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
Don't be a perfectionist... leave that to the classical musicians.
When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.
My own Brubeck Institute in California is turning out fantastic young jazz players, and I know great things will happen.
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.
Kinship doesn't come from skin color. It's in your soul and your mind.
I never wanted this kind of life that Im still living.
Concord, California was a great place to grow up.
I knew even if I'm a cowboy, I'm going to be involved in jazz in some way.
I knew I wanted to write on religious themes when I was a GI in World War II. I saw and experienced so much violence that I thought I could express my outrage best with music.
I started growing up in a hurry and taking a lot of the philosophy I'd heard from church as a kid a lot more seriously - especially the Ten Commandments - and wondering how 'Thou shalt not kill' could be so absolutely ignored. It took me until I was in my 40s to write what I was thinking as a young soldier.
The first choral music I remember hearing was Handel's 'Messiah' when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir broadcast it over the radio.
Jazz stands for freedom.
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,
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.