With World War II over at the end of August 1945, Dave Brubeck returned home from Europe and was discharged from the Army. He returned to California and immediately began studying at Mills College with Darius Milhaud, the famed French modern-classical composer and conductor who had a great reverence for jazz. [Photo above of Dave Brubeck, courtesy of the Brubeck estate]
That year, Milhaud (above) asked Dave and his newly formed octet to play concerts for the college. Dave's group called themselves Les Eight, in tribute to Milhaud's classical group, Les Six. But Dave's group was too far-out and too inside to get gigs on other campuses. So he renamed the group the Dave Brubeck Octet.
That didn't stop Fantasy Records in San Francisco. In 1946, they caught wind of Dave's octet and agreed to record them. The octet included Dick Collins (tp), Bob Collins (tb), Bill Smith (cl,bar), Bob Cummings (as), Dave Van Kriedt (ts), Dave Brubeck (p), Jack Weeks (b) and Dick Saltzman (d). Sales of the 78s weren't amazing, so Dave turned to a trio, which did get campus bookings with help of his new wife, Iola. Recordings for Fantasy followed before Dave resurrected the octet in late 1949.
Alto saxophonist Paul Desmond replaced Cummings, and Cal Tjader replaced Saltzman on drums. Sales of the 10-inch album again fell flat, so Dave formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet with Desmond. And the rest is history.
Now, alto saxophonist Jon De Lucia has picked up the torch with his wonderful new album The Brubeck Octet Project (Musaeum Clausum) (go here or stream here). For the album, Jon assembled eight musicians and recorded 12 of the Brubeck Octet's challenging arrangements, with a few modifications. His octet includes Brandon Lee (tp), Becca Patterson (tb), Jon De Lucia (as) Scott Robinson (ts) Jay Rattman (bar,cl) Glenn Zaleski (p) Daniel Duke (b) Keith Balla (d)
For a taste of this marvelous group, here they are playing IPCA...
Recently, I caught up with Jon for a Q&A interview...
JazzWax: What was it like growing up in Quincy, Mass.?
Jon De Lucia: It was a fairly working-class town, with some rich parts and some poor. I think the best part was that it was close enough to Boston to be on the city’s subway system. From sixth grade on, I could ride into town with my friends and go to record stores, vintage clothing stores and concerts. There was so much more to check out in Boston back then. Many shops have long since been turned into bank ATMs and hotels. [Photo above of Jon De Lucia, courtesy of Jon De Lucia]
JW: What about your parents?
JDL: My dad came from Italy at 18 and worked, and still works, in the restaurant business as a host and general manager. Back then he managed the Ritz Carlton dining room right in the middle of town. My first paid job was working there as the Easter Bunny, and my first gig was playing a set with the hotel's resident pianist. My mom stayed at home and was, and still is, an avid Ebay seller of antiques, taking after her mom who worked in antiques. Mom certainly influenced my interest in old collectible things. I can’t keep up with Scott Robinson there, but I’ve always loved weird old instruments, whatever I can get my hands on.
JW: Were you parents musical?
JDL: Not particularly. On my dad’s side, one of his uncles in Italy plays organ for church services, and that’s it. My mom’s half-brother is bassist John Crooks. He doesn’t play much anymore, but he was on the New York jazz scene and then in Los Angeles. He certainly was an influence on me. Probably the biggest musical influence in the family was his dad, my grandfather, Tom Crooks. Not a musician per se, but as Director of Summer Programs at Harvard in the 1960s and ‘70s, he helped put on summer jazz concerts there, featuring artists such as Jaki Byard, John Lewis, Marian McPartland, Lee Konitz and others. He died when I was 17.
JW: Did you get to talk about music with your grandfather, Tom? Siblings?
JDL: Sadly, I didn’t get to talk to him about jazz nearly as much as I would have liked. I just wasn’t there yet, musically. He did take me to see drummer Max Roach, and through him I met pianist James Williams, who played at Max’s memorial and passed away a couple of years later. I have four younger siblings, all in different fields: an anthropologist in Italy, and in the Boston area, an electrician, carpenter and real estate manager.
JW: How did your interest in jazz start?
