Word: brubeck
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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What Makes David Run? Last year Brubeck won Down Beat's popularity and critics' poll, Metronome's "AllStar" Poll. "Man, they wail!" wrote Down Beat Jazz Editor Nat Hentoff of the quartet. "A kind of teamwork which is without parallel in the entire field of music," wrote Jazz Expert George Avakian, who brought the quartet to Columbia Records. "Complicated and extremely cerebral, [Brubeck's music] has tremendous drive and surprising warmth," wrote Critic John Hammond. This kind of music (for 45 minutes three to five times a night) earns the quartet...
...Brubeck is as untypical in the jazz field as a harp in a Dixieland combo. In a business that has known more than its share of dope and liquor, Brubeck rarely drinks, and, after seriously and philosophically considering the possible value of mescaline,* rejected the whole idea. While itinerant musicians are apt to dally with the belles along the way, Dave is happily married and has four children (a fifth is on the way). Although a shady background was once almost essential to the seasoning of a real-life jazzman, Dave spent his youth playing nursemaid to heifers and earned...
When people try to figure out Dave Brubeck, the result is quite a psychological jam session. "The reason Brubeck is great," says a business associate, "is that he was one guy who knew what he wanted and kept after it." Says his wife Iola: "He's a guy who is very tolerant of other people. For that reason he's always attracted others to him, often lonely people." Says Dave's oldest brother Henry (a music educator in the Santa Barbara school system): "Dave always had my father's horse sense. When we boys were broke...
...contrapuntal arrangement of Brubeck's character has a strong bass of common sense and energy-perhaps because his father was a rancher and cattle buyer. His life also has its flights of lyricism-perhaps because his mother was a music teacher with dreams of being a concert pianist, or perhaps only because he grew up among the green Western hills. But above all these, there are high, hammering, urgent notes-and that may be because Dave Brubeck always seems to be looking for something...
...Shoeless Wonder. In the Brubeck home at Concord, Calif, (pop. 12,493), his mother kept five pianos. Dave was playing the piano by the time he was four; he started searching almost as soon as his fingers touched the keys. Instead of practicing the method of famed Piano Pedagogue Tobias Matthay, used by his mother for her stream of pupils, little David spent every minute that the keyboard was free picking out pieces of his own. He tried harder to please his father (who gave him four cows when he was eight and called Dave his "partner"); later he learned...