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 (“Time Out,” “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 the first jazz musician 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 “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, Micharl, 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 a few years ago. 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. Snotnik contributed reporting.
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