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When people try to figure out Dave Brubeck, the result is quite a psychological jam session. "The reason Brubeck is great," says a business associate, "is that he was one guy who knew what he wanted and kept after it." Says his wife Iola: "He's a guy who is very tolerant of other people. For that reason he's always attracted others to him, often lonely people." Says Dave's oldest brother Henry (a music educator in the Santa Barbara school system): "Dave always had my father's horse sense. When we boys were broke, Dave always seemed to have a buck or two in his jeans." Says California Sage Gerald Heard: "There is energy flowing from him to the people. David recharges people; he fills them with vitality." Says Jazz Promoter Norman Granz, who does not always understand Brubeck's "far-out" music: "He's way out on Cloud 7."
The contrapuntal arrangement of Brubeck's character has a strong bass of common sense and energy—perhaps because his father was a rancher and cattle buyer. His life also has its flights of lyricism—perhaps because his mother was a music teacher with dreams of being a concert pianist, or perhaps only because he grew up among the green Western hills. But above all these, there are high, hammering, urgent notes—and that may be because Dave Brubeck always seems to be looking for something.
The Shoeless Wonder. In the Brubeck home at Concord, Calif, (pop. 12,493), his mother kept five pianos. Dave was playing the piano by the time he was four; he started searching almost as soon as his fingers touched the keys. Instead of practicing the method of famed Piano Pedagogue Tobias Matthay, used by his mother for her stream of pupils, little David spent every minute that the keyboard was free picking out pieces of his own. He tried harder to please his father (who gave him four cows when he was eight and called Dave his "partner"); later he learned to rope, brand and vaccinate cattle. Eyeing his older brothers practicing their violin and piano, Dave protested against his own music lessons: "Ma, you've got two musicians; I want to be a cattleman."
But the boy just could not keep his hands off the piano. When the family moved to a ranch house near Ione, southeast of Sacramento, the cowhands used to gather around evenings to listen to the boy play, and sometimes Dave's father would pick up his harmonica and with Dave run through every cowboy tune that they could think of.