Dave Brubeck, fake it till you make it
One of the things I’ve discovered through my recent delving into popular (and unpopular) music has been how many musicians have quirky, interesting life stories. In particular, so many came from a musical parent or parents, and so many were highly gifted even as children.
And quite a few couldn’t read music. The Beatles of course, as well as the Bee Gees, and Irving Berlin, just to name a few who were well-known (note also the prevalence of “B” names among pop musicians). They just had music in their heads, and that was that; they didn’t need to learn to read it in the conventional way.
Another highly successful musician (and another “B” name) who couldn’t really read music was Dave Brubeck, jazz great. Quite a few people mentioned him on the blog in the recent jazz thread. Unlike so many of the other music greats who couldn’t read music who were self-taught, Brubeck took lessons. From his mother. But he faked the ability to read music, and that deficiency continued with him in some form or another (such as failure to learn how to sight read) for quite some time [emphasis mine]:
Brubeck did not intend to become a musician (his two older brothers, Henry and Howard, were already on that track), but he did take lessons from his mother. He could not read music during these early lessons, attributing the difficulty to poor eyesight, but “faked” his way through well enough that his deficiency went mostly unnoticed.
Planning to work with his father on their ranch, Brubeck entered the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California to study veterinary science. He switched his major to music at the urging of the head of zoology, Dr. Arnold, who told him “Brubeck, your mind’s not here. It’s across the lawn in the conservatory. Please go there. Stop wasting my time and yours.” Later, Brubeck was nearly expelled when one of his professors discovered that he could not read music on sight. Several others came forward, arguing that his ability to write counterpoint and harmony more than compensated, and demonstrated his skill with music notation. The college was still concerned, and agreed to allow Brubeck to graduate only after he promised never to teach piano.
Is that not a great story?
His older brother Howard, by the way, apparently could read music, because he taught music at the college level as well as being the person who “transcribed, edited, and arranged much of his brother’s music for publication.” It’s also possible that Dave Brubeck learned how to read music somewhere along the line, although I’m not sure why he would need to bother.
Speaking of musical families, Brubeck had six children and four of them became professional musicians: one pianist, one cellist, one percussionist, one multi-instrumentalist, and several are composers as well. His wife Iola wasn’t a musician; she was a writer and she wrote lyrics to some of his compositions (and those of some other jazz musicians, as well). The story of Brubeck’s 70-year-long marriage is wonderful, too; You can read about it here, but this is an excerpt:
In college, Iola studied drama and radio production. She co-directed a weekly campus radio program called “The Friday Frolics”, on which Dave and a small band contributed the music. At the time, Dave frequently pounded his foot to the beat. Iola asked him to remove his shoes, because the pounding upset the audio balance. The only thing Dave could think to say in response was, “I’ve been thrown out of better places than this.”
Despite the rocky beginning, Dave asked Iola out to a dance. They danced just once, sat and talked in Dave’s car for three hours and decided to become engaged that night.
So they became engaged on their first date and had a 70-year-long marriage. When it’s really right, I guess it’s really right.
The fact that you wrote about Dave Brubeck and didn’t link ‘Take Five’ is great.
Brubeck’s legacy includes his work on that GOAT B, namely Johann Sebastian Bach. From the album cover: “[Brubeck] understood Bach from several vantages — first, as the consummate composer, connected to the popular and sacred music of his own time; second, as a marked influence on everything that followed, including jazz arts; third, as an inspiration for Brubeck’s own sacred music. It’s a great joy to hear Brubeck playing Bach and to hear selections of Brubeck’s own music which show JSB’s deep influence.”
Here’s Brubeck playing “Adagio”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRLTk1rR-64&ab_channel=alephe919
The full “Brubeck Meets Bach” album is here:
http://projazz.net/dave-brubeck-quartet-brubeck-meets-bach-full-album/
As somebody who learned to read music in the sixth grade but was never much of a musician, I’m always impressed by an ability to improvise.
Howard’s transcriptions were key as I learned to read music, for they were exquisitely accurate, thus allowing me to listen to the Quartet and then correlate what I saw on the page. So thanks Dave, thanks Howard.
