Part 3- Dave Brubeck [1920-2012] - The Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master Interviews

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

As you read the third installment of the multi-part interview with Dave Brubeck, one of the most influential musicians in the pantheon of 20th Century Jazz Greats and one of the kindest and considerate  people to ever inhabit the Jazz World, please keep in mind that he was 87 years old at the time it was undertaken.

The details from such a long and illustrious career may have a tendency to cloud over with the passage of time, hence the occasional promptings and chronological clarifications by Ted Gioia, who is himself a Jazz pianist and a noted author of numerous books on the subject of Jazz, and who excels in his role as a sensitive interviewer. 

The Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master interviews are provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

DAVE BRUBECK NEA Jazz Master (1999) Interviewees: Dave Brubeck (December 6, 1920 – December 5, 2012) with Russell Gloyd and (August only) Iola Brubeck 

Interviewers: Ted Gioia with recording engineer Ken Kimery 

Date: August 6-7, 2007 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution Description: Transcript, 90 pp. 

Track markers were accidentally embedded into the original recording in such a way as to lose a few words at the breaks. Square brackets and five spaces – [ ] – indicate these small gaps in the transcription. 

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 once 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 understanding 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: 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? 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 [San Francisco]. 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. 

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. [recording interrupted] 

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 the 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.” 

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?” “E Flat.” 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. 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 heartbreaking 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 win[dows ] 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. 

Gioia: Let me ask you about a couple of other things that happened around this time. Is it true that you taught an extension course on the history of jazz at U. C. Berkeley? 

Brubeck: Absolutely. 

Gioia: Tell me about that. 

Brubeck: Remember I couldn’t teach. 

Gioia: That’s right. You violated your promise there. 

Brubeck: I knew we had no work at this time and that that would pay $15 a week. Maybe we could live on that. The way I figured out how to do that is Iola did the lecturing to the class, because she was a speech major in college, and acting. So it wasn’t a problem for her. At this point I couldn’t open my mouth in front of people, but I played. She’d ask me to play examples. In that class was a young Chinese student [ ] jazz than we could ever dream of knowing, so it was rather embarrassing when we were stuck with asking questions. Russell?

Gloyd: Herb Wong. 

Gioia: That was Herb Wong! I think Herb started writing for Down Beat when he was 13 years old or something. 

Brubeck: He was just a kid. 

Gioia: Yeah I know. I don’t think the editors there knew how young their San Francisco correspondent was. 

Brubeck: So we got to know Herb really well, and of course we work with him all the time at Monterey now. We’re old friends. Then we moved over to San Francisco extension. 

Gioia: For San Francisco State? 

Brubeck: No. Where did we teach in San Francisco? 

Gioia: I was asking about teaching jazz at U. C. extension. 

Iola Brubeck: Yes, in Berkeley and in San Francisco. 

Gioia: At San Francisco State? 

Iola: No. They had an extension . . . 

Gioia: Oh, it was a Berkeley extension course but took place in San Francisco. 

Iola: In San Francisco. 

Dave: Where are you going to sit? How did you ever find this? 

Iola: Actually, I knew that there was a file someplace that we’d thrown all this kind of stuff in, and George found it. 

Dave: Can you bring Iola a chair, Russell? You’d rather have a straight chair, wouldn’t you? 

Iola: A straight chair is fine. 

Dave: There you go. Will she be able to be heard? 

Gioia: Should we get a microphone for her? Will the microphone pick her up? 

Kimery: It should be able to pick her up.

Iola: I’ll speak up. 

Gioia: Okay. Listen on the headphones. If we need to stop . . . If you look at the 1949 phone book for San Francisco and you look under Paul Desmond, you see that he’s listed as a music teacher. So it’s clear that Paul took students around this time. Did you do that as well? Did you take any piano students? 

Dave: We all discovered that if we put down “jazz musician,” we’d never get a phone. 

Iola: That’s true. 

Dave: So we were months and months and months trying to call the company. They’d always make up some excuse. One of the Mills students lived downstairs on 18th Street. Who was that? 

Iola: That was Bert. 

Dave: Bert Corvello, music major from Mills. Worked at the telephone company. She said, “They will never give a jazz musician, or even maybe a musician, a phone. You’ll be last on the list, and the list is long. Put down ‘teacher’.” 

Iola: This was shortly after World War II, and there really was a priority list about who got a telephone. 

Gioia: And jazz musicians were at the bottom of the list. 

Dave: At the bottom. 

Iola: At the bottom of the list. 

Gioia: After drug dealers and everything else, you had jazz. Did you ever take piano students during this period? Did you ever teach piano? 

Dave: Yeah. 

Gioia: How did you approach that? Was that something that you found satisfying, or frustrating? 

Dave: It was interesting. It’s all right. ….

To be continued in Part 4