Gioia: One of the highlights of your college time was meeting your future wife. Can you tell me how that happened?

Brubeck: Oh yeah, because I’ll never forget it. The first time I met her, she was coming through a double door into the conservatory auditorium. She was going out. I was going in, so I held the door for her. We didn’t speak. Just nodded. Years later, I was giving a lecture before the concert in that same auditorium to students, asking me questions mostly. One question was the one you just asked me: how did you meet your wife? I was on stage, the very stage that we use today. I pointed from the stage to that door. I said, “Coming through that door.”

The next year we came back to play, and the dean of the conservatory, Dean Carl Nosse, came on stage and said, “We have a little surprise for Dave,” and said, “Will you shine a light on that door and then just move it over to that curtain.” Behind the curtain was a plaque that’s there, saying, “Coming through these doors, Dave Brubeck and Iola Whitlock started their musical life together.” Then the light. A student pulled a little string and the curtain was open, and there it was.The next day we were going to the airport in San Francisco from Stockton. I said to Iola, my wife, and to Russell Gloyd . . .
[Recording interrupted]

The next day, when we were going to the airport, I said to Russell and to Iola, I think our archives should go to this university. Where else do we have all these memories, for both of us. That’s how the archives went to University of Pacific, through the dean. That dean also was the one who wanted us to start the Brubeck Institute.

But it was at this College of Pacific, now University of Pacific that I finally did speak to Iola. It was on Friday afternoon from the radio station on campus that Iola was running the – producing the show that day called “Friday frolic.” It’s Friday afternoon when the school week is out. Then I was asked to have the band there. There’d be people come in and do little skits and plays and talk. Iola came out of the back where she was balancing a show and said, “Will you take everything out of your pockets and quit stamping your feet so hard?” I said, “Why?” She said, “That’s all we can hear in here, is your pounding your foot and the change that – whatever’s in your pocket is rattling.” I said, “I’ve been kicked out of better places than this.” That was our first conversation. I took off my shoes and poured all of my change, keys, and stuff, and quit beating my foot so loud.

Gioia: Your wife’s parents, Charles and Myrtle Whitlock, lived in Stockton. What were your impressions of them? What were their impressions of you?

Brubeck: You mentioned the Depression earlier. The only way Iola could have gone to school was on scholarship. She was an “A” student in Reading High School and had the pick of quite a few schools that she knew she couldn’t afford. Pacific would have been the least expensive. Junior college at Pacific was free. Then tuition on your junior and senior year was only $600, but they couldn’t afford that either. Charles Whitlock worked for the forest service and for the part of the – it was basically the forest service, where he thought he could transfer to Stockton, and that way they wouldn’t have to pay for Iola’s room and board. That’s the way they were able to go to Stockton.

Gioia: Where were they before?

Brubeck: Reading. You mentioned, where did I meet Iola? Iola didn’t believe that I remembered her just from coming through that door. I said, “What if I told you what you were wearing?” She said, “That’s impossible. You haven’t got that good a memory.” I described it. She said, “You’re absolutely right.” The reason that she remembered the dress is there was a dressmaker in the apartment downstairs from where they moved that made clothes for the ladies, and that was ordered especially to be made and never picked up. The woman never came to pick up the clothes. They knew it would fit my future wife. She was a student, and they offered it to her. It was separate stripes in the skirt. That’s what I remembered and could describe, and she was convinced that I wasn’t just making up a story.

Gioia: During your college years, you studied music, but when you graduated, as I understand it, you were asked to promise that you would never teach music. Could you tell me how this came about?

Brubeck: It was worse than that. I avoided the conservatory, knowing I couldn’t read, by – there were certain requirements that you had to do. You had to play other instruments: brass or wind or string. Finally, you had to pass basic keyboard. I avoided that by taking clarinet. You were usually just learning the scales and simple pieces. I’d already taken cello from Dr. Brown’s wife. So I was okay on strings, and I was passed on clarinet. Finally, I had to take keyboard. I decided, I’ll take organ, and maybe they’ll be just teaching me basics and they won’t find out I can’t read. The first day, I was supposed to practice at a certain time. It was an electric organ. The next day, I saw the organ teacher, and he was furious at me. He said, “You left the electric organ on all night. I’m flunking you, and I don’t want to see you in this class.” So I said, “Dr. Bacon, that’s all right.” I was relieved then. I wouldn’t have to take organ. Then the last semester, when you’re coming to graduation, I hadn’t taken piano yet, so I was sent to the top piano teacher. After about five minutes, she just dismissed me. She went to the dean and said, “That boy can’t read a note. He can’t read.” So the dean then called me in. That’s when he said, “You’re a disgrace to the conservatory, and I’m not [ ].” I said, “That’s right.”

So it spread amongst the students and the teachers that I would not graduate with the class. Dr. Bodley, who taught harmony and some composition, who had studied with Nadia Boulanger, went to the dean and said, “You’re making a mistake with Brubeck.
He’s harmonically one of the most talented students I’ve ever had.” Then shortly after, the counterpoint teacher went to the dean and said, “You’re making a mistake. He’s the best counterpoint student I’ve ever had.” Then the dean called me in and said, “I’ve heard some things about you from the teachers saying that you’re a talented person and I should let you graduate. I’ll let you graduate if you promise never to teach and disgrace this university.” I said, “That’s fine with me. I don’t want to teach anyway. All I want to do is play jazz.” He said, “I don’t understand that, but I’ll still let you graduate.” That’s how I got out. It was these other teachers going to my rescue.

Gioia: At time, while you were in college, what music were you listening to? What music was influencing your – what music did you admire at that time?

Brubeck: I grew up listening to Bach – from my mother – and Beethoven. All the classic literature for piano: Debussy, Ravel, and many other things, but those were the main things that she practiced all the time. So I had a knowledge of the good piano literature just by hearing it from her – hearing her teach it during the day, and then after dinner, she usually went into her studio, and when I was in bed, I’d be hearing her practicing. So I had a lot of influence of great piano music. Then I loved Gershwin and Bartok, Stravinsky especially. Then there great jazz things. Ellington I loved, and Stan Kenton.
Gioia: When you were in college, did you have a record player? Radio?