In my youth I could read music well enough, except the skill of sight reading a new piece of music while playing it was something that I always had to blunder through. I just wasn’t fast enough. It might not have been too frustrating but for the fact that my best friend who played the same instrument was a wonderful sight reader. And an even more wonderful musician. “You must make loooove to the instrument!” he would say in his best Fernando Lamas accent.
Brubeck was popular music to my father’s contemporaries. I sometimes think the country’s mass culture peaked with them.
Wonderful story.
I am not a huge Brubeck fan – more of a Miles sort of guy – but I enjoy his music. Love the story about his wife.
Art Pepper was a prominent alto sax player in the 50s-70s. I read his memoir, “Straight Life,” some decades ago. Remarkably talented, mostly self-taught fellow.
His parents were a train wreck. His childhood bizarre. His grandmother got him some music lessons when he was a child, but he must have been teaching himself soon after. Although he was white, he was playing in black night clubs at 13 and with Benny Carter, then Stan Kenton from age 17 on. That’s amazing.
Unfortunately, like too many jazz figures from those days, he became a heroin addict and spent ten years in prison and however much time in rehab.
Nonetheless, his talent was so prodigious, he still had a great career when he could and became a top alto sax man, next to Charlie Parker.
The memoir described one time he had literally just got out of prison, grabbed a beater horn, rushed to a session and blew everyone away.
The memoir also mentioned a musician friend of Pepper’s who worked and worked, but knew he could never get near Pepper’s level of play.
Music is so unfair! Some musicians just seem touched by the gods.
Anyway. Here’s Pepper’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Pepper plays fast and fluently, but still with melody. He is grouped with the West Coast Jazz school,
–Art Pepper, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”
https://youtu.be/E3xSv7ncvEk
PA+Cat, thanks for the Brubeck meets Bach link.
Thanks for the interesting article, Neo. Back in the day, I was better at playing by ear than sight-reading, though my skill was far from approaching Brubeck’s. One time one of my brother’s friends was mocking the la-dee-da classical music I played, so I sat down and pounded out Petula Clark’s Downtown by ear. Just to show him I could do that also.
For several days I have had a multi-CD Brubeck set on my desk, down from the shelves. Time to play it.
OTOH there’s Miles Davis.
Given his hard attitude, one might think he grew up on the mean streets, but no. He came from an affluent family, rode horses on the 200 acre family estate and for education, he went to Julliard!
Which is not to take away from his accomplishments, but he had more support to grow his talent than most.
They just had music in their heads, and that was that; they didn’t need to learn to read it in the conventional way.
This is a very good description.
Almost everyone does it to some extent – that’s how you sing along with pop tunes or Christmas carols – but in some folks’ heads it just keeps going, and among some of them, it’s not just pre-existing music, they think it up as they go along. Therein is the difference between a reciter and a composer.
Really, the ability to read – particularly sight-read – can be derogated as placing the performer in the role of a mere mechanical transformer of dots on page to sounds from instrument or voice (that’s an instrument, anyway), but that’s a calumny at worst. The reader still must furnish the cultural stylings for the genre expressed, and that frequently includes micro-shading of pitches (much music is actually violated by the well-tempered scale), and micro-placement of rhythmic expression of those dots as well. So a good ear is requisite for styling, no matter how explicit the dots.
I could go on and on, but that’ll do at this point.
You may find “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein to be an interesting read as he compares highly trained people with generalized or self taught people, and one of the areas he goes over this is music. There are a lot of great musicians who never learned to read.
I grew up on jazz. The first record I bought, in 1951, was Ellington’s Theme For Trambean.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_-apwVnmbE
I used to drive by Marty’s on the Hill every day on the way to work and spent many a night listening to the greatest there. If there is to be a jazz renaissance it will be sparked and driven by a young lady from Norway, Angelina Jordan. This is her cover of Nina Simone’s Feelin Good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8kAL-sGJx8
This is her own composition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM8DzMRbiIc
She has released 140+ songs including many by the jazz greats – Ella, Etta, Billie, Nina, …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM8DzMRbiIc
The first seven are her own songs. She is fifteen years old and a major regret is that I probaly won’t be around to listen to her develop into superstardom.
