[Dixielandjazz] Dave Brubeck, Who Helped Put Jazz Back in Vogue, Dies at 91--NYTimes 12-6-12

[Norman Vickers]

To: Musicians and Jazzfans list;  DJML
From:  Norman Vickers, Jazz society of Pensacola

This will not be news, as it's been on TV and most likely in your local
newspaper.  Here is a reasonably comprehensive summary from today's NYTimes.

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Subject: NYT: Dave Brubeck, Who Helped Put Jazz Back in Vogue, Dies at 91

He was the only jazz musician I was ever able to appreciate, though I have 
sincerely tried to come to like other jazz players. His pieces sound like 
real compositions, though I am not sure how a rendition of a piece in one 
concert differs from that in another. I have uploaded my very favorite 
pieces of his, from a Columbia recording from a concert:

http://www.filefactory.com/file/32ywzxavjt0n/n/Like_Someone_in_Love_mp3

I'm sending it in advance to my list, though I hardly ever send 
attachments. If its size exceeded what your ISP allows, you can get it 
now.

I suspect Mr. Mencken would have enjoyed it.

Dave Brubeck, Who Helped Put Jazz Back in Vogue, Dies at 91
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/arts/music/dave-brubeck-jazz-musician-dies
-at-91.html

By BEN RATLIFF

Dave Brubeck, a pianist and composer whose distinctive mixture of 
experimentation and accessibility made him one of the most popular jazz 
musicians of the 1950s and '60s, died Wednesday morning in Norwalk, Conn. 
He would have turned 92 on Thursday.

He died while on his way to a cardiology appointment, Russell Gloyd, his 
producer, conductor and manager for 36 years, said. Mr. Brubeck lived in 
Wilton, Conn.

In a long and successful career, Mr. Brubeck helped repopularize jazz at a 
time when younger listeners had been trained to the sonic dimensions of 
the three-minute pop single. His quartet's 1959 recording of "Take Five" 
was the first jazz single to sell a million copies.

Mr. Brubeck experimented with time signatures and polytonality and 
explored musical theater and the oratorio, baroque compositional devices 
and foreign modes. But he did not always please the critics, who often 
described his music as schematic, bombastic and--a word he particularly 
disliked--stolid. His very stubbornness and strangeness--the polytonality, 
the blockiness of his playing, the oppositional push-and-pull between his 
piano and Paul Desmond's alto saxophone--makes the Brubeck quartet's best 
work still sound original.

Outside of the group's most famous originals, which had the charm and 
durability of pop songs ("Take Five," "Blue Rondo à la Turk," "It's a 
Raggy Waltz"), some of its best work was in its overhauls of standards 
like "You Go to My Head," "All the Things You Are" and "Pennies From 
Heaven."

David Warren Brubeck was born on Dec. 6, 1920, in Concord, Calif., near 
San Francisco. Surrounded by farms, his family lived a bucolic life: his 
father, Pete, was a cattle buyer for a meat company, and his mother, 
Elizabeth, was a choir director at the nearby Presbyterian church. When 
Mr. Brubeck was 11, the family moved to Ione, Calif., where his father 
managed a 45,000-acre cattle ranch and owned his own 1,200 acres.

Forbidden to listen to the radio--his mother believed that if you wanted 
to hear music you should play it--Mr. Brubeck and his two brothers all 
played various instruments and knew classical études, spirituals and 
cowboy songs. Dave learned most of this music by ear: because he was born 
cross-eyed, sight-reading was nearly impossible for him through his early 
development as a musician.

When he was 14, a laundryman who led a dance band encouraged him to 
perform in public, at Lions Club gatherings and Western-swing dances; he 
was paid $8 for playing from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., with a one-hour break. But 
until he went to college he was an aspiring rancher, not an aspiring 
musician.

At the College of the Pacific, near Stockton, he first studied to be a 
veterinarian but switched to music after a year. It was there that he 
learned about 20th-century culture and read about Freud, Marx and serial 
music; it was also there that he met Iola Whitlock, a fellow student, who 
became his wife in 1942.

He graduated that year and was immediately drafted. For two years he 
played with the Army band at Camp Haan, in Southern California. In 1944 
Private Brubeck became a rifleman, entering basic training--first in 
Texas, then in Maryland--and was shortly sent to Metz, in eastern France, 
for further preparation for combat.

When his new commanding officer heard him accompany a Red Cross traveling 
show one day, Mr. Brubeck recalled, he told his aide-de-camp, "I don't 
want that boy to go to the front." Thereafter, Mr. Brubeck led a band that 
was trucked into combat areas to play for the troops. He was near the 
front twice, during the Battle of the Bulge, but he never fought.

Finished with the Army at 25, Mr. Brubeck moved with his wife into an 
apartment in Oakland, Calif., and, on a G.I. Bill scholarship, studied at 
Mills College with the French composer Darius Milhaud. Milhaud asked the 
jazz musicians in his class to write fugues for jazz ensembles, and Mr. 
Brubeck played the results at a series of performances at Mills College. 
Mr. Brubeck had such admiration for his teacher that he named his first 
son, born in 1947, Darius.

Mr. Brubeck had met his most important musical colleague, Paul Desmond, in 
an Army band in 1943. Mr. Desmond was a perfect foil; his lovely, 
impassive tone was as ethereal as Mr. Brubeck's style was densely chorded. 
In 1947 they met again and found instant musical rapport, fascinated by 
the challenge of using counterpoint in jazz.

Mr. Brubeck's first group, an octet formed in 1946, contained five of 
Milhaud's students and played pieces influenced by his teachings, using 
canonlike elements. The group's earliest recorded work predated a much 
more famous set of similarly temperate jazz recordings, the 1948-50 Miles 
Davis Nonet work later packaged as "Birth of the Cool."

In the late 1940s and early '50s Mr. Brubeck also led a trio with Ron 
Crotty on bass and Cal Tjader on drums. It was around this time that he 
started to develop an audience. He was given an initial boost by the San 
Francisco disc jockey Jimmy Lyons, later the founder of the Monterey Jazz 
Festival, who plugged the band on KNBC radio and helped secure it a record 
deal with the Coronet label.

In 1951 the trio expanded to a quartet, with Mr. Desmond returning. (The 
permanent lineup change was perhaps inevitable, as Mr. Desmond was 
desperate to join his old friend's increasingly popular band, but it may 
also have had to do with physical necessity: Mr. Brubeck had suffered a 
serious neck injury while swimming in Hawaii, limiting his dexterity, and 
he needed another soloist to help carry the music.)

Quickly the constitutionally different men--Mr. Brubeck open, ambitious 
and imposing; Mr. Desmond private, profligate and self-effacing--developed 
their lines of musical communication. By the time of an engagement in 
Boston in the fall of 1952 they had become one of jazz's greatest 
combinations.

The next part of the equation was a record label, and for that Mr. Brubeck 
had found another booster: Fantasy Records, just started by the brothers 
Max and Sol Weiss, who owned a record-pressing plant and had little 
interest in jazz apart from wanting to make a profit from it.

They did, eventually, with Mr. Brubeck. But Iola Brubeck also played a 
role in the growth of his audience. Before Mr. Brubeck became a client of 
the prominent manager Joe Glaser, she handled his business affairs. In 
1953 she wrote to more than a hundred universities, suggesting that the 
quartet would be willing to play for student associations. The college 
circuit became the group's bread and butter, and by the end of the 1950s 
it had sold hundreds of thousands of copies of its albums "Jazz at 
Oberlin" and "Jazz Goes to College."

In 1954 Mr. Brubeck was only the second jazz musician (after Louis 
Armstrong) to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. That same year he 
signed with Columbia Records, promising to deliver two albums a year, and 
built a house in Oakland.

For all his conceptualizing, Mr. Brubeck often seemed more guileless and 
stubborn country boy than intellectual. It is often noted that his piece 
"The Duke"--famously recorded by Miles Davis and Gil Evans in 1959 on 
their collaborative album "Miles Ahead"--runs through all 12 keys in the 
first eight bars. But Mr. Brubeck contended that he never realized that 
until a music professor told him.

Mr. Brubeck's very personal musical language situated him far from the Bud 
Powell school of bebop rhythm and harmony; he relied much more on chords, 
lots and lots of them, than on sizzling, hornlike right-hand lines. (He 
may have come by this outsiderness naturally, as a function of his 
background: jazz by way of rural isolation and modernist academia. He was, 
Ted Gioia wrote in his book "West Coast Jazz," "inspired by the process of 
improvisation rather than by its history.")

It took a little while for Mr. Brubeck to capitalize on the greater 
visibility his deal with Columbia gave him, and as he accommodated success 
a certain segment of the jazz audience began to turn against him. (The 
1957 album "Dave Digs Disney," on which he played songs from Walt Disney 
movies, didn't help his credibility among critics and connoisseurs.) 
Still, by the end of the decade he had broken through with mainstream 
audiences in a bigger way than almost any jazz musician since World War 
II.

In 1958, as part of a State Department program that brought jazz as an 
offer of good will during the cold war, his quartet traveled in the Middle 
East and India, and Mr. Brubeck became intrigued by musical languages that 
didn't stick to 4/4 time--what he called "march-style jazz," the meter 
that had been the music's bedrock. The result was the album "Time Out," 
recorded in 1959. With the hits "Take Five" (composed by Mr. Desmond in 
5/4 meter and prominently featuring the quartet's gifted drummer, Joe 
Morello) and "Blue Rondo à la Turk" (composed by Mr. Brubeck in 9/8), the 
album propelled Mr. Brubeck onto the pop charts.

