Part 4- 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 fourth 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: 1947. Your first son is born. How did the responsibility of parenthood impact your life and career? 

Dave: It was a good surprise. But when I think of Darius’s birth, there’s a lot that goes into that. Staying up all night with my closest friend, Bob Skinner, the pianist in San Francisco, and I taking Iola to the Children’s Hospital and nothing too much happening. For some reason we were dismissed, and you went to the birthing room, I think. 

Iola: Yes. 

Dave: So we drove out to the beach – Playland at the Beach – area and just sat in the car. I’d known him from the day he was born in the house that joined the back of our house in Concord. He was born at home like I was. He’s six months later. We had to go back to the hospital, and Iola is not having the baby. It’s going on and on and on in the evening. Now, it’s getting close to time to go to the Geary Cellar and start playing with the trio. Still no baby, but finally she had the baby. I told her – now I knew I’m late for work – I told her “I’ve got to leave, but I don’t want to leave until I know you’re aware of what’s going on and what’s happening. Here’s a little bell.” It was shaped like a bell, a black bell. “If you need a nurse, because I’m leaving now, you just press this button.” She nods. “Now put it down.” She did. I went back and said, “What is that little black object there?” She said, “It’s an umbrella.” It kind of had an umbrella shape. So I thought, oh boy. Can I leave this woman? I finally just trusted that a nurse would come and she [ ]. So I got to the Geary Cellar and the owner, standing behind the bar, said, “Brubeck, you’re fired.” I said, “My wife just had a baby. That’s why I’m late.” He said, “Drinks on the house.” 

Dave: That’s when I brought Darius home. I sat him on the grand piano – Howard’s. We were living with Howard – grand piano, and played Milhaud for him, so that that would be the first music he heard ….

Gioia: Tell me about how Fantasy Records came about and about your relationship and impressions of the Weiss brothers. 

Dave: There was a teacher from Stanford University named – the trombonist from Stanford – had the first – recorded me. He recorded me, and he did not pay for the record session: Cal Tjader, Ron Crotty, and myself. So when I asked him – I said, “My sidemen are complaining that they haven’t been paid and the records are out.” He said, “I can’t pay you, because they’re not selling at all.” So I went to the Weiss brothers, who produced those records – Jack Sheedy was his name. 

Iola: That’s it. 

Gioia: That’s right. Jack Sheedy. 

Dave: I said, “Jack said that they’re not selling.” The Weiss brothers said, “Your records are selling. His aren’t, but he’s keeping his company going by selling your records and keeping the money.” They said, “Why don’t you go to him and tell him that if he can’t pay for the record sessions that [ ] like to buy the recordings back and own them.” So I went to him. He was glad to sell them to me for cost. That would have been around three hundred dollars or four, maybe at the most. 

Iola: I think it was less than that.

Dave: Then the Weiss brothers said, “We’ll just take those, we’ll keep manufacturing them, we’ll call it Fantasy Records, and we’ll be partners.” The records started really taking off. Jimmy Lyons was playing them every night on his broadcasts, so you heard them up and down the West Coast and out past the Hawaiian islands to the sailors at sea who would come into San Francisco for their leave and look me up. We had a lot of sailors at places like the Blackhawk because of Jimmy’s show. So we just kept making trio records. Everything was going pretty well. Then I went to Honolulu, where I got in a swimming accident. The accident was bad enough that the ambulance drivers I could hear talking said, “We’re bringing in a d.o.a.” They brought me to the Army hospital, because Queens Hospital – I didn’t have any insurance or any money – wouldn’t take me. They said, “Were you in the service?” I said, “Yes.” They said, “We’ll call the Army hospital.” They put me in a holding cellar under the hospital on a gurney. They said, “If you move, you’ll probably be paralyzed, or die.” So I lay very still all through lunch hour. The doctors were up eating lunch in the hospital. Then they brought me up and started working me in various ways, with weights over my head. Finally they called Iola. You take it from here. 

