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
We immediately gelled and we both were hearing things together and feeling the beat together. We both had a wonderful ball ... it was a fun, enjoyable musical experience.
Don't be a perfectionist... leave that to the classical musicians.
Kinship doesn't come from skin color. It's in your soul and your mind.
The worst thing about the life of a jazz musician on the road is getting to the gig. Once you're there and playing, it's marvelous.
Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.
It's like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.
Damn it, when I'm bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic-take it or leave it.
Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.
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.
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.
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,
On my way out here, I was writing all the way on the plane, ... and as soon as I got to San Diego, I arranged with the symphony to find an old practice room in their basement. It's better than two-thirds completed. I'd say four-fifths.
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.
Take Five. There's a certain piece that if we don't play, we're in trouble.