 |
| In a 1999 interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross, Dave Brubeck talked about his decades in the music industry and his first love: rodeo roping.
|
This interview was originally broadcast in 1999. Brubeck died on Wednesday at age 91.
In 1954, polls in the leading jazz magazines Metronome and Downbeat selected Dave Brubeck's band as the year's best instrumental group. That same year, Brubeck was the second jazz musician ever featured on the cover of Time Magazine (the first being Louie Armstrong).
Brubeck celebrated a milestone in 2009, when his seminal album Time Out, featuring the hits "Take Five" and "Blue Rondo a la Turk," celebrated its 50th anniversary. Brubeck marked the occasion with an outdoor concert at the Newport Jazz Festival. A month later, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced that he would be a 2009 Kennedy Center Honoree.
In 1999, Brubeck talked to Terry Gross about his decades in the music industry. He explained that he grew up on a 45,000-acre ranch in California, the son of a music teacher and a cattle rancher.
Though Brubeck and his two older brothers studied piano with their mother, the future jazz pianist initially didn't take lessons for very long. He quit when he was 11 to focus on his first love: rodeo roping. But his mother, who thought he was talented at the piano, wouldn't allow him to rope anything larger than a yearling.
"She didn't want my fingers to become hurt," Brubeck said. "My uncle, who was also a rodeo roper, got his finger caught between the saddle horn and the rope, and it took his finger off. And he used to kid the other cowboys and say, 'I would've been a great pianist like my nephew Dave, had I not lost this finger.'"
Brubeck returned to studying the piano after his first year of college, after his zoology teacher offered him some advice. The teacher noticed that Brubeck's attention span seemed more focused on the music school across the street.
"He said, 'Brubeck, your mind is not here with these frogs in the formaldehyde,'" Brubeck said. " 'Your mind is across the lawn, at the conservatory. Will you please go over there next year?'"
Brubeck agreed and started taking classes at the conservatory. But he had a secret: Despite his lessons as a child, he couldn't read music. Once the dean of the conservatory found out, he threatened to not graduate Brubeck.
"But when some of the younger teachers heard this, they went to the dean and said, 'You're making a big mistake, because he writes the best counterpoint that I've ever heard,'" Brubeck said. "So they convinced the dean to let me graduate. And the dean said, 'You can graduate if you promise never to teach and embarrass the conservatory.' And that's the way I've gotten through life, is having to substitute other things for not being able to read well. But I can write, which is something very few people understand."
 |
| Brubeck and Paul Desmond at alto sax ( NY Rev of Bks)
|
GROSS: Now, you grew up in Concord, California. Your mother was a classical piano teacher. Did she give you lessons?
BRUBECK: Yeah, I had two older brothers, Henry and Howard, that also took lessons from my mother, and half the community, the people interested in piano studied with her.
GROSS: Was it hard to study with your mother?
BRUBECK: Yeah. It wasn't so bad for my brothers, but I kind of rebelled.
GROSS: How and why?
BRUBECK: How and why? I wanted to be like my father, who was a cattle man and a rodeo roper. And that was - he was my hero, and I wanted to be more like him. So my mother allowed me to stop taking lessons when I was 11.
And we moved to a 45,000-acre cattle ranch, where I spent my last year in grammar school and my high school years, and all summer I worked with my father. Then I went off to college to study veterinary medicine.
GROSS: In the hope that you'd be a help on the ranch?
BRUBECK: Yes so that - I had to go to college, according to my mother, like my brothers. I didn't ever want to leave my dad or my dad's ranch.
My dad was the manager at the 45,000-acre ranch, but he owned his own 1,200-acre ranch, and I owned four cattle that he gave to me when I graduated from grammar school, from the eighth grade. And those cows multiplied, and he kept track of them for years for me. And that was my herd.
GROSS: You know, I'm used to seeing you behind the piano. It's hard for me to imagine you as a cowboy.
BRUBECK: Well, I could send you pictures.
(LAUGHTER)
BRUBECK: And there even are some, what we call movies in those days, some of the very first kind of home movies, where I'm with my dad, lassoing and branding and big round-up. So it is documented.
GROSS: Did you sing cowboy songs?
BRUBECK: Oh, all of them, yeah, when they were real cowboy songs like "Strawberry Roan" and "Little Joe the Wrangler," tunes that people don't sing anymore. I loved those songs. The words can still make me cry,
(Read more at FRESH AIR )
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(from NY Rev of Bks: Jeremy Bernstein
In the 1960s I took brief winter vacations at the Montego Bay Racquet Club in Jamaica. You never knew who would show up. One winter Hank Greenberg, the baseball player, was there. I drove with him up a steep hill and his rented car began to stall. He said to me, “Bernstein, your father is a rabbi, why don’t you pray.” Another time Senator Javits was there. He was a better legislator than tennis player. For a while Don Budge was the club pro. I took a lesson from him. Then one winter a lanky fellow with glasses appeared. I took him for a fellow academic and when I introduced myself he said, “Paul Desmond.” I was a jazz fan but had never seen Paul Desmond in person. His song “Take Five” had become the anthem of the Dave Brubeck quartet. It has a very unusual 5/4 rhythm and Desmond’s alto saxophone solo stays in your mind forever. The tone skips along like light scattering off water.
As we were alone, we hung out a bit together. We went to a local jazz club where there were some Jamaican kids playing. Desmond couldn’t resist and asked to borrow a saxophone. The kids had no idea who he was but I explained that he was pretty good. When he began to play they were mesmerized.
(Read more at NY Rev of Bks
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(And from The New Yorker: ByTaylor Ho Bynum
Dave Brubeck, who died yesterday, the day before his ninety-second birthday, was a composer and pianist, a jazz ambassador and popularizer, a civil-rights advocate, and a musical explorer. Those musicians, too hip for their own good, who dismiss Brubeck as square do so at their own loss. Whether or not he was to your taste, he was both brilliant and important: an iconoclastic player recognizable from one clustered chord, a restless composer pushing the bounds of genre, and a bridge between the past of the music and the future. He collaborated with Louis Armstrong on the somewhat didactic but deeply heartfelt oratorio “The Real Ambassadors,” and his work was a formative influence upon avant-gardists like the pianist Cecil Taylor and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton, who played on Brubeck’s underrated 1974 album “All the Things We Are.”
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/12/the-brilliance-of-dave-brubeck.html#ixzz2ER0yEsP3