Iola: It was quite late at night before I heard from anybody. Then a doctor from the Tripler? Army Hospital phoned me and said, “There seemed to be some life in his limbs. He’s going to survive, but now it’s a question of how much he’s going to have use of his limbs.” But the recovery started quite remarkably fast, because he had – how many pounds? 

Dave: 10 pounds. 

Iola: 10-pound weights at the chin strap, and the weights would go over the back of the bed in the hospital. So he just had to lie flat with this thing stretching you. Dave’s lower back was very much affected too, but what they were really working on was what was up here, because that was the crucial part. 

Gioia: How long before you came back to California? 

Dave: I was 21 days in traction. I’m trying to get out of the hospital. Finally the doctor said, “I’ve never talked to anybody that wanted to get out so bad. There’s one thing that maybe would work. If I let you go, you have to promise me to go back to Waikiki Beach, where you got hurt, and float [ ] hours a day, because what we’re doing here is pulling your neck off the nerve, and one other way that can help it is to float. Your body starts floating and the bones move somewhat into the right place.” Can you believe that? So I go right back where I got hurt, and more than a month of floating, right?

Iola: About a month, I think. 

Dave: Then he said, “If you’ll do this every day of your life.” As soon as we finished yesterday, I went and floated. At home, I have a pool in the basement. I used to have the pulleys in the basement. I could work my neck that way. Some days I’d be better off than others. At the Blackhawk, I could not stand up when the set was over. By that time, nerves and bones had shifted into a different position, from sitting, but I could pull myself up by grabbing the top of the piano. Then there would be a blackout on the stand. I’d stand there until feeling came back in my limbs and arms, some nights better than others. 

Gioia: Is it true that while you were recovering, the Weiss brothers pressured Cal Tjader and Ron Crotty to find another piano player? 

Dave: Very true. I felt very betrayed in some ways. 

Iola: Actually it was Cal and Jack Weeks rather than Ron Crotty. 

Gioia: Okay. It was Jack Weeks. Thank you for clarifying that. 

Dave: Jack, yeah. But maybe they didn’t want to do it. They had to work, though. I think they got Vince Guaraldi. No. [John] Marabuto. What’s strange is, we always were friends, even when I felt that the Weiss brothers and everything I had started, they should have waited until I recovered, because it was maybe three months or four months before I could play again. This arm and these hands weren’t working up to snuff at all. 

Gioia: We’ll talk in a second about the formation of the quartet and about Paul Desmond joining the band at that point, but I just want you to speculate. If you had not had that swimming accident in Hawaii, do you think you would have kept with the trio? Is it possible your career could have gone off in some completely different direction if that hadn’t happened? 

Dave: Probably, but Paul was not going to take no for an answer. He wanted to come to Honolulu. I had to talk him out of that. Free. He would just come, so he could play. If you read his book . . . 

Gioia: Doug Ramsey’s book. 

Dave: . . . , you’ll see in the introduction, it was – a drive in his life, was to play with me. 

Gioia: So the quartet might have formed anyway, inevitably, because Paul was very focused on this. 

Iola: I think that it might also – Dave, I think, always had in the back of his mind wanting to revive the octet, because there were times when you were playing with a trio that you would add Paul and Dick Collins when an opportunity arose. So I think in the back of his mind, you were thinking in terms of a quartet or quintet, but Paul was the one that was centered on it. 

Dave: And you letting Paul in the house, when I said, “Never let him in the house.” 

Gioia: Tell me about this. 

Dave: He had really destroyed my life when he went to do Feather River. That was a real betrayal. So I told Iola, “Never let [ ]. If he’s coming around, I don’t want to see him.” So she let him in. 

Iola: He came back from New York, knocking at the door and all enthusiastic, wanting to see 

Dave. It was pretty hard to say no. 

Dave: I was hanging out diapers on the back porch on one of those old pulley wires. I turned around, and there’s Paul, standing on the landing and saying, “I’ll wash your dishes. I’ll wash your car.” What else was he going to do? 

Iola: He’ll baby-sit, do the grocery shopping. He would do anything. 

Gloyd: Before you leave Hawaii, mention your bank account. 

