Ambassador of Cool

"He sits down at the piano and loses 30 years," says Bobby Militello, Brubeck's saxophonist for the past 26 years. "I put the gauntlet down all the time for him, and at 87 he picks it up and throws it back at me."

Ever since his career began in San Francisco in the late 1940s, Brubeck has happily defied musical conventions. His style is catchy but never simple. By the early 1950s he was finding a foothold with the public, and in 1954 he became the second jazz musician -- Louis Armstrong was the first -- to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. The article lauded Brubeck and his group for "some of the strangest and loveliest music ever played since jazz was born" and described him in pseudo-hip prose as "a wigging cat with a far-out wail."

Dave Brubeck would be the last person to call himself a "wigging cat." He has, in fact, perhaps the most unlikely background of anyone who became a major jazz artist. He never played in a big band, never lived in a city until after his musical tastes were formed, never moved to New York to play bebop with Dizzy and Bird.

Instead, he grew up in rural California, first in Concord and later on a remote 45,000-acre ranch near Ione, 40 miles from Sacramento. Young Dave was an authentic cowboy -- his father was a champion roper -- and he spent his days riding horses, mending fences and herding cattle.

Dave's father wanted him to take over the ranch, but his mother had other ideas. She was a talented pianist who, when Dave was a boy, left home for a year to study in England with the classical virtuoso Dame Myra Hess.

In spite of their isolation on the ranch, Brubeck's mother taught her three sons to play piano and gave relatively advanced lessons in music theory. The two older boys, Henry and Howard, went on to careers as composers and music teachers. Dave, however, had a different approach. Before he began wearing glasses, he was cross-eyed and could not read music. As a result, he learned to play by ear and could repeat anything on the piano, no matter how complex, after hearing it once or twice.

His mother and brothers played Chopin and Liszt, but his own musical studies were more casual and improvisational. When he first heard jazz -- "I might have been 5 or 6 or 7. My brother's dance band rehearsed in my mother's studio on Thursday nights" -- he found the music irresistible.

"We weren't allowed to have a radio or records," he said, but he soon overcame that prohibition: "I made my own crystal set and hid it under my bed."

When he was 14, he bought his first record -- Fats Waller's "There's Honey on the Moon Tonight" -- and joined a band that played at parties and honky-tonks. He dreamed that Benny Goodman and his band would pass by his ranch and be trapped in a cattle drive, unable to move on until they took the young Brubeck with them as their piano player.

Brubeck's father wanted him to stay on the ranch, but his mother insisted that he go to college. To please them both, Brubeck enrolled at the College (now University) of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., to study veterinary science. At the end of his first year, a sympathetic zoology teacher pointed him across campus and told him he belonged in music.

Brubeck almost didn't graduate because, he says, the professors found out he had never really learned to read music. He could write musical notation when composing, but he was helpless when it came to sight reading. For four years, he had fooled them with his quick ear, his keen knowledge of theory and his compositional originality. In the end, Brubeck was awarded a diploma only on the condition that he never teach music. Today, the University of the Pacific houses the Brubeck Institute, which is both an archive of his papers and a conservatory for jazz studies.

While Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were inventing bebop in New York, Brubeck was an Army infantryman under Gen. George S. Patton in World War II. When an officer found out Brubeck could play piano, the musician was transferred to a unit where he could lead a band that entertained wounded soldiers. For a while, Brubeck was stationed at a prisoner-of-war camp, where German and Italian prisoners would call out requests while he practiced.