By the Way Brubeck, Jazz, and Me Dave Brubeck has been a nearly constant companion since I can remember knowing who he was and what he did. And, oh, what he did!

By Dan Shafer

When you've been banging around Planet Earth for as long as I have (a tad more than six decades), not a lot of stuff sticks to you. Friends, hobbies, dreams, career goals, musical tastes, political attitudes, perhaps even religious beliefs, come and go. What served you when you were eight is not likely to remain of interest when you're 48. Conversely, what you find interesting when you're 62 would probably never have even occurred to you when you were 22 or even 32.

Sometimes I think life is like a big ship. It gathers barnacles over time and then over the decades, barnacles get scraped off and fade away.

That analogy, like all such attempts at explaining the inexplicable, breaks if stretched very far, but that doesn't render it useless.

In my life, very few things have been constant for more than 45 years. I still love playing chess (though I don't get much chance any more), but stamp collecting has long since disappeared from my list of hobbies. I'm still a fan of baseball, though my passion for the game has waned since I moved to Monterey away from easy access to a Major League team's ballpark.

But then there's Dave Brubeck, a legend and an idol I had the great honor to interview for this special issue of 65 Degrees in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Monterey Jazz Festival.

My first memory of Brubeck dates back to when I was about 10 or 11 years old. For some reason, I'd taken it into my head that I'd like to learn to play the drums. I think the credit for that extremely short-lived dream goes to Cubby O'Brien, who was the drummer on the Mickey Mouse Club at that time. (Don't get me started on Annette Funicello, though; there are some things I don't even want my wife to know that much about!)

Anyway, one of my uncles bought me a Dave Brubeck Quartet record so I could listen to what he called a "real drummer's drummer," none other, of course, than the immortal Joe Morello, one of the acknowledged drumming greats of all time. I loved Morello and his style and his character. But my interest quickly grew to encompass the entire quartet, most particularly its named leader.

Here was a man who was not only obviously an immensely talented musician, he was a caring, compassionate, and committed human being. I remember a day when my father, well aware of my love for Brubeck and his music, breathlessly brought me the evening paper one day and showed me a story about how Brubeck had canceled a planned major appearance of his group because the venue would not allow him to bring his bassist Eugene Wright, an African-American, into the auditorium. I was as proud as if Brubeck had done that in my home town of Detroit with me standing on the sidelines cheering.

During those early years, I didn't get much of a chance to listen to Brubeck's stuff. He recorded quite a few albums but dollars weren't plentiful around our house, so I'd have to content myself with hanging out in the little rooms at the record stores where you could listen to a record before you decided whether to buy it. I never got thrown out of one of those places, but I'm sure I had some owners shaking their heads.

In 1959, when I was just 14, Brubeck released what was - and in many ways still is - for me his greatest album, Time Out. Wow! I didn't know enough about music technique to know just how revolutionary this stuff was, what with songs set in time signatures like 9/4, 9/8 and 14/8. Brubeck wasn't the only musician experimenting with weird time signatures in those days, but he was easily the best known. Three songs from that album - Take Five, Blue Rondo a la Turk, and Pick Up Sticks - drove me crazy. I bought that album. I listened to it so often that I wore it out in a few months and then bought another.

Dave Brubeck has given me a lot of thrills and a considerable amount of inspiration for living over the years. And during the course of my journalism career, I've had the chance to interview dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the famous and near famous. Nothing thrilled me more than my phone interview with you, Dave. You are, simply put, the best. I hope you play for another 20 years.

Dan Shafer
Associate Editor
dan@65mag.com