Dave: My bank account? Oh yeah. I was broke, and I didn’t know how I was going to get home. The doctor told me, “You cannot fly.” You see, to sit was murder. He said, “You cannot sit on an airplane.” I just turned down an hour ago, going to England to play with the LSO and the BBC, because the next day was in Humphrey’s, in San Diego. I said to Russell, “I can’t do it. I can’t sit.” When I have to sit, to this day, it is really hard. I have to do it, but I do it, but it’s not fun. 

Iola: Anyway, the bank account was . . . 

Gioia: Shall we take a break? Are we running out of tape? 

Kimery: Yeah. Just hold that thought. 

Gioia: Let him change the tape here. 

Iola: Yeah, I was thinking of that, because it was like a minor miracle. [recording interrupted] 

Gioia: We were talking about your bank account. 

Dave: The bank account. How am I going to get home? I’d only worked two weeks in Honolulu before the accidents, and we had to pay rent and food for our family. So there was nothing left in the bank. Zero. Maybe a few dollars. So I went to the bank to close the account. They came back with the statement that I had – five hundred, wasn’t it? 

Iola: I don’t remember the figure. 

Dave: It was a lot of money in those days – to my credit. I said, “You’ve made a mistake. I never deposited any money.” They said, “It’s here, it’s yours, and you might as well take it.” I said, “That’s going to solve how I get home to San Francisco, but I still believe you’re going to want this money from me someday.” So I left my parents’ address, because I didn’t have an address. “Eventually I’ll pay you if you write and tell me.” They said, “All right.” So that way we bought tickets on the Lurline, which was a Maxim [Mason Line?] ship from San Francisco to Honolulu and sometimes on to . . . 

Iola: Hong Kong. 

Dave: – Hong Kong was it? Or Sydney. 

Iola: Mostly it was back and forth between the Hawaiian Islands and San Francisco. 

Dave: So that’s the way we got home. I asked my dad, “Did you put money in my account?” He said, “No.” I asked Joe Glaser. Joe said no. I asked anybody – brothers. I never found out where the five hundred came from. But I’ll tell you, without saying – I just thought of something. [ ] this woman in the world who used to . . . 

Iola: That’s the only person that I could think of. Dave: . . . used to come into the club. 

Iola: Doris Duke. 

Gioia: Doris Duke. So it might have been her. 

Dave: Yeah. She was very nice to me. I just thought of it now. Could it? Who would have money like that that I would know? 

Iola: It’s a possibility, because she came into the club, and people who came into the club were aware of the accident and what happened. So it could have been her. 

Gioia: A miraculous story there of the money when you needed that money showing up. Iola: Now there’s a Doris Duke Foundation, and I hope it’s helping jazz musicians still. 

Dave: It is. It does help jazz musicians. 

Gioia: Let me ask you about the early quartet recordings. Those are quite extraordinary recordings, because they sound very spontaneous, but they are also very well planned and conceived. I’m trying to understand, what kind of preparation or rehearsal? How planned were they? How did you get that kind of combination between the planned and the spontaneous? 

Dave: When people talk about “cool,” I recommend that they listen to an NBC broadcast from a club, live in Los Angeles, This Can’t Be Love and Look for the Silver Lining. To this day, I think that’s some of the most spontaneous, hard-swinging, far from West Coast “cool,” so to speak. How can they call us “cool”? That is wild. Have you heard that? 

Gioia: Absolutely. 

Iola: Did that come from a head arrangement, and then just free after that? Silver Lining was a head arrangement, wasn’t it? 

Dave: Yeah, sure. Nothing written out. Then, at the end, Paul plays The Eyes and Ears of the World [Brubeck sings that melody]. That’s just crazy. 

Gloyd: You were furious with him. 

Dave: There’s one cymbal crash that everybody thinks is cymbal, and it’s me going “schewwwww,” telling the drummer to start filling. Herb Barman and Bull Ruther. What a wild rhythm section that was. So I always think, boy . . . Then we took that group to New York, didn’t we? To Birdland. 

Gioia: What would have been their first – would that have been the first time you performed in New York? 

Dave: Yeah. 

