![]() ![]() “He was the first genius I’d ever seen,” Black recalled. He knew nothing about jazz, but something shifted in him as he watched a rapturous Armstrong perform. In 1931, Charles Black was a white teenager who decided to go hear Armstrong play in an Austin, Texas, hotel. One of the most famous jazz conversion stories comes from Ken Burns’ “Jazz” documentary. The virtuosity of black artists like Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald sometimes did what a civil rights march or a court decision couldn’t do – force whites like Brubeck to see the humanity of black people. But even as his fame eclipsed many of his black musical mentors, he continually talked about the musical debt he owed to them. He was born in Northern California and grew up on a cattle ranch near the Sierra Mountains. The black experience was initially foreign to Brubeck. Photos: Notable people we've lost in 2012 “The worst thing that could have happened to me was that I was there before Duke, and he was delivering the news to me.” “I wanted to be on the cover after Duke,” Brubeck told the narrator in Ken Burns’ epic documentary on jazz. He knew that Time had also been interviewing Ellington, and Brubeck thought the jazz composer deserved the honor over him. He opened it to find Ellington, smiling and holding several copies of Time magazine. One day, Brubeck heard a knock on his hotel door. It had an impact on me I’ll never forget.ĭave Brubeck, jazz pianist, on pivotal childhood meeting He was touring with Duke Ellington, one of America’s greatest composers and a jazz titan. How did Brubeck do it, and how did he thrive? Delve into his interviews and his music, and the clues emerge. They joined a jazz community where white men were the minority – and whiteness was seen as a liability, not the norm. To make that world possible, Brubeck and other white jazz musicians did something remarkable. They offered a snapshot of what this nation is becoming, like it or not. He and an entire generation of white, black and Latino jazz musicians helped create one of the nation’s first multicultural communities. His life and music say more about this country’s future than its past. The tributes that poured in after his death tended to focus on the same themes: He was the jazz legend whose “Dave Brubeck Quartet” gave the world the jazz standard “Take Five,” he stretched the boundaries of jazz and was a champion for civil rights.īrubeck, though, was bigger than all of that. “I thought, ‘What can I do about this?’ It’s like my dad (was) telling me to do something about it.”īrubeck, the pioneering jazz pianist who died this month at 91, did more to help people like Shine than most people realize. “It had an impact on me I’ll never forget,” Brubeck told journalist Hedrick Smith for a documentary called “Rediscovering Dave Brubeck.” A furious Pete Brubeck told his son that “something like this never should happen again.” Shine was the first black person Brubeck had ever seen. Brubeck, then only 6, watched as Shine unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a brand on his chest: He had been marked like cattle. Pete Brubeck then asked Shine to open his shirt. Pete Brubeck asked an African-American cowboy who everyone called “Shine” to come over and greet his son. He was along on a cattle-buying trip with his father, Pete, a rancher in Northern California. Dave Brubeck was taking a horse ride with his father one day when he saw something that would haunt him for the rest of his life. ![]()
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