![]() In 1955, Brubeck signed with Columbia Records, then America's most prestigious record company, and his first album for the label, Brubeck Time, appeared several months later. Brubeck and the Quartet had become popular enough to be the subject of a Novemcover story in Time Magazine, only the second time that accolade had been bestowed on a jazz musician (Louis Armstrong made the cover in 1949). ![]() While the Quartet's rhythm section would shift repeatedly over the next several years, in 1956 Joe Morello became their permanent drummer, and in 1958, Eugene Wright took over as bassist.īy this time, Brubeck's fame had spread far beyond Northern California Brubeck's recordings for Fantasy had racked up strong reviews and impressive sales, and along with regular performances at jazz clubs, the Quartet began playing frequent concerts at college campuses across the country, exposing their music to a new and enthusiastic audience that embraced their innovative approach. ![]() In 1951, the Dave Brubeck Quartet made their debut, with the pianist joined by Paul Desmond on alto sax Desmond's easygoing but adventurous approach was an ideal match for Brubeck. Brubeck made his first commercial recordings with this trio for California's Fantasy Records, and while he developed a following in the San Francisco Bay Area, a back injury Brubeck received during a swimming accident prevented him from performing for several months and led him to restructure his group. However, the Octet's music was a bit too adventurous for the average jazz fan at the time, and Brubeck moved on to a more streamlined trio with Cal Tjader on vibes and percussion and Ron Crotty on bass. In 1947, Brubeck formed a band with several other Mills College students, the Dave Brubeck Octet. Unlike many composers in art music, Milhaud had a keen appreciation for jazz, and Brubeck began incorporating many of Milhaud's ideas about unusual time signatures and polytonality into his jazz pieces. Brubeck was honorably discharged in 1946, and enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied under the French composer Darius Milhaud. Patton, and would have fought in the Battle of the Bulge had he not been asked to play piano in a Red Cross show for the troops.īrubeck was requested to put together a jazz band with his fellow soldiers, and he formed a combo called "the Wolfpack," a multi-racial ensemble at a time when the military was still largely segregated. Brubeck left college as World War II was in full swing, and he was soon drafted into the Army he served under Gen. Brubeck followed this advice and graduated in 1942, though several of his instructors were shocked to learn that he still couldn't read music. However, after enrolling in the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California, Brubeck played piano in local night spots to help pay his way, and his enthusiasm for performing was such that one of his professors suggested he would be better off studying music. As a teenager, Brubeck was passionate about music and performed with a local dance band in his spare time, but he planned to follow a more practical career path and study veterinary medicine. His father worked as a cattle rancher, and in 1932, his family moved from Concord to a 45,000-acre spread near the foothills of the Sierras. Brubeck showed an initial reluctance to learn to read music, but his natural facility for the keyboard and his ability to pick up melodies by ear allowed him to keep this a secret for several years. David Warren Brubeck was born in Concord, California on December 6, 1920.īrubeck grew up surrounded by music - his mother was a classically trained pianist and his two older brothers would become professional musicians - and he began receiving piano lessons when he was four years old. At a time when the cooler sounds of West Coast jazz began to dominate the public face of the music, Brubeck proved there was an audience for the style far beyond the confines of the in-crowd, and with his emphasis on unusual time signatures and adventurous tonalities, Brubeck showed that ambitious and challenging music could still be accessible.Īnd as rock & roll began to dominate the landscape of popular music at the dawn of the '60s, Brubeck enjoyed some of his greatest commercial and critical success, expanding the audience for jazz and making it hip with young adults and college students. In the 1950s and '60s, few American jazz artists were as influential, and fewer still were as popular, as Dave Brubeck. ![]() The pianist and "Take Five" creator was one of the great post-bop jazz innovators of the 1950s. ![]()
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