Gioia: Tell me about that, your reception there and how . . .? Did they know about you in New York? Because of the recordings, they must have. 

Dave: I guess the word had gotten – we’d had a good review from John Hammond, a really good review. Metronome by Barry Ulanov.

Gioia: Let me ask you about your own musical development at this time. When you had the quartet during these early years, did you have a practice regimen? Did you have rehearsals? Or did you do most of your music on the stage? 

Dave: Most of the time, it would be something they developed on the job [ ]. There were real rehearsals in our house. I can’t remember too many other rehearsals. Can you? 

Iola: Occasionally there would be rehearsals in preparation for a recording, if it was new material that you had not played in concert or in clubs. The [Jazz Impressions of] Eurasia album, I think there were a few rehearsals, because it was all new. 

Gioia: So if you were going to record standards, it was very straightforward, but if you were going to do Time Out or something that was different, then there would be rehearsals. Let me ask you about the transition from recording for a small label like Fantasy to moving to Columbia and how that was different for you. How did that change things, all of a sudden working for a major label? 

Dave: When you consider that we were using Ampex maybe for the first time. Our first session for Fantasy was with the trio. We went – we had a three-hour session. At about two and a half hours, we had to realize that the Ampex [tape recorder] was not running at a steady – it would go flat or sharp. Weiss brothers said, “We’ve got to go to acetate,” which was right there, “and do four tunes, and then we’ll be all right.” So we did four tunes. One tune, Russell says, we repeated. The others were just first take. Our first session was made in a half hour, four sides. The Weiss brothers usually referred to my music as “garbage.” 

Gioia: They made a lot of money off of it. 

Dave: When you’d be in the studio, and somebody would say, “Okay. Let’s go over this garbage,” it’s no way to feel good about what you were about to do. Your mood in studios – you want to have a certain dignity. The word “garbage” always stuck in my mind. 

Gioia: I remember I met Max Weiss. I did a long interview with him. He told me, “I’m not a jazz guy. I’ve never been a jazz guy. My philosophy is, you can’t fall in love with the product. It’s just a product.

Dave: That’s a good description. Sol Weiss must have been an excellent recording engineer, because those old trio things are so well done. Sometimes I think with maybe one microphone. Now it takes us seven mics on the drums, balance, and all that. 

Iola: Were the first recordings that you made for Columbia in the studio without as many mics and so-on as they do now? I wasn’t around for those. 

Dave: No, but we had great, famous engineers. Fred Clough often did our sessions. We had to do three albums a year. That was my contract, and I never missed, that I can remember, in 17 years at Columbia. 

Gioia: I think you did more. I think if you and I look at the discography. I’ve done a count. You did at least three a year, sometimes more. 

Dave: Then one for Fantasy [ ] we all decided. Many years – that would be four – then there’d be special products, where I had very little to do with it. 

Gioia: I remember I once went through your discography, and I did a count. It seemed every 12 to 14 weeks there would be a new Dave Brubeck recording on the market. 

Dave: And Paul Desmond’s remark: “This group can make a recording for a streetcar token and a ham sandwich.” 

Gioia: Let’s take a break now, because we’ve been going for a while. Keep every . . . [recording interrupted] 

Gioia: Dave, we were talking about your recordings for Columbia. You made so many of them, many of them based on various themes. You did West Side Story or Time Out or A Tribute to Cole Porter or Dave Does Disney. How were those projects decided upon? Was that you sitting down with the quartet? Or was it George Avakian? Or was it, in the middle of the night you would get an idea? How did you determine the various themes for these projects? 

Dave: That’s a good question, because I remember somebody would say something like, you should start playing show tunes of some of the most well-known Broadway shows and just do a whole series of those. So we did Cole Porter and . . . 

Gioia: Richard Rogers. 

Dave: . . . Richard Rogers. Then my favorite is . . .

Iola: Matt Dennis. 

Dave: . . . Matt Dennis. 

Iola: Who suggested that? Did that come from George Avakian? 

Dave: That came from me. My friend in the Army taught me all the Matt Dennis tunes. He was Festus in “Gunsmoke.” Ken Curtis. He could sing with the big bands and often took the place of Frank Sinatra or somebody. He was that good. 