Brubeck: Oh yeah.

Gioia: So you would . . .

Brubeck: Always keeping up with Ellington. I had a good collection of Ellington in the ’30s, and my friends had good recordings – friends from the conservatory. So I was aware of the modern composers and of Debussy, Ravel.

Gioia: You celebrate your 21st birthday, and the next day, Pearl Harbor is attacked. What do you recall about what impact did that have on your life?

Brubeck: For my birthday I went to Concord to visit Howard, who was teaching at Mt. Diablo High School, where my mother had created that high school [ ] from there, and now he’s teaching. He had graduated from San Francisco State Teacher’s College. At this point he may have been taking some graduate classes at Mills. I was quite close to Howard, so I had gone to his house for my birthday – 21st birthday. We were at the service station, putting gas in my car, when the announcement came. The guy from the service station said, “They just bombed Pearl Harbor.” That’s the way I found out about it.

Gioia: After you graduated – you graduated a few months after that, and you were drafted. What would you have done differently if there hadn’t been a war going on? What were your plans at that point of what you were going to do after college?

Brubeck: I was working at this point in my senior year. Many jobs were six nights a week in nightclubs. So I knew I could make – I was always getting union scale then, and you could live on that. So I wasn’t worried. I had a fairly good reputation that I could work. So that’s what I planned to do, was just continue playing in so-called “joints.” Some of them were – some of my favorite places were not where the average citizen of the town would go, but the citizens that went there were the jazz fans, and usually African-Americans. I would be the only one supposedly that wasn’t a Negro. I loved working there. I loved that atmosphere. If that’s all I did the rest of my life, I would have been very happy. In fact, when I finally had to go on the road, if somebody would have told me, “You can always work for scale in a nightclub,” I’d rather have done that than pursue what I had to pursue, which is a life that’s not so great for a married man with children. Just let me work, and if looks like a joint, I’ll be very happy, because that’s where I’m happy.

Gioia: Is it true that you got married while on a three-day leave from the military?
Brubeck: Yeah.

Gioia: When did that happen? How did that happen?

Brubeck: Iola was able to say, “If you can get away, I’ll come down to the army camp, and we’ll get married.”

Gioia: Where were you stationed then?

Brubeck: Below Riverside, California, so it wouldn’t have been too far, to go over the border. I decided, “If I can get a three-day pass, I’ll go back home and go to Carson City, Nevada, get married and see your parents and see my parents.” Nobody came to our wedding. [ ] To this day, when I think of the rigmarole my grandchildren go through and my kids about getting married – my family didn’t even drive about 60 miles. They were camped at Silver Lake in the Sierras and it wouldn’t have been too far to go.

Gioia: Was this at a city hall or a county office?

Brubeck: No, it was a church . . .

Gioia: Oh, it was a church . . .

Brubeck: . . . where I knew the daughter who used to visit in Ione from Carson City. She also went to College of Pacific. I knew her parents were in Carson City and her father was a minister. So her father married us, and her mother was a witness. Then we jumped in the car and three days we had to get back to bring her to Stockton and me go to Camp Haan below Riverside. We stopped the first night after Carson City at a motel owned by a family that had a daughter at Pacific. We stayed all night in that hotel and then continued to Stockton and then down to Riverside.

Gioia: A very fast honeymoon.

Brubeck: Oh man. It was mostly driving a car.

Gioia: Dave, Russell has suggested a couple of questions, first about your first meeting with Duke Ellington. Can you tell us about that?

Brubeck: In the ’30s and ’40s the big bands were traveling to the West Coast to the point where you could sometimes hear two name big bands in Stockton on the same night. I think Ellington and maybe Basie just happened to be going through. Kenton would come through, and Woody Herman and Benny Goodman when he was about to break up his band, because the East Coast didn’t value him. He got saved, I think, in Denver.

Gioia: That’s right. That famous story.

Brubeck: Then Balboa Ballroom, maybe, where he really started getting an audience, which is a very strange thing, that he was almost – he was planning to break up, and a turnaround, because that audience in Denver really liked him, and then later on, in California. But there were always bands coming through. It wasn’t an isolated place, by no means. The way I heard, or met, Duke for the first time: he was playing in Stockton, and I went.

Jimmy Branford [sic: Blanton] had passed away. He was on the West Coast, and he needed a bass player. He hired Junior Raglin, who was a bass player I knew in [ ]. I surprisingly saw Junior on the stand, and I went backstage and said to Junior, “I’m surprised that you’re working with Ellington.” He explained everything. I said, “That’s wonderful.” I told him how much I thought of Ellington, the records I had from the ’30s, like Warm Valley, Flaming Sword, Jack the Bear, which has that wonderful bass solo on it. He said, “You’re an Ellington fan. Would you like to meet Duke?” I said, “Oh yes.” He said, “He’s right in this dressing room over here. Let me bring you over.” He knocked on the door and went in. I followed him. He introduced me. Duke looked up at me. I couldn’t open my mouth. I couldn’t say a word. I said to myself, this is ridiculous. I’ve got to get out of here. So I left. I didn’t say a word to him.

Later on, he came into the club where I worked in San Francisco and said, “You belong – you should play in New York. You should come to New York.” I said, “I don’t have any jobs there.” He said, “Let me see what I can do about it.” So he got me a job at the Hickory House, and my agent got me a job at Birdland on the same week. My agent – you better not cross him – was Joe Glaser – or he’d drop you, or worse. So I took the job at Birdland, but I’ll always remember that Duke had been so outgoing with me, being encouraging.

So the first time that I really talked with him – I was in awe of him and stayed my distance. We were on tour together. They put the sidemen in one big room and the leaders, Duke and I, in a separate room. That was the way they always handled the tour. I didn’t know. I don’t think I belong in the same room with Duke, but that’s where I was assigned. So that’s when I finally saw how the Duke lived, the great big trunks like you’d take on board a ship. They were like small closets. All his suits lined up and the neckties and shirts and shoes, and a dresser to dress him.

