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Brubeck Talks
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15209 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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8 / 1989 |
2,480 Words |
| Author
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Tom Pniewski
Tom Pniewski is a musicologist at Hunter College in New York. |
Probably no other single musician has been as influential in the development of contemporary jazz as Dave Brubeck. A composer and pianist of wide-ranging interests and sensibilities, he has shaped not only the music but also the audience for jazz in our time. He has toured the world as an enthusiastically welcomed ambassador of this peculiarly American artform. His personal musical world embraces all forms--instrumental and choral, classical and popular, Eastern and Western, secular and sacred.
Born in California in 1920, Brubeck took his first piano lessons at the age of four from his mother, a professional singer and part-time choir director. She also taught his two older brothers, both of whom followed more academic careers. Henry, the eldest, headed the music department at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California; Howard, the second eldest, held a similar position at Palomar College, retiring six years ago as dean of humanities.
"I escaped all that classical training and practicing my brothers endured," Brubeck said in a recent exclusive interview. "In fact, I never really learned to read music. At four or five, I was already composing, picking things out on the piano, but I couldn't write them down. Even later on, when I was studying with Milhaud, I had a struggle to play back anything I had composed."
In his teens, from about the age of fourteen, he appeared with local California hillbilly, swing, and Dixieland bands. Although his musical abilities were clearly apparent, he had originally planned to follow his father and work on a cattle ranch--the elder Brubeck managed a 45,000-acre ranch in northern
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