Gioia: Let me talk about once again your relationship with Columbia. After Take Five, you have a huge hit single, unusual. It’s unusual for any jazz musician to have a hit single, but for an instrumental and in 5/4, these are unique events. After that, was there pressure on you from Columbia to become more of a hit-maker and do more commercial music? Or did they give you freedom to define what you wanted? 

Dave: They had to give me freedom. Once in a while I’d remind them that my contract allowed me freedom. 

Gioia: Is that so? 

Dave: I think so. Don’t you? 

Iola: Yes. 

Dave: People find it hard to believe, because it’s so hard to put that in. But I made my first contract. I didn’t have an attorney. So I made a lot of mistakes. But artistic mistakes, I covered my territory very well, because that – I wasn’t thinking about money and residuals and that. Columbia could take advantage of young artists, claim all their compositions, and put it in their own publishing. I didn’t know about that. That’s when you need a music attorney that is going to protect you. I finally got that with Jim Bancroft from San Francisco and Richard Juler now. They started protecting me in the ways of commercial recordings that you want to protect yourself, because when they saw that Columbia had told me they weren’t going to put out Time Out unless I adjust the royalties for the rights. 

Iola: Because they were all originals. 

Dave: They said, when it’s all originals. I think they gave me 12 cents for the whole album. When Jim Bancroft saw that, he got it up, because [ ]. Congress was approached by BMI and ASCAP and companies like that, so we got a protection of, if you did that, it had to be 36 cents, instead of 12. So that is how much I lost over the years, is two-thirds of – so getting a good attorney is very important. 

Gioia: At Columbia – when I think of Columbia during that period, I know one of the influential people there is John Hammond. Hammond was an admirer of your music, but I don’t often hear his name in association with your time at Columbia. Did you have any dealings with John when you were at Columbia? 

Dave: No, and I kept thinking I would have. But it was different artists represented the guys that – Cal Lampley. Do you remember that name? The first jazz that Teo [Macero] ever did was, I believe, with me. So, in a way, I broke him into the business. He’s such a sharp guy. He caught on quite quickly. 

Gioia: When I look at your various achievements, there’s so many of them. But there’s one I want to focus on that’s not often talked about. It seems to me that you were very key in moving jazz from nightclubs and onto college campuses. The whole idea – today you look at – so much jazz takes place on college campuses, but as I look at it, you were almost the first. Tell me how that came about. 

Dave: It was through Iola, and even before Iola would be Darius Milhaud, telling us to play for the Mills College assembly. Then we went up to College of Pacific with the octet. Then Iola . . . 

Iola: Then U. C. Berkeley. The octet played there. 

Dave: You started writing to . . . 

Iola: Yeah. Just started out with a list of colleges within driving distance of San Francisco and offered. Sometimes worked out a deal with the student association, where if they guaranteed a certain low amount, that would cover the effort of getting there. Then you split the profits over so much. So the association made some money and had the incentive to try to bring people in, and the band got more money. This really worked, because – especially if there was a good music department and the students were really interested. Students couldn’t really afford to come into nightclubs, and some of them weren’t of age to go into a nightclub. So bringing the music to them seemed the logical step for new music and a new group. 

Gioia: November 8th, 1954. Your picture’s on the cover of Time magazine. How did that impact your career? Did this – for good or for bad. Did it change your life? 

Dave: There’s rumors that it’s not all gravy. 

Gioia: There was a backlash, I would imagine. 

Dave: Yeah, a backlash for sure. There’s stories abound that the bad luck that somebody had after being on the cover, or bad criticism. That did happen to a certain degree. But to balance it, the good that comes from it balances any – by far, the good is far better than the negative. 

Gioia: Is it true that you were on the road in the same city as Duke Ellington the day that [ ] story?

Dave: Touring with the Duke Ellington band. I believe we were in Denver at the time. There was a knock on my door, seven in the morning. There’s Duke Ellington with Time magazine, saying, “Dave, you’re on the cover.” 

