Forty-four albums reviewed across nearly six decades: from the Mills College-influenced Octet through the odd-meter experiments that changed jazz, the classic Columbia years, the post-Desmond Atlantic period, and the long late career on Concord and Telarc.
The laboratory years: the ambitious Mills College Octet, the first quartet recordings, and the live Fantasy albums that made Brubeck a name beyond the Bay Area. Paul Desmond arrives and is already fully formed.
Read reviews →The peak. Eugene Wright and Joe Morello join the band, Time Out sells a million copies, and Desmond plays some of the most beautiful alto saxophone ever recorded. Sixteen records in eight years at the height of their powers.
Read reviews →The final classic quartet albums, the post-Desmond experiments with Gerry Mulligan and the Brubeck sons, and finally the 1975 duo sessions with Desmond that stand as the definitive document of their twenty-five year partnership.
Read reviews →The long return: Bill Smith on clarinet, then Bobby Militello on alto, Brubeck recording into his eighties with the same curiosity that drove him from the beginning. Ends with Indian Summer, his last studio record.
Read reviews →David Warren Brubeck was born on December 6, 1920, in Concord, California, and grew up on a cattle ranch in the Sacramento Valley. His mother was a classically trained pianist who gave him his first lessons, but it was the ranching life that kept him outdoors until he enrolled at the College of the Pacific as a veterinary science major. He switched to music within a year. After nearly four years in the Army during World War II, including service in Patton's Third Army, he returned to California for graduate study at Mills College in Oakland, where he studied composition with Darius Milhaud. The French composer encouraged Brubeck's interest in polyrhythm and polytonality, and the influence shaped everything that followed.
In 1951 he formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet with Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, and by 1954 the group's popularity had put Brubeck on the cover of Time magazine, only the second jazz musician so honored after Louis Armstrong. He found the recognition embarrassing, believing Duke Ellington deserved it more. When Eugene Wright joined on bass and Joe Morello on drums in 1958, the classic quartet was complete. Time Out, recorded in 1959 with its odd time signatures and Desmond's "Take Five," became the first jazz album to sell a million copies, an achievement Columbia Records had considered impossible when the sessions were proposed.
The quartet toured relentlessly through the early 1960s, including State Department tours that made them cultural ambassadors during the Cold War. Brubeck insisted on keeping Eugene Wright, who was Black, in the group despite pressure from venues and television producers, canceling a 25-date tour of Southern colleges when 22 of the schools refused to present an integrated band. The group disbanded in 1967, and Brubeck spent the next several years composing oratorios, cantatas, and other large-scale works that reflected his lifelong interest in bridging jazz and classical music. He returned to small-group recording in the 1970s, reuniting with Desmond for the duo sessions that produced 1975: The Duets, among the most beautiful records either man ever made.
The later decades brought a new quartet and a prolific run on the Concord and Telarc labels, with Brubeck recording into his mid-eighties. His last studio album, Indian Summer, was released in 2007 when he was eighty-six. He died on December 5, 2012, one day before his ninety-second birthday, on the way to a cardiologist appointment in Norwalk, Connecticut. He had lived in Wilton for more than fifty years with his wife Iola, who wrote the lyrics for his musical The Real Ambassadors and was his partner in nearly everything.