Initially, Mr. Brubeck said, the album was released without high 
expectations from the record company. But when disc jockeys in the Midwest 
started playing "Take Five," the song became a national phenomenon. After 
the album had been out for 18 months, Columbia released "Take Five" as a 
45 r.p.m. single, edited for radio, with "Blue Rondo" on the B side. Both 
album and single became hits; "Time Out" has since sold close to two 
million copies.

In 1960, realizing that most of the quartet's work centered on the East 
Coast, the Brubecks, with their children, Dan, Michael, Chris, Darius and 
Catherine, moved to Wilton. They stayed there permanently and later had 
one more child, Matthew.

Genial as Mr. Brubeck could seem, he had strong convictions. In the 1950s 
he had to stand up to college deans who asked him not to perform with a 
racially mixed band (his bassist, Gene Wright, was black). He also refused 
to tour in South Africa in 1958 when asked to sign a contract stipulating 
that his band would be all white. With his wife as lyricist, he wrote "The 
Real Ambassadors," a jazz musical that dealt with race relations. With a 
cast that included Louis Armstrong, it was released on LP in 1962 but 
staged only once, at that year's Monterey Jazz Festival.

When Mr. Brubeck's quartet broke up in 1967, after 17 years, he spent more 
time with his family and followed new paths. In 1969 he composed 
"Elemental" (subtitled "Concerto for Anyone Who Can Afford an Orchestra"), 
a concerto grosso for 45-piece ensemble. He later wrote an oratorio and 
four cantatas, a mass, two ballets and works for jazz combo with 
orchestra. Most of his commissioned pieces from the late '60s on were 
classical works, many had religious or social themes, and many were 
collaborations with his wife.

As a composer, Mr. Brubeck used jazz to address religious themes and to 
bridge social and political divides. His cantata "The Gates of Justice," 
from 1969, dealt with blacks and Jews in America; another cantata, "Truth 
Is Fallen" (1972), lamented the killing of student protesters at Kent 
State University in 1970, with a score including orchestra, electric 
guitars and police sirens. He played during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit 
meeting in 1988; he composed entrance music for Pope John Paul II's visit 
to Candlestick Park in San Francisco in 1987; he performed for eight 
presidents, from Kennedy to Clinton.

In 1968 he formed a quartet with the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, 
and later he began working with his musician sons Darius (a pianist), 
Chris (a bassist), Dan (a drummer) and Matthew (a cellist). He performed 
and recorded with them often, most definitively on "In Their Own Sweet 
Way," a Telarc album from 1997. The classic Brubeck quartet regrouped only 
once, in 1976, for a 25th-anniversary tour.

Mr. Brubeck's son Michael died in 2009. In addition to his other sons, Mr. 
Brubeck is survived by his wife, Iola; a daughter, Catherine Yaghsizian; 
10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Mr. Brubeck resumed working with a quartet in the late 1970s--finally 
settling into a long-term touring group featuring the saxophonist Bobby 
Militello--and thereafter never stopped writing, touring and performing 
his hits. To the end he was a major draw at festivals.

In 1999 Mr. Brubeck was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for 
the Arts. Ten years later he received a Kennedy Center Honor for his 
contribution to American culture. He gave his archives to his alma mater, 
now renamed the University of the Pacific.

Despite health problems, Mr. Brubeck was still working as recently as 
2011. In November 2010, just a month after undergoing heart surgery and 
receiving a pacemaker, he performed at the Blue Note in Manhattan. Nate 
Chinen of The Times, noting that Mr. Brubeck had already "softened his 
pianism, replacing the old hammer-and-anvil attack with something almost 
airy," wrote that his playing at the Blue Note "was the picture of 
judicious clarity, its well-placed chordal accents suggesting a riffing 
horn section."

Mr. Brubeck once explained succinctly what jazz meant to him. "One of the 
reasons I believe in jazz," he said, "is that the oneness of man can come 
through the rhythm of your heart. It's the same anyplace in the world, 
that heartbeat. It's the first thing you hear when you're born--or before 
you're born--and it's the last thing you hear."

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 5, 2012

An earlier version of this obituary erroneously attributed a distinction 
to Mr. Brubeck.  He was the second jazz musician to be featured on the 
cover of Time magazine, not the first.  That version also misstated the 
name of a song at one point. It is "Take Five," not "Time Out." ("Time 
Out" is the name of the album on which "Take Five" first appeared.)