We were sad to hear of the passing of jazz legend Dave Brubeck (December 6, 1920 – December 5, 2012) just one day before his 92nd birthday. Although several of his songs, like Take 5, are jazz standards, many of our staff didn’t grow up listening to jazz as much as our parents. However, with the onset of sampling and subsequent crate digging, many soulheads discovered that jazz can be funky and soulful too….very soulful.
Take 5, one of his biggest hits, continues to be one of those jazz standards that simply transports you to another time and place. It’s remarkable bridge which connects its familiar melody soars from the speakers. His stellar tone and impeccable timing and phrasing will be sorely missed. R.I.P.
Here are some of Mr. Brubeck’s most important songs performed live throughout the years:
Take 5
The Duke
In Your Own Sweet Way
Dave Brubeck Bio from AllMusic.com:
In the 1950s and ’60s, few American jazz artists were as influential, and fewer still were as popular, as Dave Brubeck. 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. And as rock & roll began to dominate the landscape of popular music at the dawn of the 1960s, 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.
David Warren Brubeck was born in Concord, California on December 6, 1920. Brubeck 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. 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. Brubeck’s 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. 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. However, after enrolling in the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California, Brubeck played piano in local nightspots 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. Brubeck followed this advice and graduated in 1942, though several of his instructors were shocked to learn that he still couldn’t read music.
Brubeck left college as World War II was in full swing, and he was soon drafted into the Army; he served under Gen. George S. 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. Brubeck 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 was honorably discharged in 1946, and enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied under the French composer Darius Milhaud. 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. In 1947, Brubeck formed a band with several other Mills College students, the Dave Brubeck Octet. 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. 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.
