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Still determined to help his father in his business, Dave studied to be a veterinarian at the College of the Pacific at Stockton, Calif. But he switched to music after one year. Dave and two roommates moved into a cellar they called "the bomb shelter," which was soon embroiled in a continual jam session. Dave began playing jazz piano in nightclubs. He also played on a weekly campus radio show whose co-director was a pretty sophomore named Iola Marie Whitlock. Dave stomped his feet so hard as he played that the noise almost drowned out the music, so she made him take off his shoes. He hated fraternity life, but did go to one frat dance and took Iola. She wanted to be an actress and writer, was therefore an intellectual. He, on the other hand, was a character, and he lived up to it. "Tell me," he opened the conversation in his jalopy, "tell me about this Plato cat."
Two weeks later, they were engaged.
American Heritage. Brubeck's parents were Presbyterian, gave him a mildly religious upbringing, but he developed a searching religious bent of his own. With deep scruples against taking life, when World War II broke out, he did the next best thing to being a conscientious objector. "I resolved never to have a cartridge in my gun if I ever landed at the front," he says. "I wanted to be sure beforehand that I could never kill a man."
As it happened, he never got to the front, played in Army bands on the Coast and in the ETO (where he rarely traveled with fewer than three liberated pianos). He was home again in 1946, determined to be a composer. He played the piano in local joints and studied with France's famed Darius Milhaud at Mills College. Teacher Milhaud filled him with counterpoint and polytonality, fired him with the conviction that improvisation of jazz was as valid for him as the improvisation of toccatas and fugues was for Bach. "He told me," says Dave, "if I didn't stick to jazz, I'd be working out of my own field and not taking advantage of my American heritage." Searching Dave Brubeck found a goal: to show that jazz is music.
The music he began playing was ruggedly individual. Even Dave's own sideman and best friend, Saxophonist Desmond, almost walked out when he first played with him. "We decided to play the blues in B flat," says Desmond, "but the first chord Dave played was G major! It almost scared me to death."
In California in 1951, Brubeck's newly formed quartet found itself in an area bursting into musical blossom. About that time, Progressive Bandleader Stan Kenton passed through Los Angeles, and some of his crew, e.g., Trumpeter Shorty Rogers, Arranger Pete Rugolo, Drummer Shelly Manne, French Hornist John Graas, settled there and became famous. A hollow-eyed trumpeter named Chet Baker and an underweight baritone saxophonist named Gerry Mulligan made themselves fast killings among the cats. By 1952, the West Coast was the U.S.'s newest, biggest stomping ground for jazz. Brubeck felt right at home, shuttled between such clubs as San Francisco's Blackhawk and Los Angeles' The Haig.