Gioia: What a remarkable way to find out. 

Dave: I was hoping – because I knew they were doing a story on both of us – that Duke would come first, as he should. There it was. There was no way. But soon Ellington was on the cover. 

Gioia: Tell me how The Real Ambassadors came about. 

Dave: Through Iola, we would write about Louis Armstrong and cultural exchange and how we should do a show. I remember Iola and I were always busy driving the kids to lessons. When I was gone, she’d have to drive children to 20 lessons a week. We counted them up. 

Iola: Yeah, we counted them. 

Dave: Six kids: ballet, horseback, saxophone, trumpet, piano, cello. We’d always take writing pads along, because you’ve got to sit in front of the house or the school where somebody's taking a lesson. We would have to take advantage of those times. We’d go right to work while they're taking a lesson. I remember working on the Ambassadors. 

Iola: A lot of it was written in the car. 

Gioia: Was there ever a thought of taking that to Broadway? 

Dave: I did. I went away thinking I’m going to be recognized as a Broadway show writer, because one of the top guys that I took this to was so thrilled with the music I’d written. I remember he called his wife into the room and said, “Listen to this.” I played it for her and him again. That was Josh Logan. He sent one of his people in production up to Lenox School. 

Iola: That was Leyland Hayward. 

Dave: Oh. That was Leyland Hayward. So there’s two top names that were very interested. Then finally when it came time to not just interest, but putting up the money – I remember this session with them. They said, “Dave, the Broadway audience is not ready for a show on integration. You’ve got to remember that you’re lecturing to an audience that’s there to be entertained.” He made his point, that we were trying to – I wouldn’t call it lecture, but make people aware of the unfairness of segregation. They came close to producing it, but said it wouldn’t work. Soon there was Raisin in the Sun, on Broadway

Iola: Actually Raisin in the Sun predated that. 

Dave: [ ]. We went to a reading of it. 

Iola: Yes, and also another play that did not get on, that she wrote – I can’t think of her name at the moment – that Nemeroff was trying to produce. Yeah, I think it was difficult. That was – The Raisin in the Sun was a drama, and I think people expect a little more . . . 

Gioia: Social issues. 

Iola: Yes. They’re willing to accept that, but in a musical – at that time, they expected a musical to be entertaining and not much else. It wasn’t until later that musicals started taking on a message, so to speak. 

Dave: Then when we finally did - the only performance was Monterey Jazz Festival. Iola was on one stage, doing the narration. You couldn’t do the entire show, but we could – on the other stage with Louis Armstrong, Carmen McRae, Lambert, Hendricks, and Bavan, Louis’s band, and my band. She would read in between. Explain your part. 

Iola: There was just a narration that tied the songs together into some kind of story – sequence could be followed. But it was primarily music, very few words, except what were in the lyrics. But the message got through. It was really an extraordinary night, because so many musicians came backstage afterwards that were so moved by it. Of course, with Louis Armstrong singing it, how could you miss? 

Dave: Joe Glaser wasn’t anxious for it to be a success, because he’d have his top moneymaker and me, who was doing well, tied up for six shows and a matinee a week. He could probably send Louis out and make that much money in one night. So he wasn’t hot for this. But he did set it up, when I told him I wanted to do this show with Louis, that I could meet Louis in Chicago. His manager, Frenchie, when I went to the hotel, would not tell me Louis’s room number and really kept me away from Louis. So from one of the hall porters, I found out Louis’s room number and went up and sat on the floor in the hall between rooms until a waiter was bringing Louis’s dinner. When he said, “Room service,” Louis came to the door. When he opened the door, he saw me sitting on the floor. He said, “Dave, what are you doing?” I said, “I was waiting to see you.” “Come in. Why didn’t you come in?” I said, “I was told not to bother you, by Frenchie.” “Oh, Frenchie.” He said, “Don’t listen to him. Have you eaten anything?” I said, “No, I haven’t eaten yet.” He said, “Bring that boy the same thing you just brought me.” So I went in. We ate. He said, “Dave, I hope you’ll sit in with me tonight.” I said, “Oh, Louis, I don’t think I want to do that.” “It would be nice if you did.” I said, “I did hope to come to your show.” He spotted me in the show and brought me on. There’s Billy Kyle at the piano. That’s the first jazz pianist I heard when I was a kid, was the Billy Kyle Trio. I’m thinking, “My goodness, [ ] taking Billy Kyle’s place!” But it all worked out. Real kind people, full of smiles. It was a wonderful experience. Even Ralph Gleason gave me a great review at Monterey, and Leonard Feather gave it a rave review. Other reviewers came from all over the country. Some, I think, from Europe were there. So it was very successful, and very successful with the real aware jazz audience, so why wouldn’t it have gone on Broadway, or even a musical film? It should have worked. 