Gioia: So he didn’t travel out of a suitcase.

Brubeck: No. I never equaled anything close to the way he traveled. It was unbelievable. But I got to see how the Duke lived. It was an experience. We became pretty good friends all through the years. Even to the end of his life, he told Mercer, his son, that he wanted me to be an Ellington fellow at Yale. “Louie Bellson and Dave, I want to be fellows. I don’t want people to think I only had black friends.”

Gioia: Around this time did you also meet Stan Kenton?

Brubeck: Yes.

Gioia: Can you tell me about that?

Brubeck: I had written an arrangement for the jazz band at Camp Holland? The musicians – only a few of them thought it was any good. The rest didn’t like it. It was called Prayer of the Conquered. One of those that liked it very much was my old friend Ernie Farmer. He had copied it for me. He goes back to College of Pacific with me. Ernie said, “This is pretty advanced. Why don’t you take to Stan Kenton? See if he’d like it.”

So I went to Kenton’s house. When I came into the house, into the front room, there was no furniture, no rugs, nothing in the room but a grand piano. I said to myself, “Boy, this is the way to live.” Pretty quick, Kenton came down from upstairs. He’d slept in a little late. He looked at the score, and he said, “Play this for me.” So I started. I think I played something else, just to warm up. He said, “Where did you ever hear voicing’s like this?” I said, “That’s what I play.” He said, “That’s some very advanced voicing.” Then he looked at the score, and he said, “I’ll try this with my band. I’m playing the ‘Bob Hope Show,’ and we’re rehearsing for it.” I think it was the next day. “I’ll meet you at the stage door,” and he gave me a time “where I’ll be on a break.” He was there, right on the time we appointed. I took the parts into the band, and he ran it down. It sounded great to me. Then, after the rehearsal, he said, “Bring it back in ten years.” I don’t know what that means to this day.

Gioia: Perhaps you were ahead of your time. What year would that have been, roughly?
Brubeck: Let’s see. I was in the Army, ’42 to ’46: ’43.

Gioia: While you were in the Army, you were part of a group known as the Wolf Pack. This was a racially integrated jazz band.

Brubeck: Yeah. I integrated it.

Gioia: Had you worked with integrated bands before that?

Brubeck: Yeah. From the – even the octet in ’46 had a saxophonist from San Francisco. I’m ashamed to say at the moment I can’t remember his name. Iola would.

Gioia: We can fill that in. We’re going to get the transcript, and we can add – we’re going to be able to edit the transcript of these things.

Brubeck: Then I played with mixed groups [ ] ’39.

Gioia: Where would that have been?

Brubeck: In the Wagon Wheel in Modesto. It was just two guitar players. They asked me to play with then.

Gioia: So there were three musicians playing.

Brubeck: Yeah.

Gioia: Were both of them black?

Brubeck: Yeah.

Gloyd: [partially audible] Ted, before you get to Europe and this [ ] through, just the opposite, which is if Dave could tell the story about sitting in with a black band – Army band - on his way to Europe.

Brubeck: Oh yeah. I’ll tell that story. After the band broke up at Camp Haan – there were three full-size 28-piece bands. We were told there would be one band left. That means two bands got to go. Some of us went in to the infantry. Some guys went to another camp as a band, but broken up from Camp Haan. Unfortunately, I went into the infantry. From the infantry, I had – I was in a group of – Oklahoma National Guard ran it and broke in the guys. They kept me on KP and latrine duty, so I didn’t get basic training. But I was still shipped with the next bunch of guys that would be shipped out. We went across the country in a train, typical troop train. At different camps you’d stop overnight on the way to – the rumor is, we’re going to Europe. We’re not going to the Pacific, because we’re headed towards the East Coast. You’re never told where you’re going, but you’d stop. I think it was a camp in Maryland.

Gloyd: Fort Mead.

Brubeck: Yeah. Fort Mead. A black Army band met the train and played as you got off and marched where you were going. When we stopped and you fell out of line, I said to the guys in the band, “That was great to hear a good band playing.” They said, “We’re playing tonight at the rec hall. Why don’t you come and hear us.” So I went. I was invited to sit in. They said, “Wow. This is pretty out there. Why don’t you join our band?” I said, “Oh great. Wouldn’t that be wonderful.” So the next day I went there, and they said, “I’m sorry, but we can’t have any white members. It’s against the rules.” So as bad as I wanted to get in there, bad as they wanted me – the next day we were in Washington, D.C., and we had a pass to go into Washington that night. I’m walking down the street, looking for some jazz someplace on my night on the town. I heard a saxophonist from about a block away. I said, “That’s Bud Harr. I’m sure that’s Bud” from my old jazz band at College of Pacific.
I followed the sound. It was coming from a dance hall up a flight of stairs. I go up there, and it is my old saxophonist, Bud Harr, from – he didn’t even say hello. He said, “Sit in, Dave.” So I sat in with that band.

He seemed like the leader. The guys were saying, “Why don’t you join our band?” I said, “Great.” Bud said, “Yeah. That would be wonderful if you could get in the band.” So I tried that, and they said, “Aren’t you in the Army?” I said, “Yeah,” and they said, “We’re in the Navy. We’re sorry, but we can’t swing that.”
So I’m back on the troop train, moving towards what I knew was the next step. It was outside of Boston, north of Boston, to get on a troop ship. I got on the largest troop ship that was going at that time, called the George Washington. We were to join a convoy of, I’m guessing, maybe 50 ships on the way to Europe. After a few days of this, the captain of the ship said, “I’m breaking out of the convoy. I don’t like moving in a convoy. Too slow.” So we broke out of that. He would zigzag, because the German submarines had to have so many seconds to send a torpedo, knowing where your next zig or zag – they don’t know where it’s going to be. We didn’t get hit, although it was dangerous to be out of the convoy. We went on to England and never touched English soil. We landed in Liverpool, and we just got on a train that came out on the dock, so we were on from the boat to the train to get ready to go across the Channel, onto an English troop ship and then climb on down to a landing barge, where the front end drops open.
We were segregated after we got up on to the land and up the cliff and into what looked like cattle cars and across – we thought we were going to Paris, but all we did was see the lights of Paris. We kept going, to Verdun.

