Neapolitan Days-Part II

Saturday, I went to see Dave Brubeck, who is perhaps best known for "Take Five". He is still on a whirlwind concert tour, although he has a conductor who probably organizes most musical things (that an agent doesn't handle.) Brubeck still plays the piano, and he has extraordinarily long fingers, about 25% longer than most male fingers I've seen. He sat upon the stage and talked with a member of our jazz faculty.

Brubeck grew up in a musical family. His mother played piano and taught his two older brothers piano. She intended for them to both be professional musicians. Dave, however, was commandeered by his father. "This one's mine," he proclaimed. Dave's father was a cowboy on a full ranch out in rural California, and he wanted a ranch hand. When Brubeck grew old enough to go to college, his mother insisted he attend. "Only if he becomes a veterinarian and comes back here to the ranch to help me after he graduates," said the dad. "That's fine by me!" said Brubeck. Turns out he loved being out on the ranch with his dad, spending time all together. "He was a man's man," said Brubeck lovingly during his talk. You could tell that he holds really fond memories of that time with his dad.

"So I started school pre-med," confessed Brubeck amid laughs from the audience. "That lasted until I got to zoology. There, the professor said to me one day, "Brubeck! Your mind isn't here with frogs in formaldehyde. It's over at the conservatory across the way. So do me a favor and go over there next semester and leave me in peace!"" So Brubeck went across the way to major in music. But, unlike the other students, he didn't have the theory or performance background. His brothers had had the training, but he had been out on the ranch with his dad. It's possible this is what allowed him to step outside the boundaries and look at things in a new way with his composition and performance. Certainly, I don't recall hearing about the other Brubecks in a significant manner.

He then talked about the music education portion of his life. ""Go wake up Brubeck," the professor would say to my classmate, "and ask him what chord I just played." So he'd wake me up from where I was half asleep, and I'd say, "Oh, that's the first chord in "Don't Worry About Me." But the professor would say, "That's not a proper answer. Why don't you come up here and play it?" So I'd go play it, and he'd say, "Well, that's right. That's the chord I played. But why can't you just say, "It's a dominant seventh with a flat ninth?" You see, I knew the chords but I never knew the names for them, and that's the way a lot of the great jazz musicians were. They'll know all the harmonies inside and out but they don't know what they're called.

"I didn't even read music. Now, each year, you had to take an instrument. Strings one year, winds the next, and so forth. I did fine until I got to piano my senior year because I could play by ear. Then, I knew I was in for it. So I sat down in my first lesson, and 5 minutes later, the teacher went to the dean. And the dean called me in and said, "Ms. so-and-so tells me you can't read music."

""That's right," I said.

""Well, I'm sorry, but I can't let you graduate."

""That's okay."

""Well, what will you do?"

""Oh, don't worry about me," I said. "I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to play jazz."

"So, I left his office, and then my professors went to see him. My counterpoint teacher went and said, "You have to let him graduate! He's written the best counterpoint I've ever seen!"" [Brubeck also mentioned another professorial advocate or two at this point, which I forget.]

The conductor for Brubeck stood up and said, "Tell them what happened. What were the conditions under which they let you graduate?"

"That I promise never to teach," said Brubeck. Ripples of laughter flowed through the auditorium. "Of course, now my college - the College of the Pacific - has a Brubeck Institute. And I get in a few suggestions every now and again. But that's true. I promised never to teach."

Brubeck also mentioned that "a lot of wonderful musicians can't read music. They can write, but they can't read, and I'm the same way. Somebody ought to study it because it's a phenomenon that's more common than you'd think. And you think, "Well, if you can write it, you can read it," but that's not necessarily true. And if I told you some of the names of these people who can't read, you wouldn't believe it." He refused to share, so some must still be living. Pretty interesting.

He also spoke about writing a classical piece. "A friend asked me to write a symphony. "But I don't know how to do that!" I protested. "Tell you what," he said. "Write it like you would for piano and then you just write down how you think the orchestration might go, what instruments you think might play. Just do the first movement and then show it to me and I'll correct all your mistakes." So I wrote the first movement, and I showed it to him, and he said, "Good. It looks great." And he didn't change anything. So I wrote the second and third movements, and he looked them over. And then he said, "Go write the rest of it and don't show it to me until it's all done." So I did.

"Years later, a young choreographer went into a second-hand record store and asked, "Do you have anything that's a mix of jazz and classical?", and the owner said, "I think I might have something in the attic," and he pulled out this record. So the choreographer created a ballet. And somebody called me and said, "Dave, I really enjoyed your ballet in Paris!" And I said, "What ballet in Paris?" And then it came to Vancouver, and someone called and said "Dave, I really enjoyed your ballet in Vancouver". So I thought I should check this out." :)

What's really exciting is that some lost recordings of Brubeck's are going to be issued soon. They were found in a fireproof vault. Why weren't they released before? "We were on Columbia's label", said Brubeck. "But we were doing an event, and the RCA trucks were there. Unbeknownst to us, they secretly left their mics on. And we just found these reels. We're listening through them now, and there's some really Wild stuff on there! Just WILD! I didn't know I was that wild," he said. So funny. He's now a pretty frail man with a halting voice and hunched walk, so to hear him (very correctly) talk about his wild younger days is a comical juxtaposition.

In any case, another amazing talk.