JDL: I was drawn to the saxophone in fourth grade, when we all had an opportunity to choose instruments. The sax was my first choice. I played it through school, but from middle school on I was more interested in playing guitar and drums in various rock bands. My musician friends and I formed a band when I was in sixth grade, under a teacher named Rich Kenneally. He had gone to Boston’s Berklee College of Music in the 1970s and played with Buddy Rich. He was our teacher through high school. He took us on trips to visit Berklee. I think we all were convinced from a young age we'd wind up there.
JW: When did you break from the rock track?
JDL: As I got closer to attending college, I decided I didn’t want to be another rock guitarist at Berklee who couldn’t read music. Instead, I decided to return to the saxophone. Through Rich, I started taking lessons with Dino Govoni, who still teaches at Berklee, two years before I applied to colleges.
JW: What were you listening to?
JDL: At that time, I was listening to all the old Blue Note records and other CD reissues that were coming out at the time and getting into the music. My favorites were Wayne Shorter, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. At the same time, I played baritone saxophone in marching band and was one of the lead singers and sax players in a ska band called the Rockets. We played big venues in town, like the Middle East and Aerosmith’s club, Mama Kin’s.
JW: At Berklee, why did you major in music production?
JDL: The school also offered a film-scoring major, but I liked the idea of being able to do everything in a home studio, not writing for orchestras. Music production back then meant music video games, which were having a bit of a moment in 1998, with the release of games like Final Fantasy VII. Video-game sounds were getting better, the themes longer and you could even include real instruments on the soundtracks.
JW: What was the appeal?
JDL: I was drawn to the romanticism of it, creating lush orchestral themes for role-playing games. This was before video-game music was being addressed at all by schools. Now many schools offer such programs. I gradually fell out of video-game music because it often felt like the kid with the best gear made the best music, and I was getting more artistic and less commercial in my music. I was influenced by people like George Garzone, Bill Pierce, Joe Lovano and all the great teachers I had at Berklee.
JW: Why did you move to Brooklyn in 2005?
JDL: A whole batch of us moved down around the same time from Boston: Nir Felder, Garth Stevenson, Leo Genovese, Ziv Ravitz, all of whom were on my first album, Face No Face, which was recorded that year. I got a place in Kensington, south of Prospect Park, with bassist Bryan Ladd. It was a two bedroom for $1,100 a month.
JW: Why Park Slope?
JDL: Park Slope was most appealing because that’s where many of the musical happenings were at the time. Artists such as Jim Black, Chris Speed, Trevor Dunn, Oscar Noriega, Tim Berne and that whole scene performed and lived around there. Not long after, it started to get too expensive.
JW: So you winged it, hoping for the best?
JDL: I didn’t have the best of plans, and I struggled a bit for a few years. To make ends meet, I worked at a Barnes & Noble in Midtown, then I got a job translating and editing subtitles for Japanese TV shows. I was fairly fluent in Japanese then. The best part of the job was meeting my wife there. She had just graduated from Amherst and was working her first job. We both quit, and I worked in a wine store in Park Slope. I also was teaching privately, playing gigs, learning the clarinet and slowly writing and releasing music. I didn’t have the money to record.
JW: What did you do?
JDL: Eventually I made a change and went back to school at age 34. I got a master’s at City College and became an adjunct lecturer there. After five years, a full-time position opened up at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in Manhattan’s Tribeca section and I was hired two years ago. I’m now able to focus more on my music while helping to build up the college’s program.
JW: How and when did you discover Dave Brubeck?
JDL: Through Paul Desmond’s sound. I remember playing on WGBH in Boston in 2006 to promote my first album. The late DJs Ron Della Chiesa and Steve Schwartz both compared my sound to Desmond’s. I wanted to be modern and sound like Kenny Garrett or Greg Osby, but to the DJs, it still sounded like Desmond. But as time went on and I studied with alto saxophonist Lee Konitz for a while, I got more into playing standard jazz repertoire. I also became more obsessed with Desmond’s work. I’ve checked out nearly everything he’s done, and the Brubeck Octet Project was part of that.
JW: Were you up to speed on the Octet?