We were in the mud hole at Verdun. [ ] Germans were in a mountain overlooking the area where we were. That’s where the Red Cross sent two girls that were on a truck that later I found out a lieutenant with us had rigged that truck so that one side of the back of the truck would drop down and make a stage. There was a piano in there. We were sitting in the mud, on our helmets, and one of the girls said, “Can anybody play the piano?” My hand went up immediately. So I went up and played. The next morning we were replacements to go in. We’d go up that mountain, where a company had been wiped out the day before. We were supposed to go out there. While lined up to go, three of us were called out. There were two guys that had come across the country from Camp Haan, musicians. The guy – corporal in charge of entertainment, said that he had a piano player that had heard me and said I was better than him, and he wanted to go back and join his unit. I had the chance to hear him play, and he was great. I kept in touch with him, but he said, “I don’t like it here. I miss my buddies. I’m in the Signal Corps. I’ll be all right. You take this job. The colonel has said that you – that’s in change of this replacement depot – that you should never go to the front.” “I don’t want that boy to go to the front” was circulated amongst the officers.

I formed a band, which he wanted, out of guys that had been wounded. One of them happened to be black: Jonathan Richard Flowers. How many years ago did we see him, Russell?

Gloyd: In Boston, right?

Brubeck: Yeah.

Gloyd: Maybe – I don’t know. It’s hard to say.

Brubeck: Can’t tell me.

Gloyd: All those Boston – it all kind of runs together. But there’s a follow through of the story of that pianist, which we heard three years ago in Daytona Beach.

Brubeck: That’s his son.

Gloyd: Right.

Brubeck: The son of that pianist. I’ve got his name written down, because I always forgot. His father’s name was a hard name for me to remember. He tuned my piano before a concert, the son, and he said . . .

Gloyd: We didn’t know who he was. He was just the tuner that Paul [inaudible] used to tune the pianos.

Gioia: Small world.

Brubeck: Did he write to me or talk to me?

Gloyd: He talked to you. He came up to you.

Brubeck: He said, “I understand you knew my father. Do you remember much about him? Can you tell me how he played?” I said, “Oh, he was better than me,” and the guy started crying.

Gioia: Leroy Pearlman has mentioned that the Wolf Pack once played on a show with Marlene Dietrich.

Brubeck: That’s the guy that built the truck, Pearlman.

Gioia: He also said the band worked on the same bill as other well-known performers. Do you have any . . .?

Brubeck: Pearlman changed his name to Waxman. If you want to check up on him, Studs Terkel’s book The Good War has an interview with him, and Waxman starts talking about me.

Gioia: I remember that.

Brubeck: You remember it?

Gioia: Yeah, I’ve seen the book. Yes. It’s about the Battle of the Bulge.
Brubeck: And the Bulge has a good story with – that’s how it was – who did we do that recording with, Dave Remembers? Walter Cronkite.

Gloyd: Private Brubeck.

Brubeck: Private Brubeck Remembers. Cronkite is talking about the Bulge, his memory of it, with me. You can get that from George Moore at my house, because they only allowed 10,000 copies with that CD to be released. They’re all gone, but George has made a tape of it.

Gioia: After the war, you decide to go to Mills College. What determined that decision? Why did you decide to go to Mills?

Brubeck: My brother was studying with [Darius] Milhaud. He and Pete Rugolo went from San Francisco State [College] to Mills to get their masters degrees. They would be some of the first males to attend Mills. They allowed it on master’s degree programs. It was through Howard that I heard about Milhaud. While I was still a student at Pacific, I hitch-hiked down to Mills to meet with Milhaud. He said – I knew I was going into the Army. It’s often said I was drafted. I wasn’t drafted. I enlisted by telling the draft office that I would go as soon as I graduated, because it was only one more semester. They said that’s okay, as long as you go as soon as you graduate.

Gioia: So you actually enlisted rather than . . .

Brubeck: Yeah.

Gioia: You didn’t get a draft notice.

Brubeck: Yeah. So Milhaud said, “After the war, you come study with me.” That was great. I had something to always look forward to.

Gioia: How familiar were you with his music? Had you heard his music at that point?
Brubeck: The Creation of the World, I’d heard.

Gioia: When you began studying with him, how did he react to your music and to jazz?

Brubeck: [ ] class, the octet was born, when he said, “How many of you in this class play jazz?” Five of us raised our hands. We thought that was going to be the end of – like any other conservatory. He said, “I’d like you to write your counterpoint and your compositions for jazz instrumentation, if you want to.” That’s how the octet came in.
Paul Desmond and Cal Tjader came over from San Francisco State any way their [?].Have you ever heard the octet? I know you’ve heard it. So you know the members of it.

Gioia: Sure. Absolutely. Great recordings.Let me ask you about other modern classical composers of that time. I want to start with Schoenberg, because you had an encounter with Schoenberg that I think was quite interesting. Can you relay that?

Brubeck: I’d heard so much about him. I was at Camp Haan in Riverside and made an appointment to be interviewed, or to meet him, at his home near UCLA, I think it was, and went to his house and talked with him. He told me to come back, I think, in a week and write something. So I wrote something, came back in a week, played it for him. He stopped me and said, “Why did you write that note?” I said, “Because it sounds good.” He said, “That’s no reason to write a note, ‘because it sounds good.’ There must be a reason. Do you have a reason?” I said, “No. That’s it.” I tried to defend, if it sounded good, should be the reason. He said, “Come with me.” He went in to a different room, took out some keys from his pocket, opened a glass door. There were cabinets all around.

He said, “I know every note of music on any page in all these scores. That’s the reason. I can tell you, there must be a reason. And I know more about music than any man alive.” That was our last meeting. I thought it was so different than Darius Milhaud.

