Dave Brubeck: a bio
Beginnings:
_____If Dave 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, Dave 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 favoured classical music, she could never dissuade young Dave 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), Dave Brubeck didn't harbour 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 Brubeck became enamoured with life on the ranch and relished its daily chores. Dave 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 musicia - working between 8 at night until 4 in the morning - made the music profession decidedly unattractive.

College Years:
_____Dave 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. Dave 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. Dave 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 Dave 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, Darius Millhaud's tutelage, while training him in the elements of the classical idiom, actually reinforced his ardour for jazz. Although Darius 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 Dave 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 Darius Millhaud and sought primarily to employ the Millhaud classical mantras of polytonality and polyrhythm in his compositions. It was Darius Millhaud's legitimization of the jazz style to Dave 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 Paul Desmond left after three weeks, engendering in Dave Brubeck a bitterness towards the man with whom he would later become famous. Thus when Dave Brubeck formed the Brubeck Trio in November of 1949 in Oakland, Paul Desmond was not among the members, although he soon began sitting in every night. Dave Brubeck was resistant towards making it a Quartet despite the group's success, and an unfortunate neck injury suffered by Dave Brubeck put an end to his playing for six months and to the promising future of the Trio.

First Successes:
_____Dave Brubeck returned from his injury in June, 1951, and formed the Quartet with Paul Desmond, Joe Dodge, and Bates that was to reshape the American jazz scene in just a few years time. The Quartet had the good fortune to not only have four talented musicians, but also to be in California in the early 50's, when such luminaries as Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker, and Gerry Mulligan would, due to their geographical and stylistic proximity, become frontmen for the "West Coast Cool Jazz" movement. After three months, the Dave Brubeck Quartet began travelling in Dave Brubeck's station wagon (with the string bass tied to the roof). At first they did the normal jazz club circuit, but Dave Brubeck, always particular about the type of audience in front of which he played, decided upon an audience which would eventually provide them with the support and inertia to propel them onto the popular music scene: college students. After establishing his own record label, Fantasy, Dave Brubeck released the Quartet's first album, "Jazz at Oberlin", in 1953. The album was a modest success - enough to get the Quartet a contract with Columbia Records - but was more notable for being one of the first jazz LP's to be recorded in concert instead of in a studio. Their first album on Columbia was "Jazz Goes to College" in 1954, which sold over 100,000 copies and placed Dave Brubeck and his Quartet in the national spotlight. In this same year Dave Brubeck became the first jazz artist to grace the cover of Time magazine as part of an article which described him as "the most exciting new jazz artist at work today" and the Quartet's music as "some of the strangest and loveliest music ever played since jazz was born".

The Classic Quartet:
_____Despite the runaway popularity, neither the evolution of Dave Brubeck nor that of the Dave Brubeck Quartet was finished, as in 1956 the group replaced drummer Joe Dodge, a sturdy backup man, with the high-profile Joe Morello, transforming the Quartet from a two-virtuoso to three-virtuoso band. Understandably, tension developed between Joe Morello and the original members Paul Desmond and Bates, but as the players began to get used to the sharing of time and Bates was replaced by Eugene Wright on bass, the situation was resolved and the Quartet's most well-known collaborations were to result.

_____In 1959 the Quartet released "Time Out", a collection of songs which experimented with different time signatures, which included the hits "Take Five" and "Blue Rondo à la Turk". "Take Five", which soon became Dave Brubeck and the Quartet's signature tune, was officially composed by Paul Desmond but derived from Joe Morello's original 5/4 beat. The composition can be read as a conciliatory act between the two previously feuding bandmates. "Blue Rondo à la Turk" was a venture into 9/8 time and a play on Wolfgang Mozart's "Rondo alla Turca". The wild success of the album and "Take Five" in particular catapulted the Quartet and its leader beyond simply the temporal successes of the day and into the permanent jazz canon. The Quartet continued to produce popular jazz albums, including the inevitable "Time Further Out" which experimented further with nontraditonal meter. Dave Brubeck himself, however, seized upon his popularity to branch out into other projects and expand upon his aspirations of being a composer in other realms. In 1960, a ballet he wrote entitled "Points on Jazz" was accepted into the repertory of the American Ballet Theatre. Dave Brubeck wrote the score for "The Real Ambassadors", an attempt to infuse a Broadway show with the emotions of jazz and its players, and its performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1962 with Louis Armstrong is remembered as a seminal event in the history of that venerable annual show.

