One of the reasons why I started this blog back in the day was to chronicle the music of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and all of its facets. Something I’ve wanted to do for the longest is create a detailed selective discography of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s available music, a document that contained info on all of Brubeck and Paul Desmond’s recorded output during their partnership from 1951 to 1967. In the course of my personal research and collecting, I’ve noticed anomalies and omissions in Brubeck’s discography that I couldn’t find any information on. This discography is my attempt to correct that and make my research available for others.

A couple of notes about this discography. The focus is on material available to the public, even if it’s hard to find, such as vinyl-only music, bootleg albums, etc. I’m an archivist at heart, and so I’ve included information such as the mono and stereo catalog numbers for albums, notes about track edits and splices, and track timings if possible. I’ve also included information about the different mediums the music was released on, from 78rpm discs to MP3 files. Like I mentioned earlier, this is NOT a complete Brubeck discography! This is a selective discography of Brubeck’s music spanning his quartet years of 1951 to 1967, and thus contains items that the Dave Brubeck Quartet appeared on during those years.

As much as possible I’ve tried to keep things in chronological order, which posed a problem when it came to the numerous compilation albums with unique tracks from all over Brubeck’s career. I decided to group such tracks at the end in a special section for compilation albums. Speaking of compilation albums, there have been numerous Brubeck albums with an infinite combination of tracks released over the 60-plus years since Brubeck’s quartet first began recording. I’ve opted not to mention each and every ‘greatest hits’, ‘essential collection’ album or the many bootleg reissues with various already-available bonus tracks. Instead, I only list the original sources unless the compilation album has material found nowhere else. For ease of access, I categorized the music with the year the music was recorded, with a few exceptions. Just click on the year and you’ll find what the quartet recorded that year. With that, to the music we go!