JDL: I didn’t know much about the different eras of the Octet then, but I knew I liked the David Van Kriedt arrangements the most, though I didn’t know they were his then. I thought September in the Rain was lovely, and Fugue on Bop Themes, along with Love Walked in and Let’s Fall in Love. I wasn’t as interested in the wind quintet-type pieces, though I might like to take a crack at the Octet's Schizophrenic Scherzo. Mike McGinnis, a friend and a Bill Smith expert, recently gave me the original score. My interest in writing for large ensembles leans towards the quirky and weird.
JW: You transcribed just one of the 1946 recordings, yes? Dave told me in an interview that the entire book of arrangements was lost in an Australian flood.
JDL: I’m still a little confused on the details of the flood. I got to sit down with Chris and Darius Brubeck last week and asked them about it, but they are hazy on it as well. The one transcription I had to do off the album was The Way You Look Tonight. This song is the hardest arrangement in the entire book, so it was a real challenge. I wonder if that score and the other 1946 scores were lost in the flood while the original individual parts—which is what I have—were preserved elsewhere.
JW: Not too much from the 1946 Octet on your album?
JDL: The only thing we recorded from the early Octet material is I Hear a Rhapsody. This one is interesting, as it is a fairly straightforward bopper with a unison shout chorus. Van Kriedt arranged it, but as trumpeter Dick Collins said, Van Kriedt was never fully comfortable in the bebop idiom. The later stuff from the early 1950s, is much more lush and layered, and Bill Smith’s arranged tunes IPCA and What Is This Thing Called Love? pull from modernism, bop and the Lenny Tristano school.
JW: Which musicians in the Octet do you admire most?
JDL: I’m currently in the early stages of a musicology PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center. If I end up writing about the Brubeck Octet for my dissertation, I will certainly go much deeper on each member’s bio. I am intrigued by Smith, and really love the1960 album he recorded with Brubeck called The Riddle. I’ve loved Jimmy Giuffre for some time as well, and Smith achieves some similar things, musically. He was an amazing clarinetist.
JW: What sort of research did you do?
JDL: I’ve enjoyed putting a timeline together for the Octet, and seeing where the various musicians overlap. Smith was the only member of the Octet to spend time in New York, at the jazz clubs on 52nd St, before the group formed in 1946. If we’re trying to draw connections to Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool nonet, there are only a few examples of an East Coast and West Coast overlap between these two scenes. Interestingly, arranger-producer Pete Rugolo also attended Mills College and studied with Milhaud along with Howard Brubeck, Dave’s older brother. He certainly would have heard the original Octet before becoming a jazz producer at Capitol Records and signing Miles’s nonet a couple of years later.
JW: Looking forward to researching?
JDL: I am. I hope to dig into that a bit more. I found it interesting, in your interview with Dick Collins on Jack Weeks and Van Kriedt’s time in Paris playing with Kenny Clarke and recording with Hubert Fol before coming back and writing and recording with the Octet in 1949-‘50. And finally, what did the Octet sounded like from 1950-1953, after Dave Brubeck's departure, They apparently played regularly at the Blackhawk, and many of the unrecorded charts are dated after their last official recording session in 1950. I believe there has to be a bootleg out there somewhere.
JW: Tell me about the new album. When did you conceive the idea and how did you get the charts?
JDL: In 2015 or so, I formed an octet to play the music recorded on the album Lee Konitz Meets Jimmy Giuffre. I was in touch with Konitz and Ted Brown, who recorded the original 1959 session. I wanted to see if I could get them in a room together to replay that music. This was my first time trying to do research of any kind, reaching out to everyone I could to find the charts and transcribing others. We did end up doing one session, an open rehearsal at City College, with Lee, Ted and the great Ellington drummer Steve Little. It was an experience I’ll never forget.
JW: How so?
JDL: We recorded some of that music live with Ted a couple of years later. So around this time, the octet—then all woodwinds—became a weekly reading band. I was on the lookout for more charts, and stumbled across the Van Kriedt papers at Mills and requested a scan. From 2016 on we pulled the parts out the session, since there were no scores, and tried to read through them. They were full of mistakes and scribbles, and you could tell that these parts had really been used. I always wanted an excuse to put them into Sibelius software and clean up the forms so they could actually be fun to read. Lewis Porter gave me the idea to reach out to Darius Brubeck, and the Brubecks liked the idea.
