Dave Brubeck: A Biography 
Dave Brubeck: Beginnings to Early Career
Beginnings
If Brubeck was the atypical jazzman in the 50's, it was due to the unique
route he took to stardom. Born in 1920 in Concord, California, Brubeck's
mother, a piano teacher herself, exposed him early to music. But while
she was able to wean his two older brothers on her favored classical
music, she could never dissuade young Brubeck from banging out his own
selections and popular tunes, which he began doing when he was four.
Despite (or maybe because of) the prevalence of musicians in the
household (his brothers would later become dean of Palomar College and
head of the Santa Barbara High School music department), Brubeck didn't
harbor dreams of becoming a professional musician -- he wanted instead to
become a rancher. With the family's move to a ranch in the foothills of
the Sierras near Ione, California, when he was 11, Dave became enamored
with life on the ranch and relished its daily chores. Brubeck still
enjoyed playing the piano, but to his mother's vocational overtures he
responded:" Ma, you've got two musicians: I want to be a cattleman." By
the time he was 15, he was playing weekend dances in Ione and the
surrounding towns, but the schedule of being a musician -- working
between 8 at night until 4 in the morning -- made the music profession
decidedly unattractive.
College Years
Brubeck was reluctant to leave the ranch when he was 18, but his parents
persuaded him to go the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California,
by suggesting the possibility of his studying to become a veterinarian so
that he could return to the ranch after school. The folly of that plan
became apparent in his first year, as he spent more time during
anatomy class staring across the lawn at the conservatory than taking
notes, and, with the suggestion of his science department advisor, opted to
switch to a music major after just one year. Brubeck advanced through
the curriculum with mainly raw talent, and could not, in fact, read music
when he graduated. Coasting through his classes and playing six nights a
week in jazz clubs, it wasn't until he met the dynamic Harold Meeske
that his intellect was awakened and he was stirred by both the power of
music and by a desire to be a composer. It was also in college that he
met Iola Marie Whitlock, the director of a weekly campus radio show he
played on, whom he asked to marry him two weeks after they met. They
were married for ???? years.
Brubeck graduated from the College of the Pacific with his music degree
in 1942 and was immediately drafted for service. His musical talents
enabled him avoid abandoning his convictions against fighting in the
war, though, as he spent two years in a camp band at Camp Haan in Southern
California. He was eventually sent to Europe in 1944 as manpower
shortages became acute and was slated to be sent to the front, but the
intervention of a jazzophilic army officer kept Brubeck travelling about
Europe surreptitiously entertaining troops. He travelled to the front
lines, but armed with a piano instead of a weapon.
Early Career
When the war ended, he returned immediately to pursue his jazz aspirations,
enrolling at Mills College under the GI Bill to study under French
classical composer Darius Millhaud. Ironically, though, Millhaud's
tutelage, while training him in the elements of the classical idiom,
actually reinforced his ardor for jazz. Although Millhaud plied him with
polytonality and counterpoint, he also told him:"If you want to express
this country, you will always use the jazz idiom." Indeed, although
popularly held opinion asserts that Brubeck was well-trained in the
classics and sought primarily to fuse classical music and modern jazz,
this is in fact erroneous as he received scant formal training in the
classics even under Millhaud and sought primarily to employ the Millhaud
classical mantras of polytonality and polyrhythm in his compositions. It
was Millhaud's
legitimization of the jazz style to Brubeck that gave the young pianist
the drive to explore and expand upon the prevailing jazz paradigm.
He began his music career in 1947 by joining a jazz band at a San
Francisco club named Geary Cellar -- a collaboration that was
undistinguished except for the fact that he began playing with alto
saxophonist Paul Desmond, whom he had met briefly while playing in the
Army. In 1949, he left San Francisco to join the Paul Desmond Trio at
the Bard Box in Palo Alto, but Desmond left after three weeks,
engendering in Brubeck a bitterness towards the man with whom he would
later become famous. Thus when Brubeck formed the Brubeck Trio in
November of 1949 in Oakland, Desmond was not among the members, although
he soon began sitting in every night. Brubeck was resistant towards
making it a Quartet despite the group's success, and an unfortunate neck
injury suffered by Brubeck put an end to his playing for six months and
to the promising future of the Trio.
Introduction to Dave Brubeck
First Successes, the Classic Quartet, and Beyond
References and Brubeck Discography
Questions, comments, or conerns?
smt3@acpub.duke.edu