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When I think of Dave Brubeck, the first image that comes to mind is not that of a jazz institution laden with honours, the grand old man of modernism who led the most popular jazz group of the 1950s, or the patron saint of legions of buskers belting out \u2018Take Five\u2019. <\/p>
Instead, I think of London\u2019s Royal Festival Hall in 1992, where the pianist had just finished a rapturously received concert that almost didn\u2019t happen. Two days before, he\u2019d had to cancel a Glasgow concert when his heart began fibrillating, requiring hospital treatment and putting the London event in doubt, as well as cancelling our Radio 3 interview. <\/p>
But Brubeck insisted on going ahead, with his doctor and wife sitting apprehensively in the front row. After the applause had finally stopped, I followed Brubeck\u2019s rangy, white-haired figure through the backstage labyrinth of the Festival Hall to where his wife and team were waiting. \u2018Well,\u2019 he said, \u2018I made it.\u2019<\/p> For me, that phrase captures the essential Brubeck spirit \u2013 committed to his art and to performance, determined to express the music he felt whatever the circumstances, an unselfconscious trailblazer in the American grain who did what he had to to get where he was going.\u00a0<\/p> But his path was never easy. Brubeck\u2019s parents seemed a spectacular misalliance, his father the manager of one of the biggest cattle ranches in northern California, a rodeo champion and man\u2019s man whom Brubeck adored. In total contrast, his mother was a piano teacher who\u2019d studied with Myra Hess<\/a><\/strong> in London and hoped for a solo career. <\/p> Brubeck grew up surrounded by the classical repertoire she played with her pupils, though he utterly resisted her attempts to teach him. But he obviously had talent, playing by ear in his own way and picking up the jazz music<\/a><\/strong> he heard on the radio. By the time he was 14, he was good enough to be offered jobs at local dance halls, though that often meant coming home from a gig at four in the morning to get straight on a horse and help his father herd cattle.\u00a0<\/p> To the young Brubeck, that seemed an ideal life, which was ruined by his mother\u2019s insistence that he go to college. As Brubeck once summed up his view of academe to me, \u2018I hated school with a vengeance.\u2019 His father didn\u2019t want him to go either, but a compromise was reached whereby Brubeck would study veterinary science, which could help on the ranch. But in the event Brubeck proved totally unsuited to the sciences, devoting all his attention to the sounds coming from the nearby music school, which is where the exasperated science faculty finally suggested he should go.\u00a0<\/p>Jazz gigs and cattle herding<\/h2>