1953 was a banner year for the Brubeck Quartet. Their popularity on college campuses exploded and Brubeck and Desmond were quickly becoming jazz stars. The group recorded two of the best live albums in their voluminous discography. 1953 also saw another personnel change in the band with the exit of bassist Wyatt Ruther and the [...]
The Dave Brubeck Quartet's continued to make waves in the jazz community in 1952, winning the first of numerous awards from jazz publications and appearing in serious discussions in those same publications. Fantasy continued to record and release music from the group. Dave Brubeck live, with Wyatt Ruther on bass, Herb Barman on drums, & [...]
This post is merely an explanation and an alert for the post I just published and for future posts. For almost a year, I've been working on a project near and dear to my heart, and that is the creation of a discography of the music of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. It's still a work [...]
Yesterday, the Raggy Waltz staff brought to my attention that it was Cal Tjader's birthday. Today, the Raggy Waltz staff have alerted me to the fact that it's the birthday of another famous Northern Californian jazz musician. Born 90 years ago on July 17, 1928, pianist Vince Guaraldi was not only a contemporary of Cal [...]
Say what you want about social media and its terrible effect on culture, but today it proved its worth. Scrolling through Twitter this morning, I was informed through a tweet that it was Cal Tjader's birthday. Born 93 years ago on this date, July 16, 1925 in St. Louis, Missouri, Tjader's family relocated to the [...]
Any true Dave Brubeck fan will tell you that the Dave Brubeck Quartet always sounded its best when it performed live. Brubeck himself made the observation that the "audience is the fifth member" of his group, spurring him and the other members of the quartet to greater heights of musical inspiration. As a true fan, [...]
Great interview piece of Dave Brubeck
A recent press release from the Detroit Jazz Festival stated that 90-year-old Dave Brubeck, advised by his doctors that it would be a bad idea for him to travel, had cancelled his scheduled concert, A vivid force in American music since the latter ’40s, and a charismatic performer, Brubeck shines in the public eye, and it will be a shame if his performing career is over.
I had a wonderful opportunity to interview Brubeck four years ago, for a Jazziz story focusing on his involvement in education. It was a narrative article — the unedited transcript appears below, following four expository paragraphs.
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Few jazz musicians can discuss the whys and wherefores of jazz education so eloquently as pianist-composer Dave Brubeck, whose career could serve as a case study in how to blend the conservatory and the working world beyond.
A household name since Time magazine placed his…
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This may have just saved my life
One of the things that I liked about this African-American Literature class was that the things I learned in class almost always became relevant and useful afterwards. It was uncanny. One of these uncanny moments was when, a day after learning about the poet Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones. I was reading a book about [...]
One thing I appreciated about this class was the absolutely fantastic discussions that we had. I looked forward to class primarily because of these discussions, in fact. Well, they started off as discussions, anyhow. Without fail, the discussions rapidly morphed into vociferous debates. I found myself learning a lot from these pseudo-discussions, and at the [...]
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