![]() After the war, the young veteran enrolled in Mills College in Oakland, studying composition with Darius Milhaud. After graduation in 1942, he enlisted and served in Patton Third Army in Europe. He enrolled in the College of the Pacific in Stockton, where he met his future wife, fellow student Iola Whitlock. He began piano lessons with his mother at the age of 4 and by 14 he was playing local gigs on weekends. "As Darius Milhaud said," Brubeck told the New York Times recalling his mentor, "if you come from America and haven't felt the jazz influence, then you havent written music that expresses America." Dave Brubeck, unmistakably, irresistibly, writes American music.ĭavid Warren Brubeck was born in Concord, California in 1920 into a musical family. The composers most likely to live on from the 20th century are Ives, Copland, Bernstein, Ellington, Gershwin and all the people wise enough to use jazz, like they were." It really an extension of what Bach and Mozart did every day: improvise. ![]() Ellington didn't like it, Stan Kenton didnt like it. Most of us don't even like the word jazz. His "polytonality and use of polyrhythms, combined with his uniquely American musical language," noted The New York Times, "give his music an unmistakable and accessible sound." Crowned "the reigning elder statesman of jazz" by the Washington Post and designated nothing less than a "Living Legend" by the Library of Congress, this octogenarian icon of West Coast cool remains impossibly young. He has inspired choreography by Lar Lubovitch, Murray Louis and other visionary danc akers. He has created the sounds of Peanuts in the miniseries This is America, Charlie Brown. He has set to music the words of the Old Testament and of Martin Luther King, Jr. He helped ease jazz into the mainstream, married spontaneity with classical rigor, made unlikely time signatures irresistible, and he made very serious music swing.įrom the Dave Brubeck Quartet worldwide success in the 1950s and 60s, right through the jazz opera Cannery Row Suite he created with his wife Iola Brubeck at the 2006 Monterey Jazz Festival, and Brubeck piano solo prowess at the 2008 San Francisco Jazz Festival, the man continues to surprise. The genius of that progress for more than six decades, improvisations, reinventions and all, is bodied in Dave Brubeck music. Jazz, like the country of its birth, is forever a dazzling work in progress. (Pianist and composer born Decemin Concord, California died Decemin Norwalk, Connecticut)
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