago as dean of humanities.
"I escaped all that classical training and practicing my brothers endured," Brubeck said in a recent exclusive interview. "In fact, I never really learned to read music. At four or five, I was already composing, picking things out on the piano, but I couldn't write them down. Even later on, when I was studying with Milhaud, I had a struggle to play back anything I had composed."
In his teens, from about the age of fourteen, he appeared with local California hillbilly, swing, and Dixieland bands. Although his musical abilities were clearly apparent, he had originally planned to follow his father and work on a cattle ranch--the elder Brubeck managed a 45,000-acre ranch in northern California. A perceptive high school teacher convinced young Dave to enter college, which he did, intending to study veterinary science at the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California. "But then a guy in the zoology department at the college said, 'You don't belong here; you belong over in the conservatory. I've seen you; whenever there's someone playing music over there, you quit concentrating.'"
While still a student, Brubeck formed a twelve-piece dance band that played regularly in area clubs. But graduation--"I still couldn't read music," Brubeck says--was followed by four years in the Army during World War II. "I joined the infantry and was all over Germany with Patton. I was asked to play, to set up a little band, in a camp we called Mudville, close to Verdun." Brubeck's band toured right alongside the troops, sometimes getting caught when the rapidly shifting battle lines moved.
Study with Milhaud
After the war, Brubeck entered Mills College in Oakland, California, on the GI Bill. His brother Howard was already there as assistant to Darius Milhaud. The seminal French composer, one of "Les Six," was then in his fifties and at the height of his career. He had come to the United States at the beginning of the war and spent nearly a decade here, teaching at Mills. "Milhaud was one of the top composers in the world," Brubeck proudly recalls. "I don't think that even composers like Stravinsky or Bartok had his technique or ability. He was like a Mozart; it went right from his head to the paper, even with a roomful of people or in the middle of a party.
"Milhaud's fifteenth
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