Dave Brubeck

Dave Brubeck
David Warren "Dave" Brubeckwas an American jazz pianist and composer, considered to be one of the foremost exponents of cool jazz. He wrote a number of jazz standards, including "In Your Own Sweet Way" and "The Duke". Brubeck's style ranged from refined to bombastic, reflecting his mother's attempts at classical training and his improvisational skills. His music is known for employing unusual time signatures, and superimposing contrasting rhythms, meters, and tonalities...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPianist
Date of Birth6 December 1920
CityConcord, CA
CountryUnited States of America
One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It’s the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It’s the first thing you hear when you’re born — or before you’re born — and it’s the last thing you hear.
When you start out with goals - mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically - you never exhaust that. I started doing that in the 1940s. It's still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements.
That's the beauty of music. You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn't make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz.
I was young, too, ... It was new for both of us.
The Pacific Mozart Chorale in Berkeley asked four different composers (the other three are John Adams, Meredith Monk and David Lang) to fill in what Mozart left out,
It has taken me almost 60 years finally to compose something I wanted to write when I was a young soldier in Europe.
And it still produces, too. The Stockton Symphony is top-notch in my book, and there's some great students coming to the institute. Joe Gilman (the American River College music professor who also teaches at the institute) is one of the most talented pianists I've ever heard. That praise doesn't do him justice,