Gioia: What was your opinion then, and your opinion now, of Schoenberg’s music and 12-tone row?

Brubeck: I had heard maybe Pierrot Lunaire. Nothing much more than that. It was his reputation. So many people I admired thought he was really the master of this age. After the war, you either chose to follow Schoenberg or Schillinger or somebody like Stravinsky or Milhaud. For sure I didn’t want to follow Schoenberg.

Today I use the 12-tone row to write a melody. All the time I’m doing that. But never in the harmony. Just the melody. But The Duke, which I wrote in the early ’50s [ ] or ’52, I didn’t realize had a 12-tone row in the bass, until a music professor told me, “That’s interesting, the way you use a 12-tone row in the bass line.” If you analyze it, I got through every key in eight bars. So I’m influenced, but didn’t want to be. But lately, when I’m trying to do something, I’ll start a melody and think, oh, that’s my goal, into a 12-tone melody. I just wrote a new one called So Lonely. It’s on the current album, The Indian Summer. The opening theme is 11 tones. Then when I repeat it, I added some way to make it 12-tone, just wanting it to be 12-tone. It’s terrible that I would dislike – I still don’t usually like when it’s strict 12-tone.

Gioia: Serialism.

Brubeck: Yeah. I don’t like it too much.

Gioia: Let me ask you about another composer. Doug Ramsey has suggested that one of the influences on the octet was Stravinsky’s Octet that he composed in 1923. Was that a work that influenced you?

Brubeck: Not me. It could have been Bill Smith. Bill probably knew it.

Gioia: A few years after you began mixing jazz and classical music, a term came about called “Third Stream.” People would talk about Third Stream, sort of a blending between jazz and classical. Did you feel like you were part of that movement? Or did you feel that was something very similar to what you were doing? Or that came after you? What was your reaction to the Third Stream?

Brubeck: Gunther [Schuller]’s such a brilliant musician that I respect him. If he uses the term “Third Stream,” it’s probably correct for what he wants to express. But I think that Jelly Roll Morton was listening to the music from the French opera house quite often, and that they’re just discovering things of Jelly Roll that were never published or no-one else was too familiar with until recently. I’d like to hear what Jelly was doing. I would say that there’s certain influences in jazz. Why wouldn’t you call Art Tatum’s Elegy or Humoresque . . .

Gioia: Or Black, Brown, and Beige.

Brubeck: . . . Third Stream?

Gioia: So your sense is, jazz has always borrowed something from classical music, and that that’s actually part of the tradition of the music, going back to Jelly Roll.

Brubeck: Yeah.

Gioia: Let’s go back to the time at Mills College, how you learned and studied then. What was your practice regimen then? How did you practice the piano? What did you do during those years or before to develop? Did you play though scales and Hannon? Or did you just improvise? What would you do?

Brubeck: Nothing that [ ] classical good pianist. Today I do Hannon once in a while, but I never bothered when I should have, when I was young, to help get some fingers more quickly.

Gioia: Did you do any scales back then, Cherney, or any of these exercises?

Brubeck: No.

Gioia: What would you do when you were sitting at the piano by yourself after classes? You would just play songs? Would you compose? Would you improvise?
Brubeck: Improvise, and play songs, and alter them – take off.

Gioia: How did you develop your chord voicings? Did someone teach you those? Did you do them by ear?

Brubeck: Mostly by ear. Milhaud one time showed me a chart that he developed for polytonal chords. You can’t remember something that somebody just said, “Look at this.” So I wasn’t – what I was aware of, that he’d probably tried every possible tonality.
The chart was so big – pages.

Gioia: Did you study off that?

Brubeck: No, I wouldn’t have brains enough to study off of it.

Gioia: So basically, you’ve got – your sense of harmony was really unique in jazz at the time you were doing these things. So really, you were doing these by ear.

Brubeck: Yeah.

Gioia: You were working through combinations of notes at the keyboard, trying to hear what sounded right to you, and you would bring those to the gig.

Brubeck: Exactly.

Gioia: Tell me about the formation of the octet. How did that . . .?

Brubeck: Right there in Milhaud’s class.

Gioia: In terms of performing, my understand is that between 1947 and 1949, the octet had only three paying gigs.

Brubeck: Yeah.

Gioia: But did you also perform – did you get together informally to play and practice?

Brubeck: Yeah. And once in a while, somebody will say, “Oh, but I heard you at University of California, Berkeley.” It’s a gig I forgot. So maybe there were four or five. But there weren’t many. At Mills College, Marines Memorial in San Francisco, College of Pacific in Stockton, University of California, Berkeley.

Gioia: I’m told that your father, after hearing a concert by the octet, once told a newspaper writer, “That was the damndest bunch of notes I ever heard.” Is that true?

Brubeck: Noise.

Gioia: “Bunch of noise I ever heard.”

Brubeck: Yeah. He said that, and he meant it. I told him he was the best critic who ever heard me.

Gioia: Did you have a sense at that time that the music you were doing had commercial potential? What were – did you have – here you are. You’re doing very experimental music. A few years later you’re famous. Did you anticipate that at all, or envision that happening?

Brubeck: Yeah, to the point where I would justify the hardship I was putting my family through. I would in complete confidence sometimes question my wife whether this was correct or not, knowing that even if she said no, I was going to still do it, but I wanted to know if she were ready to give up. I’ve seen too many times where a love affair would break up over the musician devoting too much time to what he was doing, or the husband and wife – I’ve seen many [ ] “If you don’t give up your drive in music, I think we’ll have to get a divorce.” I’ve seen that close up, with guys that are working for me. “Either come home or divorce.” With Paul Desmond, it was with the understanding that Paul would become the greatest saxophonist and his wife would become the greatest actress.

They split up, and they were going to come back together. It can work that way. It’s strange how you’ve got to have somebody that really understands and is willing to sacrifice almost everything – a roof over your head, even.

Gioia: In terms of timing – let me know Dave – my thought is that we can go another 15 minutes today. Is that all right?

Brubeck: Sure.

