Jazz legend Dave Brubeck remembered by his composer son, Darius

Musician and composer Darius Brubeck, 71, remembers life with his father, the jazz legend Dave Brubeck, who would have been 100 next month

The Brubecks were Californians, going back three generations, but in 1960 we were trying out life on the East Coast. We were staying in a house in Wilton, Connecticut, which is where this photograph was taken. I’m 13 or 14, holding a trumpet. That’s my sister Cathy at the piano with [my dad] Dave. Mike, who died in 2009, is holding a saxophone. Chris is wearing the striped shirt, and that’s Dan looking on. I have another brother, Matthew, who wasn’t born yet.

I wouldn’t say we were being groomed, but four of us went on to become professional musicians. I play the piano; Chris is now a very successful composer, and plays bass and trombone; Dan is a drummer and Matthew plays the cello.

This was taken the year after the release of Dave’s Time Out album, which had Take Five and Blue Rondo á La Turk on it. It was the first jazz album to sell a million copies. My father was one of the original Jazz Ambassadors, which was a cultural exchange initiative in the 1950s. The Bolshoi Ballet had come to New York, so the thinking was, ‘What can we do that is not competing with what the Russians could do?’ The idea was that mutual exposure would be a way of heading off a third world war.

Dave was the first American modern jazz musician to go behind the Iron Curtain. He went to Poland in 1958, and I got to go along with him. Sixty years later, in 2018, I toured Poland with the Darius Brubeck Quartet. We went to the ‘solidarity museum’ in Szczecin and the first thing you see there in a display cabinet is a concert programme with a drawing of my father’s face. Seeing that brought tears to my eyes.

All of us felt very close to our father. He was often absent, touring, but he was so involved with us when he was home – we’d go swimming and play sports and music together. He was a thoughtful, outgoing person. It wasn’t an aloof, intellectual upbringing, but we were raised in an atmosphere of talking about art and politics and going to museums and concerts. He loved all of that, and the interaction with us that it produced. What did we really think of West Side Story or the Picasso exhibition at the Guggenheim? We weren’t embarrassed to share questing, if poorly-formed thoughts about the meaning of life.

Without being religious in the conventional sense, he was really interested in spiritual things. He was a GI during the Second World War and reconciliation became a big theme in his music, in his cultural ambassador role, and more directly in the cantatas and oratorios he started writing from 1968 onwards, which were very message-driven on social justice issues.

He did not want to be identified with any political party or movement. It was obvious he was a Democrat, but he never joined the party. He simply said and did what he thought was right. Of course he was invited to the Kennedy White House, but more surprisingly, 20 years later, he and my mother were guests of the Reagans, and kind of friends even.

Later in life, to escape the winter weather in Connecticut, my parents would go to Florida, and that’s where he recorded his last album in 2010, two years before he died. At home in Wilton he had this beautiful music room with two grand pianos, and he’d sit there and just play tunes that he liked. It was just magical being there, listening to him. And this album has some of that late life, elegiac feel.

Darius (second from right) with his father and siblings in 1960