Dave Brubeck Quartet ,
Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck,
Eugene Wright In 1951, Brubeck organized the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with Paul Desmond on alto saxophone. The two took up residency at San Francisco's
Black Hawk nightclub and had success touring college campuses, recording a series of
live albums. The first of these live albums,
Jazz at Oberlin, was recorded in March 1953 in the Finney Chapel at
Oberlin College. Brubeck's live performance was credited with legitimizing the field of jazz music at Oberlin, and the album is one of the earliest examples of
cool jazz. Brubeck returned to College of the Pacific to record
Jazz at the College of the Pacific in December of that year. Following the release of
Jazz at the College of the Pacific, Brubeck signed with Fantasy Records, believing that he had a stake in the company. He worked as an
artists and repertoire promoter for the label, encouraging the Weiss brothers to sign other contemporary jazz performers, including
Gerry Mulligan,
Chet Baker, and
Red Norvo. Upon discovering that the deal was for a half interest in his own recordings, Brubeck quit to sign with another label,
Columbia Records.
College success In June 1954, Brubeck released
Jazz Goes to College, with double bassist
Bob Bates and drummer
Joe Dodge. The album is a compilation of the quartet's visits to three colleges: Oberlin College,
University of Michigan, and
University of Cincinnati, and features seven songs, two of which were written by Brubeck and Desmond. "Balcony Rock", the opening song on the album, was noted for its
timing and uneven tonalities, themes that would be explored by Brubeck later. Brubeck was featured on the cover of
Time in November 1954, the second jazz musician to be featured, following
Louis Armstrong in February 1949. Brubeck personally found this acclaim embarrassing, since he considered
Duke Ellington more deserving and was convinced that he had been favored as a white man. In one encounter with Ellington, he knocked on the door of Brubeck's hotel room to show him the cover; Brubeck's response was, "It should have been you." Early bassists for the group included Ron Crotty, Bates, and Bates's brother
Norman; Lloyd Davis and Dodge held the drum chair. In 1956, Brubeck hired drummer
Joe Morello, who had been working with pianist
Marian McPartland; Morello's presence made possible the rhythmic experiments that were to come. In 1958, African-American bassist
Eugene Wright joined for the group's
Department of State tour of Europe and Asia. The group visited Poland, Turkey, India,
Ceylon, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq on behalf of the Department of State. They spent two weeks in Poland, giving 13 concerts and visiting with Polish musicians and citizens as part of the People-to-People program. Wright became a permanent member in 1959, finishing the "classic era" of the quartet's personnel. During this time, Brubeck was strongly supportive of Wright's inclusion in the band, and reportedly canceled several concerts when the club owners or hall managers objected to presenting an integrated band. He also canceled a television appearance when he found out that the producers intended to keep Wright off-camera. In January 1960, he canceled a 25-date tour of colleges and universities in the
American South because 22 of the schools refused to allow Wright to perform.
Time Out In 1959, the Dave Brubeck Quartet recorded
Time Out. The album, which featured pieces entirely written by members of the quartet, notably uses unusual
time signatures—especially for jazz—about which Columbia Records was enthusiastic, but was nonetheless hesitant to release. The release of
Time Out required the cooperation of Columbia Records president
Goddard Lieberson, who underwrote and released it on the condition that the quartet record a conventional album of the
American South,
Gone with the Wind, to cover the risk of
Time Out becoming a
commercial failure. Nonetheless, on the strength of these unusual time signatures, the album quickly went
gold (and was eventually certified double platinum), and peaked at number two on the
Billboard 200. It was the first jazz album to sell more than a million copies. The single "Take Five" from the album quickly became a
jazz standard, despite its unusual composition and its time signature: time.
Time Out was followed by several albums with a similar approach, including
Time Further Out: Miro Reflections (1961), using more , , and , plus the first attempt at ;
Countdown—Time in Outer Space (dedicated to
John Glenn, 1962), featuring and more ;
Time Changes (1963), with much , and ; and
Time In (1966). These albums (except
Time In) were also known for using contemporary paintings as cover art, featuring the work of
Joan Miró on
Time Further Out,
Franz Kline on
Time in Outer Space, and
Sam Francis on
Time Changes.
Later work On a handful of albums in the early 1960s, clarinetist
Bill Smith replaced Desmond. These albums were devoted to Smith's compositions, thus had a somewhat different aesthetic than other Brubeck Quartet albums. Nonetheless, according to critic Ken Dryden, "[Smith] proves himself very much in Desmond's league with his witty solos". Smith was an old friend of Brubeck's; they would record together, intermittently, from the 1940s until the final years of Brubeck's career. In 1961, Brubeck and his wife, Iola, developed a jazz musical,
The Real Ambassadors, based in part on experiences their colleagues and they had during foreign tours on behalf of the Department of State. The soundtrack album, which featured Louis Armstrong,
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, and
Carmen McRae, was recorded in 1961; the musical was performed at the 1962
Monterey Jazz Festival. At its peak in the early 1960s, the Brubeck Quartet was releasing as many as four albums a year. Apart from the "College" and the "Time" series, Brubeck recorded four
LP records featuring his compositions based on the group's travels, and the local music they encountered.
Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A. (1956, Morello's debut with the group),
Jazz Impressions of Eurasia (1958),
Jazz Impressions of Japan (1964), and
Jazz Impressions of New York (1964) are less well-known albums, but they produced Brubeck standards such as "Summer Song", "Brandenburg Gate", "Koto Song", and "Theme from Mr. Broadway". (Brubeck wrote, and the Quartet performed, the theme song for this
Craig Stevens CBS drama series; the music from the series became material for the
New York album.) In 1961, Brubeck appeared in a few scenes of the British jazz/beat film
All Night Long, which starred
Patrick McGoohan and
Richard Attenborough. Brubeck plays himself, with the film featuring
close-ups of his piano fingerings. Brubeck performs "It's a Raggy Waltz" from the
Time Further Out album and duets briefly with bassist
Charles Mingus in "Non-Sectarian Blues". Brubeck also served as the program director of WJZZ-FM (now
WEZN-FM) while recording for the quartet. He achieved his vision of an all-jazz format radio station along with his friend and neighbor John E. Metts, one of the first African Americans in senior radio management. The final studio album for Columbia by the Desmond/Wright/Morello quartet was
Anything Goes (1966), featuring the songs of
Cole Porter. A few concert recordings followed, and
The Last Time We Saw Paris (1967) was the "Classic" quartet's swan-song.
Later career Brubeck produced
The Gates of Justice in 1968, a
cantata mixing
Biblical scripture with the words of
Martin Luther King Jr. In 1971, the new senior management at Columbia Records decided not to renew Brubeck's contract, as they wished to focus on rock music. He moved to Atlantic Records. Brubeck's music was used in the 1985 film
Ordeal by Innocence. He also composed for—and performed with his ensemble on—"The NASA Space Station", a 1988 episode of the CBS TV series
This Is America, Charlie Brown. ==Personal life==