Brothers Chris (l) and Dan Brubeck pay tribute to their dad with the CPO.

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The Brubeck Brothers with Mike DeMiccio presented by the CPO & Chuck Lamb
Jack Singer Concert Hall
Jack Singer Concert Hall
Friday, September 11 - Friday, September 11 Saturday, September 12 - Saturday, September 12

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Chris Brubeck, the affable bassist son of legendary jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, grew up fully aware of his father’s stature and importance in the music world. Still, it wasn’t until 2001, with Ken Burns’s documentary series, Jazz, that Chris believes music lovers finally caught a true glimpse of the man behind his famous father, the dad he simply calls “Dave.”

“I called him and said, ‘How did the thing go with Ken Burns?’” Chris recalls. “And he said; ‘Oh I blew it!’ and I said, ‘Well, what happened?’ He said, ‘Oh, he asked me a question and I started telling a story and, for some reason, right on camera, I started crying. I really blew it!’”

The filmmaker, however, begged to differ. “When I talked to Ken Burns about it later, he said the complete emotional pinnacle of the entire 11-hour series is Dave’s interview,” Chris says. “He was talking about how his father, who was a cowboy, was introducing him to an older African-American gentleman and they were talking about how bad slavery was and this guy had scars on his back where he’d been whipped as a slave. Dave’s father asked the man to show my dad what that actually looked like in the flesh, this concept of slavery and people owning each other, how horrible it was. For some reason, when that memory burned back to him, he started crying.”

At the dawn of the reality TV onslaught, such a raw, real emotional outpouring connected profoundly with the PBS viewing audience. “When a lot of people saw that, they couldn’t see Dave any more, other than in completely human terms,” Chris says. “They couldn’t say, ‘Oh, that’s the guy who wore horn-rimmed glasses and had the first million-seller and was on the cover of Time magazine.’”

“You can’t say ‘Oh, Dave — he hung out with Gerry Mulligan and Charlie Mingus and got drunk and high.’ He never did any of that,” Chris says of his father’s straight-laced lifestyle. “He was always a bit on the outside.” Despite the lack of drugs, debauchery, mischief and mayhem, Brubeck Sr.’s life story is extremely interesting and compellingly unconventional. The son of a rancher and a Paris-schooled classical piano teacher, Dave dropped out of veterinary school to study music and he was nearly expelled for his difficulty in reading music (partly due to poor eyesight and partly due to what would probably now be diagnosed as a learning disability). At a time when audience apartheid was standard practice and overt racism was commonplace in the southern U.S., a racially integrated quartet met with significant resistance (Eugene Wright, Dave Brubeck Quartet’s bass player, is African-American).

Brubeck refused to accept this, cancelling concerts and even walking out of an important television appearance when he learned that Wright was not going to be shown on camera.

Things have changed. It’s hard to imagine that social reality in today’s world. At the same time, it’s fun to imagine how fresh and innovative DBQ classics like “Take Five” and “Blue Rondo A La Turk” must have been in 1959.

Dave Brubeck survives at the rarified age of 88, still making occasional concert appearances. “You know, the thing that keeps you young is going out and playing on the road and the thing that makes you old is going out and playing on the road,” says Chris. “Dave, I don’t think he’d mind my saying this, is like a Rolls Royce with 380,000 miles on it.” Like his father, Chris is a well-respected composer in both the classical and jazz genres, a father and, recently, a grandfather. His group, The Brubeck Brothers Quartet (with brother Dan on drums, Mike DeMicco on guitar and Chuck Lamb on piano), continues to export and expand on the family legacy. He still keeps in touch with some of his father’s fellow groundbreakers from back in the day.

“Gene Wright, Joe Morello [drums] and Paul Desmond [saxophone], they were like uncles to Dan and I when we were growing up,” Chris says of the other three quarters of the classic Dave Brubeck Quartet lineup. “A few months ago, I talked to Gene after Obama got elected. We were talking about bass players and different things but I just had to say, ‘Isn’t it amazing when you think of all that you went through as a member of the quartet, the African-American who was trying to play these places, and now we actually have a president that is black.’ It was great to be able to share that with somebody who’d known me my whole life.”