_____As Dave Brubeck reached across boundaries to introduce jazz to different disciplines, the Quartet reached around the world to introduce jazz into new countries, touring extensively in Europe and Asia. Indeed, the popularity of the Dave Brubeck Quartet overseas was so widespread that longtime Dave Brubeck supporter and comedian Mort Sahl remarked that "...whenever John Foster Dulles visits a country, the State Department sends that Brubeck Quartet in a few weeks later to repair the damage..." The Dave Brubeck classic "Blue Rondo à la Turk" was in fact composed when the band was touring in Turkey and was based on a traditional Turkish 9/8 meter, and the Quartet released a collection of selections recorded on the Continent as "The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe" in 1958 and "Jazz Impressions of Eurasia", recorded after an extended tour in Eastern Europe and the Middle East in 1958. Although the Quartet enjoyed continued success, their development soon began to diverge from that of mainstream jazz, and they disbanded in 1967, regrouping only once in 1976 for a twenty-fifth anniversary tour.

Later Career:
_____After the breakup of the 'Classic Quartet', as it has come to be known, Dave Brubeck continued to expound upon his role as a jazz-inspired composer, creating ballets, scores, oratorios, cantatas, symphonic pieces, classical compositions, liturgical compositions (including a contemporary mass), and Native American-inspired compositions. He continued to work not only on his own and with contemporary jazz masters, but also collaborated in a Quartet with his sons Dan Brubeck, Darius Brubeck, and Chris Brubeck, all jazz artists of their own merit. Among the awards and honours Dave Brubeck received after the breakup of the Classic Quartet are: playing for four presidents (Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, and Clinton), election to the Down Beat Hall of Fame, San Francisco Jazz Festival Laureate, an appearance at the Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow Summit in 1988, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, National Medal of the Arts, composing a score for Pope John Paul II's visit to San Francisco in 1987, six honorary doctorate degrees, named a Duke Ellington Fellow at Yale University, and a doctorate degree from Duisberg University - the first doctorate degree awarded to an American jazz musician from a German university. A change in Dave Brubeck's outlook is apparent in his development from the days of the Classic Quartet to his later work. In the early days, the only written parts of the tunes were the short intro and conclusion and a sketchy chord progression, and Brubeck confessed that 90% of the notes the group played occurred to them as they played. Despite this reliance on improvisation, he still received ample criticism that he couldn't swing (a hallmark of jazz up to the 1950's), to which he responded that "...any jackass can swing. But to try something new and swing at the same time, that's hard..." But as he continued to develop, he came to realize his dreams of being a composer, and his later work (other than strictly jazz tunes) relies more and more on written composition. Despite his obvious successes, critics often refuse to acknowlege Dave Brubeck importance in the development of jazz music, alluding to his abundant popular success as a mark of a want of merit. Yet regardless of the critics' subjective assessment of the merit of his contribution to the jazz idiom, he is arguably responsible for initiating more listeners into the art of jazz - a legacy more fruitful and healthy for jazz music as a whole than most.

Joe Morello: a bio
_______Joe Morello (Joseph A. Morello) was born on July 17th, 1928 in Springfield, Massachusetts. A brilliant drummer, Joe Morello played early on with Phil Woods and Sal Salvador. Joe Morello had short stints during 1952-1953 with Johnny Smith, Stan Kenton's Orchestra, and Gil Melle, but really gained a strong reputation for his work with the Marian McPartland Trio (1953-1956); he also played during the period with Tal Farlow and Jimmy Raney.

_____Joe Morello gained fame as a member of The Dave Brubeck Quartet during 1956-1967, making it possible for Dave Brubeck to experiment with unusual time signatures. Due to his failing eyesight (he went blind in 1976), Joe Morello has mostly worked as a drum instructor since (Danny Gottlieb was a student), but still plays and participated in reunions with Dave Brubeck and Marian McPartland. He has led sessions for Score® (1956), RCA® (1961-1962), Ovation® (1969), and DMP® (1993-1994).

...from Scott Yanow.