Jon De Lucia - The Brubeck Octet Project

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

“Although the music of Brubeck, especially the Dave Brubeck Quartet featuring Paul Desmond, is well known, the music of the Dave Brubeck Octet, which essentially flourished from 1946 until 1950, is virtually unknown.

Music for this group, written and arranged by several members of the band including Brubeck himself, displays many of the same concerns as the music of the Miles Davis nonet that followed soon after. As far as one can determine, the New York musicians were totally unaware of Brubeck's endeavors, for his Octet arrangements were not professionally recorded nor circulated at the time.”

One will discover that some musical features, sounds, and ideas characteristic of cool jazz and the Miles Davis nonet are fully present in the music of the Brubeck Octet.

Overall, one will observe that some features important in the new style of cool jazz are explored even more fully in the Brubeck ensemble than they were in the Davis nonet. The first is counterpoint.  In virtually every creation, contrapuntal lines are crafted, usually as a countersubject to the melody of the popular music standard under consideration. 

Although counterpoint appears prominently in virtually every one of the Octet's recorded selections, the David Van Kriedt composition "Fugue on Bop Themes" stands as the most unapologetic testimonial to a jazz work totally immersed in counterpoint.  Its long subject is followed strictly with successive entrances, and it contains the expected fortspinnung of thematic material (the "spinning out" processes of the developmental and episodic passages). The composer leads the music through a varied harmonic and contrapuntal display.

Another novel feature of the Octet was its members' interest in meters other than 4/4 or common dance time, surely an additional by-product of music study with Darius Milhaud at Mills College.”

- Frank Tirro’s The Birth of the Cool of Miles Davis and His Associates [College Music Society,2009].

“Within the past ten years I can think of very few released recordings with more musical importance than the work of the Octet. I have seen within the time lapse of a decade the growth of so-called West Coast jazz. I have heard more and more of the Octet innovations being used and accepted in the "mainstream" of jazz. I have seen the individuals of the Octet, once removed from the geographic isolation of their San Francisco home, rise in esteem and prominence in the eyes of fellow musicians, critics, and the public. But, as a group these contributors to jazz were unacknowledged, except by flattery of imitation, primarily because the jazz-conscious public, the agents, the recording companies, the jazz journals, the reporters, all had their eyes and ears focused on the East Coast.”

- Dave Brubeck liner notes written in 1956 for Fantasy’s 12” red vinyl LP The Dave Brubeck Octet [F-3-239]

Coincidentally, while working on the Octet segment of my forthcoming Dave Brubeck Reader, Terri Hinte’s Media Relations firm kindly sent along a preview copy of Jon De Lucia/The Brubeck Octet Project which will released on July 12, 2024 on Jon’s own Musaeum Clausum Recordings imprint.

Ever curious about the underexplored corners of jazz history, alto saxophonist Jon De Lucia breathes new life into one important such chapter with The Brubeck Octet Project. The album documents De Lucia and his octet's rediscovery and reconditioning of the arrangements played by the Dave Brubeck Octet, the innovative 1946-1950 unit with which the iconic West Coast pianist began his career. It will be available in CD and digital formats as well as a limited edition 180g Translucent Red Vinyl release, in the style of the original Fantasy Brubeck records.

As such, Jon’s interpretation of the music of Dave Brubeck’s Octet is an excellent example of what my Jazz buddy Jeffrey Sultanof refers to as “Jazz repertory” -

“The phrase ‘jazz repertory’ has many definitions and dimensions. Perhaps the most basic is: the study, preservation and performance of the many diverse musical styles in jazz. In recent years, the phrase most often applies to big bands and jazz ensembles performing classic and new music written for reeds, brass, and rhythm section in various sizes and combinations.” 

- Jeffrey Sultanof, Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz [p.512]

Here’s more information about the recording from the accompanying press release.

“De Lucia formed his Octet in 2016, a vessel for investigating Giuffre's 1959 octet arrangements for saxophonist Lee Konitz. The Octet turned out to outlast the Giuffre project, and De Lucia's desire to keep replenishing its repertoire led him to the Van Kriedt and Brubeck arrangements that form the basis of his Brubeck Octet Project.”

De Lucia's octet was formed at City College of New York (where he then taught), but it quickly became a weekly reading band, leaving the saxophonist constantly in search of new (old) repertoire. It was this quest that led him to the archives at Mills College (Brubeck's alma mater), where he found many of the Brubeck Octet's original handwritten charts in the papers of the band's tenor saxophonist and arranger, Dave Van Kriedt.

"They were a bit of a mess, full of mistakes and scribbles that made them hard to read," recalls De Lucia in the album's liner notes. "I always wanted to take the time to put them into notation software, fix the mistakes, rehearse a band, and record this music anew. Finally, thanks to support from CUNY and the Brubeck and Van Kriedt families, it has happened."

Jazz being jazz, however, De Lucia also sought ways to make his own mark on the work—and to allow his collaborators to do the same. He wrote new intros and backgrounds for the arrangements (by Brubeck, Van Kriedt, and baritone/clarinetist Bill Smith), and, more importantly, expanded their solo spaces, giving his musicians room to have their say.

