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When his early records (for Coronet) were selling poorly, he bought back the master disks and started his own label, Fantasy (he still collects some $2,000 a month from it). Brubeck built an imposing glass-and-redwood house in Oakland overlooking the bay—a house on a hilltop, which is where he always wanted to live.
Jazzman's World. Brubeck does not get to spend much time in his house on the hill. He is away six months of the year, living in the jazzman's restless world of all-night coach rides, smoky nightclubs and hamburger joints at dawn. Nowadays, the quartet travels in better style than in the days when it chugged cross-country in Dave's old car, with the string bass tied to the ceiling. But Brubeck still retains most of his frugal habits: he travels with one suit (two pairs of pants) that rarely gets a pressing, and usually washes his own nylon shirts in the bathroom. His wife used to go on tour with him, but he was nervous whenever he knew she was listening to him. ("When are you going home?" is his standard question to her whenever she comes to hear him play.) Despite his casual, smiling manner and his slouching walk, Brubeck is constantly tense. Unlike other musicians, jazz players of Brubeck's type cannot simply sit down and play from memory or from the sheet: since they never play a piece the same way twice, they are under the constant pressure of having to invent music.
Wherever they go, Brubeck and Saxophonist Desmond seem to be enveloped in a kind of electric field in which they can communicate almost without words. Their only "arranged" passages are occasional introductions or endings. Before a recent recording session, the desultory opening dialogue went something like this:
"What are we going to do?"
"Well, I'm going to take an eight-bar intro . . ."
"Then I play counterpoint to you, and you take the rest, but the rest of what?"
"Why don't we do like we always do, keep things going and kick it around and see if something happens?"'
"If we goof the counterpoint, which we certainly will, playing it for the first time, keep going."
From then on, nothing further was said—they communicated through what Brubeck regards as a kind of mental telepathy. They will often get bored with the same idea or decide to make a switch at the same moment. They have many private musical jokes, e.g., Brubeck will play a few bars from a lovesong to kid Desmond about a girl friend, and once Desmond memorized the telephone number of a blonde by keying musical notes to each figure—Seaside 3-5474, i.e.