JW: What happened?
JDL: Finding time became hard, as I was working on my Bach Shapes book series then. Then I finally got a grant from CUNY in 2022 to prepare the Brubeck Octet scores and record a new album. The Brubecks have been supportive throughout, culminating in a performance at the Brubeck Archive in Wilton, Ct., recently to a sold-out crowd that included Darius, Chris and their wives. It was a beautiful way to re-introduce this music.
JW: A few of the album’s tracks weren’t recorded by the Brubeck Octet, correct?
JDL: Yes, but they were all for the Octet. Previously I had played these charts conservatively. But for the album, I knew I wanted to open up things a bit more and get some small-group energy into the music. This is why I added an improvised intro to Let’s Fall In Love, an extended free solo for tenor saxophonist Scott Robinson on Fugue and generally opened up more solo sections, including solos for the rhythm section, which weren’t present in the originals.
JW: Scott sounds great on tenor.
JDL: Scott was the perfect choice to be our featured guest here. We’ve played together in little snippets at Manhattan’s Ear Inn on Sunday nights, but this has been a great opportunity to play with him at length. I also think pianist Glenn Zaleski, who I hadn’t worked with before, really adds an element of surprise to the music.
JW: How so?
JDL: He came up under the mentorship of Dave, so I knew he was the right choice. I had a lot of fun combining people I knew from lots of different scenes for this project. Love Me or Leave Me was never recorded by the Octet, but it was in the Mills papers. I think it’s an amazing take on that tune. On this note, we have won a grant to make another album of the Octet's music next year. It will feature exclusively unrecorded material from the archive. Much of this material is head charts and segments of things, so I will likely be adding more of my own writing and rearranging this time around. Very much looking forward to starting that project this fall.
JW: What else did you add to the original music?
JDL: There are sometimes backgrounds and shouts and things in the parts that weren’t on the original recordings. The backgrounds under Scott’s solo on What is this Thing?, for example. We dealt with these on a case-by-case basis.
JW: What did you learn about Brubeck by crawling inside this material?
JDL: I spent one full day poring over the Brubeck Collection in Wilton, Ct., and I'm about to schedule another. There are numerous letters of interest, I remember one from Van Kriedt in 1953 to Dave, saying he would do whatever is necessary to make the Octet a success. I think at this point, the group knew the Dave Brubeck Quartet was going to be special.
JW: Was the Octet abandoned?
JDL: Not at all. Even Dave hoped to return to the Octet. He was persuaded by his management to leave it behind, however. I think Dave found his way back to some of it with his large-scale orchestral works later on and with his brief revival of some of the Octet’s music in the early 2000s. I didn’t know about this revival when I started the project. They were working off of transcriptions by Jeff Lindberg, as the parts were presumed lost at the time.
JW: Where did they play them?
JDL: They would play four or five of the Octet charts per concert, but they never made a commercial recording, just live recordings that can be found in the archive in Wilton and the New York Public Library. Bill Smith is a guest soloist and sounds amazing in his 80s.
JW: What’s most fascinating about the music from your perspetive?
JDL: I think of it as a collective in its inception, with each member bringing out a different element of Milhaud’s teachings, which continued on with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. So Van Kriedt is counterpoint, canon and fugue; Bill Smith is odd meters and harmonic tension; Brubeck is polytonality and odd meters; Dick Collins is the best improviser in the group at the time; and Desmond is sound. I’ve learned a lot from this quirky music and find it endlessly fascinating as a bridge from some of the “novelty” groups of the 1930s—such as John Kirby, Alec Wilder and Raymond Scott—to the jazz-classical Third Stream of the 1950s and ‘60s.
JazzWax tracks: You'll find Jon De Lucia's The Brubeck Octet Project (Musaeum Clausum) here or stream here.
JazzWax clips: Here's The Way You Look Tonight...
Here's September in the Rain...
And here's Love Me or Leave Me...
For my interview with Dave Brubeck, go here (links to subsequent parts ae above the red date at the top).