Insufficiently Sensitive,
I agree completely. As a teen, I just didn’t have a deep and wise enough understanding of musicianship as a whole. We were so focused on skills. We certainly knew about importance of style and phrasing and so on, but it’s not easy to put all of it in context unless you’ve got a older music sage and mentor teaching you.
@Huxley:
Wow… I didn’t know that about Miles Davis!
Not exactly a Yard Bird Roadkill diet upbringing. Must learn more.
OK, this made me put two slightly related notions together.
How much does dyslexia affect this ability? Seems as though it ought to do so a lot.
}}} Music is so unfair! Some musicians just seem touched by the gods.
Hence the story of Robert Johnson, the R&B man who seems to have been the main “goto for learning” guy for about every major guitarist who came up in the 60s and 70s.
He’s also the source of the tale about the guy who sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads in BFE for his ability.
Thanks, Neo, for the great stories about Dave Brubeck (and his wife)!
I don’t get this perverse pride in not being able to read music. It’s pretty easy. I along with all my school bandmates learned to do it in 4th grade.
Roy Lofquist, wow, that is weird listening to such a young girl singing with a voice 30 or 40 years older. I would have sworn upon my life that it was dubbed.
To this day, I still have a bit of an issue sight-reading even a melodic line of Western music. Byzantine notation is much less of a problem for me by now. Yet here I am directing the church choir… go figure.
Roy Lofquist:
Angelina Jordan is new to me, but whoa! Smokin’.
PA+Cat:
The Brubeck/Bach shocked me. Brubeck knew what he was doing. I’ve listened to Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett go off the reservation for classical and they just didn’t make it IMHO.
Zaphod:
Miles Davis. Yeah. I could hardly believe it either.
ObloodyHell:
I bought the Robert Johnson box set and was amazed. Blues is not my goto music, but he was spooky good. I can understand why Clapton was obsessed with Johnson.
Re: Angelina Jordan, Wow! Watching a a 10-year-old sing Feelin’ Good is disconcerting.
Phillip & Huxley,
Yup, truly amazing talent. She won Norway’s Got Talent in 2014 at the age of seven. I won’t try to list my favorites – there are too many of them. There are, however, two that pop up as the most requested on the “reaction” sites. The first is her tribute to Screaming Jay Hawkins’ I Put A Spell On You:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwFloCPXzCs
The second is from AGT Champions in January, 2020. This is the one that really launched her career. It is a radical arrangement of the iconic Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gQljxeaNuM
I got the link wrong in my comment above. Here is her complete oeuvre:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2v8kgVeo4EbQD6l_WAVjOfItquzW7oEc
There are currently 160 videos. Some are short clips but most all are complete songs. Her fans call this the “Rabbit Hole”. Click the “Play All” button. I dare you.
@ Insufficiently Sensitive > “(much music is actually violated by the well-tempered scale)”
Yes. Thank you. It’s scary how many musicians don’t know the difference between just and equal tempered scales (which replaced all the earlier well-tempered ones), or that the just tuning even exists*.
I think one of the attractions to me of a cappella singing is that the voices actually harmonize in the just, rather than tempered, scales, without the singers really being aware they are doing it: the harmonics come through more purely. That’s a caution to not practice too much with a piano.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2010/04/the_wolf_at_our_heels.html
A very good, although somewhat flippant, explanation, and has the virtue of agreeing with me (although I only read it tonight while looking for an on-line resource).
Regrettably, the post is so old none of the audio examples are active now.
A more boring technical treatment that may clear up some questions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament
Here’s the math part:
https://pages.mtu.edu/~suits/scales.html
BTW, there is probably a good psychological / physiological reason why many mathematicians are also musicians. Most of my tech-geek friends in college played an instrument (one built his own harpsichord) or sang, although there is certainly not a correlation of +1.