Gioia: March 1949 your octet performed at the Marines Memorial Auditorium. This is almost a very important historic event, I think, in the history of jazz and modern jazz and West Coast jazz. How did this come about? Were there other acts on the bill? How did you get this venue? What are your recollections of it?

Brubeck: Technically, the octet should have been called something like the workshop ensemble. It wasn’t under my name, because we were all equals as far as talent goes.
Again, Iola will know the man’s name who wanted to produce us like the octet. We ran into him recently someplace. I should never forget him, but sometimes I forget people’s names. I remember a lot about him. He came to my house and said he’d like to do a concert with the octet, but it had to have my name on it. So I told the guys in the group, we will have to use my name or we can’t have the concert. What do you want to do?
They said, take the concert. After the concert . . .

Gioia: Was that at the Marines Memorial Concert?

Brubeck: Yeah.

Gioia: Okay. That was that engagement.

Brubeck: But I want you to check this whole story with Iola. After the concert I think Jimmy Lyons went to the head of NBC. Maria Corbin – check these names – was the head of classical music at NBC. She went to the concert. They both went to the head of NBC and said, you should do a program with this group. One’s the head of jazz – Jimmy – and one’s the head of classical music for NBC. So the guy’s thinking it over, and said okay. Then he said, “But we can’t afford an octet. Can you do it with a trio?” That’s how the trio got born, from the octet.

Gioia: At this point in time, you are doing a type of modern jazz that sounds very different from what anyone else is doing. When I listen to those octet recordings, they just sound unique. They don’t sound like anything else. At the same time [ ] mostly back East with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, [Thelonious] Monk, Lennie Tristano – how aware were you of this? How much did you listen to it? Did it influence you? It seems like there’s these two different styles of modern jazz.

Brubeck: I think you’re influenced by everything you’ve heard, and you can’t not hear Dizzy and Charlie Parker. After all, I toured with Charlie. When you play at Birdland, in those days, Dizzy’s there, and Charlie.

Gioia: When did you first hear that music, though? Probably when you got out of – after the war?

Brubeck: Yeah. I sure didn’t hear it during the war. I was very removed. Then when I started hearing it, I thought it was great, but I wanted to do what I did, and it was fine if they did what they did. There was no law against each of us, or every guy, doing what he wants to do musically.

Gioia: Let me ask just one more question, and then we’ll wrap up today. At the time you began working with the octet and the trio, San Francisco was seen more as a Dixieland type of town, Lu Watters and later Turk Murphy and all that. Were there other people doing really modern, adventurous jazz in San Francisco that influenced you, or were you really – how did you relate to the rest of the jazz scene there? Did you have many interactions with these dixieland people?

Brubeck: I liked – one time we were in the car, driving down to play in Los Angeles.
The kids were up behind the seat in the coupe. Two of them could lie down up there, Iola and I in the front. As we drove down the road – I think it was near Stanford University that I said – excuse me. We were talking about Lu Watters and the . . .
Gioia: Lu Watters and the dixieland scene in San Francisco.

Brubeck: And who was the other?

Gioia: I mentioned Turk Murphy.

Brubeck: Turk Murphy. I said, “Turk Murphy. Look, there’s a sign in front of that nightclub. Turk Murphy plays there.” My little son, Darius, said, “Stop. We should hear Turk Murphy.” I said, “What do you know about Turk Murphy?” He goes, [Brubeck sings a melody popularized by Murphy]. I said, “How could you . . .?” He said, “You’ve got a Turk Murphy recording at home.” Do you remember that song?

Gioia: Sure.

Brubeck: That’s the way he was. From the time he was little, he remembered everything.

Gioia: Why don’t we stop it here. We’ve covered all the way up to the start of the trio.
That will give us tomorrow. We can – we made it up to 1950, more or less.
Gioia: This is Ted Gioia. It’s August 7th, 2007. This is the second day of the oral history with Dave Brubeck conducted by the Smithsonian Institution as part of their program to conduct oral histories with NEA Jazz Masters. We are at Chris Brubeck’s house in Wilton, Connecticut. This will be the second and final day of our oral history.
Dave, yesterday we finished talking about the octet. I now want to talk to you about some smaller combos you had at the time. I’d like to start with a group called the Three D’s, which I believe first played at a place called El Baracho and then at the Geary Cellar in San Francisco. Can you tell me how this group came about and what kind of music it played?

Brubeck: The Three D’s was composed of Darrell Cutler, who was from Stockton, California, and at the University – College of Pacific at the same time I was. We worked in Stockton as undergraduates. He went on into the Marines and was a Marine aviator and squadron leader. Very sharp guy in every way. So he and I were friends before the war, and after the war we got together again. That’s one D. Don Rattle, also from University – College of Pacific, from Stockton, is the second D. He’s still alive, living in Santa Cruz. The third D is Dave Brubeck. That group grew out of the friends at Stockton.

Gioia: There was a vocalist that sometimes joined the group, Francis Lynne. Is that correct?

Brubeck: Francis Lynne.

Gioia: This is unusual, for you to be in a group with a singer. Did you play differently to back up a singer? Or would this be the same kind of experimental stuff you were doing with the octet or trio?

Brubeck: This would be all popular songs.

Gioia: You were playing standards.

Brubeck: That’s it. Yeah. Francis just sent me her new recording, which is very good. She’s married to Johnny Coppola, the trumpet player who is still working in the San Francisco area, but he spent much of his life as either lead [trumpeter] or jazz [trumpet soloist] with Kenton or Woody Herman or – almost any group you can think of wanted him. He’s a San Francisco musician.

Gioia: One night Paul Desmond comes to see the Three D’s. He comes home that night. He tells his wife that he had heard a piano player who was a genius. So this was his first encounter with you. What is your first recollection of Paul? Can you tell me about your first meeting with him?

Brubeck: You really want to know the first?

Gioia: Yes I would.

