Last week jazz legend David Warren Brubeck turned 85. One
wonders how many music lovers realized Brubeck was still alive, let
alone still playing jazz, still out on the road for 80 gigs a year
in a dozen countries.
After all aren’t jazz musicians — the great ones anyway —
supposed to be self-destructive geniuses? Not always. Brubeck has
thus far survived Charlie Parker by 50 years, Coltrane by 38 years,
Charlie Mingus by 26, and Miles Davis by 14. Commenting on the
dysfunctional streak inherent in so many jazz artists, Brubeck once
famously said, “So many of my friends shouldn’t have died; they
just believed they were indestructible and they lived too hard and
those things finally catch up with you.”
Unlike most jazz superstars, Dave Brubeck remains a modest,
unpretentious family man. Raised by a cattle rancher father and a
mother who loved to play Chopin and insisted the family speak
French at the dinner table, Dave often seemed more the nerdy
veterinarian he studied to be in school than the innovative jazz
man he remains. He didn’t smoke dope or drink to excess or hop from
bed to bed. He didn’t even speak the lingo. Instead of a Dizzy
Gillespie getup and goatee, he wore a business suit and horn-rimmed
glasses. In fact the whole jazz scene seemed foreign to Dave. “My
dream,” he said, “was to have a steady job, was not to be on the
road, to exist like a guy that goes to work as a mechanic or a
carpenter and knows he’s going to have a job.”
And yet no matter how effectively Brubeck shunned the excesses
of stardom, there was no escaping the proverbial paying of the
dues. “No person in their right mind would want to put their family
through what I’ve had to put my family through,” he once told an
interviewer. At one point, after returning from World War II (he
served in Patton’s unit), Brubeck and his family lived in a
corrugated iron shack with no windows while Dave sold sandwiches in
office buildings to make ends meet, and at night banged out wild
jazz at the Silver Log Tavern in a hopeless attempt to get the war
out of his system.
To Dave Brubeck jazz was never about being hip or cool. It was
about the music, and pushing it as far as it could go in new
directions and holding on for the wild ride. He remains the living
embodiment of Ezra Pound’s dictum to “make it new.” With Brubeck
everything is on the table, which has resulted in ingenious
combinations of modernist harmonies, contrapuntal choruses,
classical structures, and complex time signatures with classical or
folk or blues or Latin rhythms and improvised rhythms and sometimes
serendipitous screw-ups. “There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a
way of using tricks, and there’s the way I like to play, which is
dangerously, where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes
in order to create something you haven’t created before,” he said.
Not bad for a guy who never learned to read music.
At his peak, in the late '50s and early '60s, Brubeck was the
most popular jazz musician alive, more admired than Bird or Miles
Davis. In 1954, he was pictured on the cover of Time
magazine, a windfall that also caused a stir in the jazz world
since the African-American and quintessential jazzman Duke
Ellington was also profiled in the issue, and was arguably the more
“important” artist. (“Important” being Dave’s word.) All that
changed a half dozen years later with the release of the Dave
Brubeck Quartet’s signature album. Time Out became the
first jazz record to go gold, and the song “Take 5” became one of
the few jazz standards to be heard on commercial radio. (Ironically
Columbia Records at first refused to release Time Out
because of its eccentric rhythms.)
WITH THE DAVE BRUBECK Quartet jazz was for the first time embraced
by a mainstream audience, largely due to the Quartet’s appeal to
white college kids. Critics, of course, considered such vulgar
popularity a sign of weakness. “The jazz world likes to view itself
as outsiders from popular culture,” said jazz critic Ted Gioia.
“And jazz people are always uneasy whenever one of the fraternity
crosses over to this large public audience.” Jazz musicians were
uneasy too, suspicious of anything not sticking to the familiar
Kansas City four-four. “You don’t swing,” Miles Davis once sneered
at Brubeck. Later, Miles had to admit that Brubeck did in fact
swing, but insisted his band didn’t.
Of course Brubeck did swing, and he was cool, in the
sense that Elvis Presley was cool. And William S. Burroughs and
later Andy Warhol. In the sense that he was a creator, not an
imitator. Uninterested in the pose of the sulky, anti-social
tough-guy, Brubeck wanted to be cool on his own terms; a jazzman,
yes, but an essentially decent human being too.
He was controversial for other reasons, too. Brubeck’s music was
too optimistic for the critics’ taste. There was and still is
nothing cool about being an optimist. Cool, rather, is supposed to
be about seeing the dark side, the essential absurdity of life, and
taking pains to numb yourself against the existential angst of
modern civilization. But here was modernism with a smiley face.
Crazy Daddy-O.
And then there was the race card to deal with. Jazz was
considered an African-American invention, indeed the most profound
statement of an entire culture. No white guy could ever really play
jazz, it was said (with the exception, perhaps of Stan Getz of whom
Coltrane once said, “Let’s face it. We would all play like him, if
we could”). Even today the critics maintain that Brubeck’s music
was just West Coast or cool jazz, intellectual jazz, classical
jazz, and — most biting of all — white jazz.
Brubeck largely ignored the critics, while their bleatings were
mostly drowned out by the audience’s applause and the ka-ching of
the cash register.
NOW AT 85, DAVE BRUBECK is still on the road, still losing his
baggage at airports, still arriving at hotels that have lost his
registration, still waiting for the promoter’s van that never shows
up. The road: it has been the undoing of many a great musician, but
Brubeck and his constant travel companion and wife of 63 years Iola
(the “smartest girl in school” whom Dave proposed to the night of
their first date) take it all in stride, enjoying each show like it
will be their last.
Meanwhile Dave Brubeck continues to explore every night on
stage, says the critic Ted Gioia. And his audiences are always
pleasantly surprised. Unlike the tedious, juvenile simplicity of
the rock and roll ballads of aging hippies, Brubeck’s music is as
fresh today as it ever was. “You could play probably a span of 50
years of me playing St. Louis Blues,” he once said, “and most of
the time it will be different every time.”
But what Dave Brubeck really brings to jazz and American music
and American culture and what is sorely missing today is his
incredible optimism. “Dave and Iola’s life together embraces the
American spirit and the best in our values,” says filmmaker Hedrick
Smith, director of the documentary Rediscovering Dave Brubeck. “People
hear Dave and come away feeling better, happier.” Likewise Ted
Gioia has noted that “Dave’s is the classic American optimism we
associate with people like Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, and Dave
was showing that, yes, there was this futuristic approach…but
that it was going to be all right…America always had this sort of
upbeat, embracing, forward-looking view that everything is going to
be all right.”
It is this optimism that has made jazzman Dave Brubeck one of
America’s foremost goodwill ambassadors. Ironic, perhaps, since
given his druthers he might have ended up as something else
entirely: a rancher on some high lonesome prairie or one of those
square workadaddies living in a split level in Dullsville, USA. “I
never wanted this kind of life that I’m still living,” he said
recently. But even at 85, Dave Brubeck can’t help living it and
enjoying it, and we are the better for it.
