Dave Brubeck interview (nov 1998)

“After the war in 1946, I was studying with Darius Milhaud in Oakland, California and my first group, the octet, was formed in his class. Paul Desmond and Cal Tjader were studying across the bay at San Francisco and they'd come over and sit in with the five of us who were in the class. But the octet couldn’t work. We rehearsed for three years, and we got three gigs - one paying job and two freebies’ - in all that time, so in disgust I said I ’ll just take the rhythm section of Cal and bassist Ron Crotty to work as a trio, and add the horns back in when things improve.’

“The first horn I added was Paul Desmond in 1951. Not that I picked him; he picked us. He was working with Alvino Rey’s band in New York, and he came back to the west coast when he heard that the trio was doing great. Contrary to what most people still continue to believe, and write, is that in rare moments when he was trying to playing something hard and swinging. And to think people thought that was disrupting! To hear a beautiful alto saxophone like that! That shows you how hard it was to change the public. But we did, and when you think of what we did with the Time Out album in 1959: we could’ve done that in 1946! It took 13 years of waiting for the right time to do that, and in 1959 I sensed that I had a big enough audience to do that.

“Another thing the critics like to say is that ‘Brubeck made it by playing to the college kids'. I wish they’d been with me and seen where we worked across the United States, and the way we lived. Because at the same time we were working the colleges, we were working the joints. That's something they like to forget. We used to drive twenty-five hundred miles without ever going to a hotel or motel. We'd just start out and drive. And we did that on quite a few tours. We were working all the wonderful jazz joints at that time.

“And we were the biggest group in jazz! I don’t care black, white, purple or what. The black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, had its first jazz poll and everybody else

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P h o t o the trio was the big group that broke through. We were group of the year in Metronome magazine and in Down Beat. When Paul joined us, the first club-owner offered to pay him if he’d just go home for two weeks. And I had to fight to add any of the horns in. What you have to remember is that the people who worked in those days were in trios. For some reason the public didn’t like horns. They were just stuck in that groove. You could have bass-guitar-piano, or drums-bass-piano, or a group like that. Once in a while, there was a group with a horn in it, but mostly it was without a horn for a few years there.

“So, whenever Paul came, he would sit in for free because we were getting paid scale, and they really couldn’t afford an extra fourth man. A lot of the time we weren’t getting paid scale, and they’d give us a cheque for scale, which we had to cash at the bar, and then they took half the money back. But it meant they could prove to the union that they’d paid you scale. Paul and I worked in strip-joints in San Francisco, in dime-dances, and in the sleaziest dance-halls. The worst place was a good hotel; that’s the most demeaning kind of job for a musician. We used to call it businessman’s bounce’, you know, that 6/8 bouncy music? That was the worst. At least in a strip joint, or a dime-dance, everybody was so out of it they didn’t care what you were playing, and so you were free to play what you wanted.

“That shows you how hard it was to crack it, because Paul was one of the most lyrical players I ’ve ever heard in jazz. No matter what he played, it was always beautiful to me except listed there was black. The one white group was us, and we won. So you gotta keep in mind that we were covering everything. We were the first jazz group on the college campuses, we were the first into the symphony orchestras in making that a place to work, and we were the first into the churches.

“I don’t exactly remember all the early albums that well, but you’ll see that in that period they were almost all standards. I knew if I was going to survive, and was going to be able to feed my family that, playing my own compositions, I was going to starve right down to nuthin’. I knew I couldn't play my own compositions, and make it. So in those early recordings with the trio and the quartet, you'll hardly find anything but standards. And then one night in 1954 or 55, Paul said, ‘We’ve got to hire somebody to write some original music for us. All the other groups that are making it now have their own music, and all we’re doing is playing these standards.’ I said, Paul, don't tell me I ’ve gotta hire somebody. I can write two standards in a half-hour.’ So he said, Why don’cha do it?’ Even he had forgotten I could write. I almost had forgotten it myself. What's funny is. I wrote a standard that same night. The other tune is one that nobody's played, but one was ‘In Your Own Sweet Way'. Joe Pass, Bill Evans, and so many guys have recorded it and, pow, I just sat down and wrote it like that.” Dave Brubeck’s latest album So What’s New? is on Telarc CD-83434. Brubeck’s group plays the Oris London Jazz Festival on 10 November