Brubeck: I was on my way overseas in the infantry. Dave Van Kreidt, who had come to live in the bomb shelter at the College of Pacific – unannounced one day, I came back from school and there in the cellar was Dave Van Kreidt on one of the rusty old beds. He’d moved in without asking anybody. What he did was visit classes that he liked. He wouldn’t register. But Dr. Bodley lived across the street, and he’d take private lessons. [ ] He was close friends with Paul Desmond. During the war, Kreidt would write to me and say, you should be in this band. He’d describe the band at the Presidio in San Francisco. Pete Rugolo was in another part of the Presidio, and my old drummer, Joe Dodge, was there.

Anyway, when I’m on leave, knowing I’m going overseas, Kreidt set up an audition for me to get into that band. So I came and played. I was to play with some of the musicians. Paul Desmond had been picked to be one of the people that would play with me. There were a few others – Dave Van Kreidt. They would pass judgment on me. The first tune we played I think was a blues in G, and I started it out in G in the left hand and B-flat in the right hand, and Paul said, “Wigsville. Those nutty changes.” He called me – later on he called me Surly Sue and other words, and said I had a purple Army jacket on, which I don’t believe, but he swore that I was one of the most radical guys he’d ever seen. I didn’t get into that band. It would have been wonderful not to go overseas, because I was classified as a rifleman, and not the happiest future ahead. That’s my first encounter with Paul. He loved to elaborate on, “Who is this crazy man?”
Gioia: Let me ask you about another person that you met probably around this same time: Jimmy Lyons. He became a very important advocate for your music. How did that come about?

Brubeck: When I was – the first place that the Three D’s played was right in Stockton. .
Gioia: Is that so?

Brubeck: . . . in a nightclub. From there we moved to San Francisco, to El Baracho.
Gioia: And then the Geary Cellar.

Brubeck: Then the Geary Cellar.

Gioia: Okay. I didn’t know that.

Brubeck: The Geary Cellar was under the Geary Theater. NBC was around the block, in the same block, their main studios, and Jimmy was broadcasting every night. I can’t remember meeting at the Geary Cellar, but apparently he came in. Then when we played the Marines Memorial, he came to that concert. Ralph Gleason came to that concert and really gave us a bad review.

Gioia: Ralph Gleason gave you a bad review.

Brubeck: Oh yeah. He was good at that, at giving me bad reviews, because he was moldy fig at that point. A highly intelligent guy. A good writer. He gradually changed his tune, because he was up against too many people that were approving of what I was doing. But what really changed him was The Real Ambassadors at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Everybody that was at that concert that night thinks it was a hallmark concert for Monterey, and highly emotional [ ] Louis Armstrong in a whole different light.
But I got away from what you were asking me.

Gioia: About you meeting Jimmy Lyons. You said he came and heard you at the Geary Cellar and at the Marines Memorial.

Brubeck: There he decided to have us do a show, and eight people were too many for NBC, but they would do it as a trio. That’s where I think Jimmy Lyons and I started getting more friendly and knowing each other. I’d appear a lot on his show. In fact if you’ve got the old octet record, Jimmy Lyons is narrating How High the Moon. So you know that he was involved. Then the classical – Maria Corbin was very impressed with the writing of the octet, considering it classical. So we right away were crossing between the jazz and the classical, which we were trying to do. When we played a concert, we’d divide it into three sections: one would be classical pieces that we’re playing; two would be jazz pieces that we composed or arranged; and the third, a jazz session, which would be quite free. That’s our format for concerts. We would have done that at Marines Memorial. So you could see, if we were doing something like Dave Van Kreidt’s Fugue on Bop Themes, that crosses over between bop and classical, but it’s a serious fugue that Milhaud would have looked at and said – I remember him saying, “This is a very good fugue,” and that’s in our fugue class. So it grew right out of Milhaud’s class.

There’s a whole great amount of music that was lost when Kreidt took the octet book to Australia, when he moved there. He had it in a garage that was flooded. I’ve tried and tried and tried – even if it’s got ink all running, we could put it together – but they won’t cooperate, the sons and relatives that could have done me a great favor and sent that back after Kreidt died. So we lost so many classical compositions and jazz compositions. If we hadn’t recorded, we’d have nothing.

Bill Russo’s arranger-copyist – Bill wanted us to play in Chicago. We said we had no music. Russo talked with him. They said this man that works for Bill Russo will listen to the recording and write it all down.

Gloyd: This was for the Chicago Jazz Festival. Neil Tesser was the one. Do you know Neil? The writer.

Gioia: Jazz writer. Sure.

Gloyd: Neil called me up and said that the octet was the most quintessentially perfect group in jazz, it needed to be featured, and could we do it? I told him the story: we had no music, but we have a recording. He said, “But there’s a recording.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “I know the perfect guy to transcribe it, Jeff Levinson.”

Brubeck: Didn’t he work [ ]

Gloyd: So I contacted Jeff. We sent him a tape. The music started to come to me a week before the festival. This was in August of 2001. I looked at this, and the very first thing I saw was a Bill Smith arrangement of “What is This Thing Called Love” in E-major. Bill is a very creative person, but he’s also extremely practical and lazy when it comes to solos.

He’s not going to write a solo for himself that he’s going to have to play in F-sharp. So I called him up. I said, “Bill, what did you write This Thing Called Love?? What key?” “Eflat.” I looked at every other piece. Every piece was off by a half-step because of the tape speed, which Jeff never would have known. He’s transcribing. I am frantically now trying to fix everything. This is early stages of the computer. It’s taken us some a couple – there’s still some wrong notes in Dave’s arrangement of “Just The Way You Look Tonight”, which we just cannot find it.

The performance was over the Labor Day weekend in August [sic: September] of 2001.Dave was incredible, because he set this whole thing up with the audience in terms of World War II, coming back, everything that took place. Our world all changed – because he brought Pearl Harbor in on it, and our world changed 12 days later.

Brubeck: So that’s the only music we have.

Gioia: It’s a tragedy.

Brubeck: Why did I think Bill Russo?