As one of the most famous and prolific jazz musicians of the 20th century, Dave Brubeck was so well documented there would seem to be precious few unexplored corners of his career. But Brooklyn alto saxophonist Jon De Lucia, a musician drawn to overlooked musical nooks and crannies, has uncovered and refurbished the long-neglected arrangements that launched Brubeck's career in the late 1940s as a classical-curious student studying composition at Mills College on the GI Bill. The Brubeck Octet Project takes a fresh look at the West Coast's alternative to Miles Davis's epochal Birth of the Cool sessions with a cast of heavyweight improvisers including tenor saxophone great Scott Robinson.

Before gaining fame on the college circuit with his quartet in the mid-1950s, Brubeck was an experimentally minded player drawn to Oakland's Mills College by French composer Darius Milhaud. The Octet started as a school project first known as the Jazz Workshop Ensemble and later as The Eight, and finally as the Dave Brubeck Octet. And like Davis's contemporaneous sessions that came to be known as Birth of the Cool, the octet's 1946-50 recordings were first released piecemeal before Fantasy compiled the tracks on the 1956 12-inch LP Dave Brubeck Octet.

While hewing close to the original charts, De Lucia opens up the long-buried material with space for solos, essentially re-conducting Brubeck's experiments from a 21st-century perspective. The resulting album unfolds with the flow and coherence of a well-conceived set, opening and closing with Brubeck's walk-off theme "Curtain Music." There are fascinating arrangements of standards, from the lapidary take on Gershwin's "Love Walked In" to the warp-and-weft melodic lines of Arlen's "Let's Fall in Love," which opens with the horns unaccompanied. Both of those arrangements are by tenor saxophonist Dave Van Kriedt.

Brubeck's group was stocked with future luminaries, like clarinetist/composer Bill Smith, who contributed the arrangement of Cole Porter's "What Is This Thing Called Love?" (which opens with clattery melancholy before De Lucia takes over with a spritely alto solo). Drummer Cal Tjader went on to renown as a Latin jazz-loving vibraphonist and bandleader, while alto saxophonist Paul Desmond's deliciously dry sound defined the Dave Brubeck Quartet during the height of its fame.

Brubeck's sole arrangement, besides his original "Curtain Music," is Kern's "The Way You Look Tonight," a chart marked more by a dense thicket of rapidly moving lines than lithe syncopation. It turns out the driving force behind the Octet's sound was Van Kriedt, a mysterious and remarkable figure that De Lucia has rescued from obscurity. Responsible for the lion's share of the Octet arrangements, the tenor saxophonist was born in Berkeley and ended up studying composition at Mills with Milhaud. He contributed two originals to the Octet's book, the sensuous ballad "Prelude" (a gorgeous feature for De Lucia) and "Fugue on Bop Themes," a piece that Igor Stravinsky used to illustrate counterpoint while lecturing at UCLA in 1951.

A highly accomplished multi-instrumentalist, Van Kriedt resurfaced on Brubeck's 1957 album Reunion, a quintet session featuring eight Van Kriedt compositions, including "Prelude." But by the end of the decade he had moved to Tasmania, and De Lucia found letters from him to his former boss in the Brubeck Archives. "He sounds isolated, living in this farmhouse that's remote even in Tasmania," De Lucia said. "But he kept writing and composing."

De Lucia's band features a stellar cross-section of New York talent, including trumpeter Brandon Lee, who's showcased on two Grammy Award-winning albums by the Christian McBride Big Band, and trombonist Rebecca Patterson, who divides her time between Broadway pit orchestras and creative combos like Charlie Rosen's 8-Bit Big Band. Jay Rattman's clarinet and baritone saxophone work reveals a highly expressive player with a knack for blending with other winds.

Pianist Glenn Zaleski is one of the most sought-after accompanists on the New York scene, and bassist Daniel Duke is a highly versatile player who's recorded with brass expert Corey Wilcox and saxophonist Nicole Glover. Rising drummer Keith Balla, who regularly supports Samara Joy and Pasquale Grasso, rounds out the rhythm section. Aside from De Lucia, the standout voice is Scott Robinson, whose longtime position holding down the baritone sax chair in the Maria Schneider Orchestra has indelibly linked him to the imposing horn. But given his druthers he prefers to play tenor, and he delivers consistently supple ensemble work along with a series of pithy solos.

As a musicologist, De Lucia has published in the Jazz Research Journal and has released a series of books, Bach Shapes, for saxophone. He continues to compose, perform, and teach full time at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City. His sixth album The Brubeck Octet Project offers a wholly original view of a moment when a cadre of unknown twentysomething avant-garde jazz artists on the West Coast worked out new strategies for combining composition and arrangement.

"They were all exploring these concepts, odd times, rhythmic play, polytonality, all these ideas Dave had about music," De Lucia says. "It carries forward to his early quartet and trio things, eventually manifesting in Time Out. It's fascinating that these ideas are being explored simultaneously on both coasts with Birth of the Cool.”