*I started looking into this decades ago when a guitar-playing friend asked why, after tuning his guitar by ear, the strings were slightly off-pitch according to his electronic tuner.
Refer to the math part, table 2.
I learned to love jazz in my mid-20s and have been listening to it ever since (40 plus years now). I had the pleasure of seeing Brubeck once about that time in a truly unique setting. When my first husband was in med school, Brubeck and his sons were touring in small group and the school booked them into their auditorium as a treat for the faculty and students. It must have been free or next to it or we couldn’t have afforded to go.
Their music was delightful and it was fun to see the family play together, but the most striking thing was the manifest joy on Brubeck’s face throughout the concert. I don’t know if it’s that he particularly enjoyed playing with his boys or if he was always like that, but I can still see his face and it always makes me happy to think of the memory.
@AesopFan-
Somewhere I have a cassette of an (the?) Enharmonic Choir, which sings in just intervals and just nails chords, however they occur and wherever they lead. Those folks have ears!
But also, many non- ‘western classical’ communities sing, and play, in scales which aren’t exactly right for your recently-tuned piano. Indians, Turks, Arabs, southern fiddlers (and church choirs) in the US, older Serbs, Macedonian bagpipers, etc etc.
Another common thread in music, AND other things (just ask dilberts creator), is the commonality of using mind altering substances in a useful way (at least when composing… ) – a kind of candle in the wind creativity… does it make you, or does it break you… the way Scott Adams kinds of puts it (i am not doing justice at all to this), is that if its positive for you and not destructive it tends to teach you a lot of the world is your view and mold able and changable when most people who have only one view, never realize this and other things…. its interesting when you put the best of the best on top and then check off the list on what they were doing in their most creative years… Miles Davies? Pink Floyd (the group), rolling stones… beatles… on and on and on…
its like a magic quest… if you can handle the wand as a bright, the sword can be pulled from the stone, etc… it works… but woe betide the ones in which this is not the quest, as it can destroy them..
interesting abstractions…
musings on nothing..
Yes jazz is special…Most jazz stays on the back burner no matter how wonderful the sound… I think it takes a little more effort and inner emotion to appreciate it..But the bright spot in jazz is this season ,as the brillance of Vince Guaraldi is played for the masses…Neo…need to spotlight his story and how his partnership with the Charley Brown crew brought joy and meaning to this season and decades past and future.
I’ll never forget the day our high school band director handed out sheet music to a small group of us for “Take Five”.
It changed my life. I quit the wrestling team to concentrate on music.
Note how little NEW good jazz is out there. It’s all on CDs from the 1960s.
Lots of good musicians never learned how to read notes, I refer particularly to the early Bluegrass of Bill Monroe’s band, Jimmy Martin and his, the Blue Sky Boys, Jimmie Rodgers the Blue Yodeler, and it goes on and on. None of them had music stands with pages of notes. They mostly came from poverty. The pace of breakdowns, when played is too fast to turn a page! Great instrumentalists, fine harmonies.
Do you know what a breakdown is?
I can read music, but my singing in church or otherwise does not make me a good vocalist!
Re: Guaraldi / Charlie Brown
Drcool#1:
That was a magical combination. For me it captured the timeless happy tang of childhood, when a Saturday afternoon could stretch out forever.
Re: Angelina Jordan – I Put A Spell On You
Roy Lofquist:
That’s pretty … compelling.
But a bit like watching Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” She shouldn’t be able to do such things. She’s way off the charts.
Another argument for reincarnation.
Do you know what a breakdown is?
Cicero:
It’s what happens past Foggy Mountain, isn’t it?
–“Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs – Foggy Mountain Breakdown (Original 1949)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Y3mnj-8lA
Those boys could play.
You’re killing me, neo.
Huxley,
At my age, I’m hoping.
Roy Lofquist:
I found this book interesting:
–Leslie Kean, “Surviving Death”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surviving_Death
There are scientists taking a whack at the question.
Huxley,
I used to be an atheist when I was young and foolish.
Huxley,
Here is an hour long talk between Russell Brand and Rupert Sheldrake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAS-QzWvj8g
Well, well worth your time.