Iola: Also I think it’s important to say that it meant a lot to Louis Armstrong. I read an interview he had with Leonard Feather. Louis was in Stockholm someplace. He was talking about The Real Ambassadors and saying that that was one of the most important things that he had done, because I think he felt this was his opportunity to make a statement. 

Gioia: I look back at that period, Dave, and you yourself were something of a real ambassador. I think in 1958 you went to Poland . . . 

Dave: Turkey. 

Gioia: . . . through the State Department. Then you go behind the Eastern curtain, and then down into the Middle East, Turkey, places like that. What kind of reception did you find? Were people aware of your music? Were they responsive to it? 

Dave: Poland was very responsive. Turkey – we played in movie houses in Istanbul. Ankara, we played in a nightclub. Was it Isfahan? 

Iola: Izmir. 

Dave: Izmir. So Turkey was good. Very good musicians in Turkey. In those days in Europe – and consider that Turkey’s almost part of Europe – there’s always big bands at the radio stations. Sometimes more than one. Really great jazz players. So those kind of people were very aware of American jazz players. In England and Germany, to this day they still have radio bands, and they’re great. They’re on call every day. That’s the kind of job that jazz musicians want to get. Get off the road. It pays well, and it’s steady work. Some of my friends have been in a band in Germany for maybe 15 or 20 years. 

Iola: Yeah. I think Herb Geller just retired. 

Dave: Herb and Paul Desmond were together in that band . . . 

Iola: Jack Fina? 

Dave: No. When Paul was in New York and came home. 

Iola: I thought that was Jack Fina. 

Dave: That guitar player. Jack? 

Gioia: Eddie Duran.

Iola: Alvino Rey. 

Dave: Alvino Rey.

Iola: On that Turkey date, I think it’s important to mention a group, Blue Rondo a la Turk. 

Dave: I was on my way to a radio station to be interviewed in Turkey. I was walking through the streets. There were street musicians playing in 9/8. [Brubeck sings a 9/8 rhythmic pattern.] Like that. So when I got to the radio station, there was a wonderful musician named June [ ], a friend of Gunther Schuller. I said to June, “What is this rhythm? di-ya di-ya di-ya ta-ta-ta di-ya di-ya.” He turned and looked at the band and pointed, and the whole band started playing something in 9/8 with that rhythm. I thought to myself, boy, when I get home, I’m going to write a tune – or maybe tonight, I started using that rhythm. I’ll put harmony to it, and my own melody. That’s how I started Blue Rondo a la Turk. It’s too bad that I said “a la Turk.” I was trying to be amusing by using Mozart’s term. The reason that Columbia did not push it, they said Blue Rondo a la Turk is too long to be listed on a jukebox. Take Five is just perfect. I said, yeah, I did that to myself. I named Paul’s tune Take Five and mine Blue Rondo a la Turk. But Blue Rondo was played as much before Columbia started pushing. They said they had to have an A side and a B side. They though Take Five, being that title, should be the A side. If they had left it alone, they’d have had two monster hits. To this day, Blue Rondo is played all over the road. Take Five, played more. But they were equal for a while. 

Gioia: I can believe that. 

Iola: They should have split it up . . . 

Gioia: Two singles. 

Iola: . . . so they could have two A sides. But that was the thinking in those days, that the B side just was along for the ride, and they pushed the one side. 

To be continued and concluded in Part 5.