Dave Brubeck

At 91 years old, Dave Brubeck has this physical status:

In 1951, Brubeck organized the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with Paul Desmond on alto saxophone. The two took up residency at San Francisco's Black Hawk nightclub and had success touring college campuses, recording a series of live albums.

The first of these live albums, Jazz at Oberlin, was recorded in March 1953 in the Finney Chapel at Oberlin College. Brubeck's live performance was credited with legitimizing the field of jazz music at Oberlin, and the album is one of the earliest examples of cool jazz. Brubeck returned to College of the Pacific to record Jazz at the College of the Pacific in December of that year.

Following the release of Jazz at the College of the Pacific, Brubeck signed with Fantasy Records, believing that he had a stake in the company and worked as an artists and repertoire promoter for the label, encouraging the Weiss brothers to sign other contemporary jazz performers, including Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker and Red Norvo. Upon discovering that the deal was for a half interest in his own recordings, Brubeck quit to sign with another label, Columbia Records.

In June 1954, Brubeck released Jazz Goes to College, with double bassist Bob Bates and drummer Joe Dodge. The album is a compilation of the quartet's visit to three colleges: Oberlin College, University of Michigan, and University of Cincinnati, and features seven songs, two of which were written by Brubeck and Desmond. "Balcony Rock", the opening song on the album, was noted for its timing and uneven tonalities, themes that would be explored by Brubeck later.

Brubeck was featured on the cover of Time in November 1954, the second jazz musician to be featured, following Louis Armstrong in February 1949. Brubeck personally found this acclaim embarrassing, since he considered Duke Ellington more deserving and was convinced that he had been favored as a Caucasian. In one encounter with Ellington, he knocked on the door of Brubeck's hotel room to show him the cover; Brubeck's response was, "It should have been you."

Early bassists for the group included Ron Crotty, Bates, and Bates' brother Norman; Lloyd Davis and Dodge held the drum chair. In 1956, Brubeck hired drummer Joe Morello, who had been working with Marian McPartland; Morello's presence made possible the rhythmic experiments that were to come. In 1958, African-American bassist Eugene Wright joined for the group's Department of State tour of Europe and Asia. The group visited Poland, Turkey, India, Ceylon, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq on behalf of the Department of State. They spent two weeks in Poland, giving thirteen concerts and visiting with Polish musicians and citizens as part of the People-to-People program. Wright became a permanent member in 1959, finishing the "classic era" of the quartet's personnel. During this time, Brubeck was strongly supportive of Wright's inclusion in the band, and reportedly canceled several concerts when the club owners or hall managers objected to presenting an integrated band. He also canceled a television appearance when he found out that the producers intended to keep Wright off-camera.

In 1959, the Dave Brubeck Quartet recorded Time Out. The album, which featured pieces entirely written by members of the quartet, notably uses unusual time signatures in the field of music—and especially jazz—a crux which Columbia Records was enthusiastic about, but which they were nonetheless hesitant to release.

The release of Time Out required the cooperation of Columbia Records president Goddard Lieberson, who underwrote and released Time Out, on the condition that the quartet record a conventional album of the American South, Gone with the Wind, to cover the risk of Time Out becoming a commercial failure.

Featuring the cover art of S. Neil Fujita, Time Out was released in December 1959, to negative critical reception. Nonetheless, on the strength of these unusual time signatures, the album quickly went Platinum, and peaked at number two on the Billboard 200. It was the first jazz album to sell more than a million copies. The single "Take Five" off the album quickly became a jazz standard, despite its unusual composition and its time signature: 54 time.

Time Out was followed by several albums with a similar approach, including Time Further Out: Miro Reflections (1961), using more 54, 64, and 98, plus the first attempt at 74; Countdown—Time in Outer Space (dedicated to John Glenn, 1962), featuring 114 and more 74; Time Changes (1963), with much 34, 104 and 134; and Time In (1966). These albums (except Time In) were also known for using contemporary paintings as cover art, featuring the work of Joan Miró on Time Further Out, Franz Kline on Time in Outer Space, and Sam Francis on Time Changes.

On a handful of albums in the early 1960s, clarinetist Bill Smith replaced Desmond. These albums were devoted to Smith's compositions and thus had a somewhat different aesthetic than other Brubeck Quartet albums. Nonetheless, according to critic Ken Dryden, "[Smith] proves himself very much in Desmond's league with his witty solos". Smith was an old friend of Brubeck's; they would record together, intermittently, from the 1940s until the final years of Brubeck's career.

In 1961, Brubeck and his wife, Iola, developed a jazz musical, The Real Ambassadors, based in part on experiences they and their colleagues had during foreign tours on behalf of the Department of State. The soundtrack album, which featured Louis Armstrong, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, and Carmen McRae was recorded in 1961; the musical was performed at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival.

At its peak in the early 1960s, the Brubeck Quartet was releasing as many as four albums a year. Apart from the "College" and the "Time" series, Brubeck recorded four LP records featuring his compositions based on the group's travels, and the local music they encountered. Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A. (1956, Morello's debut with the group), Jazz Impressions of Eurasia (1958), Jazz Impressions of Japan (1964), and Jazz Impressions of New York (1964) are less well-known albums and they produced Brubeck standards such as "Summer Song", "Brandenburg Gate", "Koto Song", and "Theme from Mr. Broadway". (Brubeck wrote, and the Quartet performed, the theme song for this Craig Stevens CBS drama series; the music from the series became material for the New York album.) In 1961, Brubeck appeared in a few scenes of the British jazz/beat film All Night Long, which starred Patrick McGoohan and Richard Attenborough. Brubeck merely plays himself, with the film featuring close-ups of his piano fingerings. Brubeck performs "It's a Raggy Waltz" from the Time Further Out album and duets briefly with bassist Charles Mingus in "Non-Sectarian Blues".

Brubeck also served as the program director of WJZZ-FM (now WEZN-FM) while recording for the quartet. He achieved his vision of an all-jazz format radio station along with his friend and neighbor John E. Metts, one of the first African Americans in senior radio management.

The final studio album for Columbia by the Desmond/Wright/Morello quartet was Anything Goes (1966), featuring the songs of Cole Porter. A few concert recordings followed, and The Last Time We Saw Paris (1967) was the "Classic" quartet's swan-song.

Brubeck produced The Gates of Justice in 1968, a cantata mixing Biblical scripture with the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1971, the new senior management at Columbia Records decided not to renew Brubeck's contract, as they wished to focus on rock music. He moved to Atlantic Records.

Brubeck's music was used in the 1985 film Ordeal by Innocence. He also composed for—and performed with his ensemble on—"The NASA Space Station", a 1988 episode of the CBS TV series This Is America, Charlie Brown.

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