Gloyd: It’s confusing because of cross-references, but this was Neil Tesser. We did it – we’ve done it at Avery Fisher, and we got the greatest single review we ever got in the New York Times. Lew Soloff was the trumpet player. Just before we went on stage, Wynton [Marsalis] came back stage. He’s looking around. He’s going, like, “Lew. You’ve got music in your hand. Have you been practicing?” Lew said, “Wynton, this is the hardest music I’ve ever played in here, in my life.” He said, “I’m going along. It’s all fine. It’s all easy. I turn a page, and suddenly I’m doing a solo in 12-tone.”

Gioia: I can believe that. I think to this day no-one has ever done music like the octet. I listen to something like Playland at the Beach or . . .

Gloyd: The other interesting thing on this composition is that – why is Cannery Row so incredibly effective? It’s because Dave uses minimalist writing which all came from the octet. The hardest damn thing in working on the octet music is there’s no place to hide. Just the Way You [inaudible], You’ve got this counterpoint between alto and trumpet.
Gioia: Every note is important.

Gloyd: Every note.

Brubeck: Can you imagine these New York guys saying, “Where’d you get these musicians?” Bill Smith came and played live in New York. Their mouths dropped open. I heard one guy say, “Where’s he been all my life?” You remember that?

Gloyd: Yeah.

Brubeck: These were top guys – number one guys.

Gloyd: Lew Soloff says it all, right? Rondo is the piece that he was talking about, which is, it’s very nice, it’s Dave’s piece, it’s just – then you turn the page and the next thing, you’ve got a solo in 12-tone.

Brubeck: I think I got you off the subject.

Gioia: Yeah, but it’s an interesting topic, because the octet music is very important, and I still don’t think it’s as widely heard as it should be, because it’s unique. It really is. I don’t think – people talk about what Miles was doing, but what you were doing is just worlds apart. I think it’s got these classical elements and these twists and turns in it. Miles’s music sounds very straightforward by comparison, I believe, not to detract from The Birth of the Cool.

Brubeck: One of the greatest books of writing was lost in that flood. It’s just heart-breaking that I couldn’t get Kreidt’s family to [ ].

Gioia: I want to talk about some of the financial challenges you faced during this period. You had begun playing with Paul at the Band Box in Palo Alto, and that required you to take a cut in pay from the Geary Cellar. Soon you even lost that gig, when Paul took an engagement at Feather River. Around this time I understand you were struggling financially. You were trying to supplement your income by selling sandwiches in San Francisco and doing other things to make money. Tell me about this period of your life and how you survived through it.

Brubeck: Quickly summing it up, I had a very good job at the Geary Cellar with the Three D’s: scale plus and a steady job. Paul hired away Francis Lynne, the vocalist, and Norman Bates, the bassist. He would be the leader and take a group where he had a job at a place near Stanford University called the Band Box. I just remembered why it was called the Band Box, because I remembered the song that Paul had us sing: “The Band Box is the joint for you. Get high when you’re happy and blind when you’re blue. The whiskey is old, but the music is new at the Band Box. If the state you arrive in encourages jivin’, relax on a sofa with a chick you can go fa’. That’s why the proletariat make merry at the Band Box.” That’s the way we’d open the show every night.

Then he gets a job at Russian River, where he worked other summers, and he says he’s going there. I said, “What happens here?” He said, “We just break up, and when I get back, maybe I’ll get everybody together.” The owner said, “Dave, why don’t you keep this job and get another horn player?” I would have gotten Bill Smith, because Bill and I worked a lot together. Paul flipped out, saying “It’s my job, and I won’t have you playing here.” So he goes to Feather River, and I’m trying to figure out, what’s the big attraction to Feather River, which I can never figure, because he loved playing with this group that he’s just destroying. He loved gambling more than he loved the group, and it was near Reno. He could drive over to Reno. He loved the slot machines. He was hooked. It’s like a guy that’s hooked on cigarettes, which he also was hooked on. That’s why he did that.

So I had to take another job. This was at scale at a lake about 100 miles from San Francisco: Silver Log Tavern, it was called, on Clear Lake. You can see Clear Lake. The owner of that place had the same name as the owner of the Oakland Raiders.

Gloyd: Al Davis.

Brubeck: Al Davis. I never knew if it was a young Al Davis, the real McCoy, or not.

Gioia: We’ll look into that.

Brubeck: We worked there. Lived in a corrugated iron tent – about the size of a big tent.
No windows. It got very hot every day. We’d take the kids to the lake every day and let them just float in the water. They were too young to swim or anything, but that cooled them off.

I got a phone call from Jimmy Lyons saying, “Are you interested? I think I’ve got a trio job for you at the Burma Lounge in Oakland, right near Lake Merritt.” I said, “I’m very interested.” So we went there. Clint Eastwood came in there when he was 15. He recently told me he used to sneak in there, because he was tall, and it was dark at the entrance. They didn’t see he had a young face.

Then Jimmy called me. He said, “I think I can have you play at the Blackhawk in San Francisco.” So the trio moved to San Francisco. We opened the Blackhawk as a jazz club. It was a store turned into a place with chairs and a small stage, which had to hold the Count Basie band or Duke Ellington, with half of them on the floor. That worked. I worked three months of the year, then three months off, then back for three months. It didn’t pay much more than scale, but it was steady. But I couldn’t make it. So I started trying to go to L.A. That’s where I met Gerry Mulligan with his quartet.

Gioia: So in the time you were off from the Blackhawk, during those three months, you would do engagements in Los Angeles.

Brubeck: If I could get them.

Gioia: Where would you play in Los Angeles?

Brubeck: Where Gerry was playing, one night a week.

Gioia: At the Haig.

Brubeck: At the Haig, yeah. They hired me six nights a week. Red Norvo was playing on the off nights, with Tal Farlow and Charlie Mingus and Red, which was one of my favorite groups. I had just started Fantasy Records, so I talked the Weiss brothers into recording Red Norvo’s trio, which I think is some of the greatest small combo recordings ever made. I talked them into recording Gerry. Gerry said I gave him his first steady job by moving him into the Blackhawk. Then Red Norvo came up there. But I still had to work. That’s when I started investigating going on the road more.

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