Archives for December 5, 2012

Dave Brubeck, a wonderful artist and an uncommonly kind and decent man, died today, on the eve of his ninety-second birthday. The Los Angeles Times obituary is here.

Much will be said about Brubeck in days to come, so I’ll confine myself to a purely personal note: I learned how to play jazz bass as a boy by plucking along with my father’s battered copy of Jazz Goes to College, the 1954 live album that made Brubeck a star. It’s as listenable today as it was six decades ago. So are most of his other records, this one in particular.

Here’s a rare kinescope of the Dave Brubeck Quartet performing “The Duke,” a tribute to Duke Ellington that was Brubeck’s best-known composition. Paul Desmond is the saxophonist, Bob Bates the bassist, Joe Dodge the drummer:

And here’s my all-time favorite Brubeck record, a performance of his own “Summer Song” in which he accompanies none other than Louis Armstrong. Iola, Dave’s wife, wrote the lyric:

Clifford Brown performs “Oh, Lady Be Good” and “Memories of You” in 1955 on Soupy Sales’ Soup’s On. This clip is believed to be the only surviving performance film of Brown:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit–some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.”
Loren Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid