At Home With Dickens And Louisa May Alcott

December 7, 2012

Guest: Dave Brubeck

DAVE DAVIES, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, sitting in for Terry Gross. Today we remember Dave Brubeck, the influential jazz pianist and composer who died Wednesday on the eve of his 92nd birthday. His career lasted nearly 70 years. He was still performing in his 90s.

Brubeck's 1961 album "Time Out" was the first jazz album to sell a million copies, and "Take Five," the album's hit single, was, in the words of our jazz critic Kevin Whitehead, a musical symbol of Kennedy-era optimism.

Terry interviewed Dave Brubeck in 1999. We'll listen to that interview in a few minutes, but first here's Kevin's review of him earlier this year, of some lesser-known Brubeck recordings. Kevin says you could easily forget how many and varied Brubeck's recordings were, even during his 1950s and '60s peak.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEVIN WHITEHEAD, BYLINE: Drummer Joe Morello with pianist Dave Brubeck. After Brubeck signed with Columbia in the mid-1950s, his quartet made a few albums a year. By 1959, they were short of material to record, having exhausted their live repertoire. Their album "Time Out" with tunes in odd meters like "Take Five," would point them in a new direction, but it took that stuff a couple of years to catch on.

The album Brubeck made just before "Time Out," "Gone with the Wind," consisted mostly of moldy old tunes, many in the public domain, that the band hadn't played before. It could have been a throwaway, with trifles like "Deep in the Heart of Texas," where Brubeck could get heavy handed. But sometimes his playing is surprising restrained. For me, that's Brubeck at his best.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

WHITEHEAD: Saxophonist Paul Desmond on Stephen Foster's "The Old Folks at Home" listed as "Swanee River" on Dave Brubeck's album "Gone with the Wind." His quartet's great success was partly due to Joe Morello's flashy drumming and partly to the contrast between the exuberant Brubeck and the imperturbably serene Paul Desmond.

The alto saxophonist improvised plaintively lyrical melodies with a tangy sweet-and-sour tone. He and Brubeck orbited and influenced each other. Desmond wrote their splashy hit "Take Five," and when he'd quote other tunes in a solo for sport, Brubeck might rise to the bait. Improvising on "Gone with the Wind," Brubeck works in "Have You Met Miss Jones," the "Candid Camera" theme and a few more tunes.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GONE WITH THE WIND")

WHITEHEAD: Dave Brubeck with Gene Wright on bass. The quartet's next and biggest album, "Time Out," was partly inspired by rhythms they'd heard touring the world in 1958. After that, it was back to more Stephen Foster and such for the album "Southern Scene" but with fewer sightings of Paul Desmond, who'd weary of the band occasionally.

Confronting other cultures may have prompted the travelers to reassess their own, but then other jazz musicians played Anglo-American traditional themes during the late '50s folk-music boom. Brubeck's quartet would record a few albums inspired by their tours, like the classic "Jazz Impressions of Japan." But the first of them was "Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A." from 1956, with Brubeck's "Ode to a Cowboy." The loping bassist here is Norman Bates.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JAZZ IMPRESSINGS OF THE U.S.A.")

WHITEHEAD: No jazz musician was more urbane than saxophonist Paul Desmond, who sounds as much at home on the rural sketches on "Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A." as on the salutes to Broadway and the Chicago Loop - no surprise, as his tone never varies. Much as Morello's slamming could get on Desmond's nerves, the drummer and the pianist knew how to lay back and set him up. And Brubeck wrote Desmond nice vehicles like the rolling pastoral "Summer Song."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUMMER SONG")

WHITEHEAD: Before they were world travelers, the Brubeck quartet crisscrossed the American continent, as the toast of the college circuit. Dave Brubeck wrote "Plain Song" on a bus somewhere in western Iowa, and you can hear the road weariness, monotonous landscape and ca-thunk of tires on concrete highway slabs. No wonder this busy quartet's music drew more and more on what they saw and heard on the road. It's like rockers and country singers doing songs about the Holiday Inn. You write what you know.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: Kevin Whitehead writes for A Point of Departure, Downbeat and emusic, and is the author of "Why Jazz?"

DAVE DAVIES, HOST: We're remembering jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck, who died on Wednesday. Terry Gross interviewed Brubeck in 1999. Before we hear that interview, let's listen to his composition "Three to Get Ready," from the "Time Out" album. Paul Desmond is featured on alto saxophone, Eugene Wright on bass and Joe Morello, drums.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THREE TO GET READY")

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

Dave Brubeck, welcome to FRESH AIR.

DAVE BRUBECK: Thank you.

GROSS: Now, you grew up in Concord, California. Your mother was a classical piano teacher. Did she give you lessons?

BRUBECK: Yeah, I had two older brothers, Henry and Howard, that also took lessons from my mother, and half the community, the people interested in piano studied with her.

GROSS: Was it hard to study with your mother?

BRUBECK: Yeah. It wasn't so bad for my brothers, but I kind of rebelled.

GROSS: How and why?

BRUBECK: How and why? I wanted to be like my father, who was a cattle man and a rodeo roper. And that was - he was my hero, and I wanted to be more like him. So my mother allowed me to stop taking lessons when I was 11.

And we moved to a 45,000-acre cattle ranch, where I spent my last year in grammar school and my high school years, and all summer I worked with my father. Then I went off to college to study veterinary medicine.

GROSS: In the hope that you'd be a help on the ranch?

BRUBECK: Yes so that - I had to go to college, according to my mother, like my brothers. I didn't ever want to leave my dad or my dad's ranch.

My dad was the manager at the 45,000-acre ranch, but he owned his own 1,200-acre ranch, and I owned four cattle that he gave to me when I graduated from grammar school, from the eighth grade. And those cows multiplied, and he kept track of them for years for me. And that was my herd.

GROSS: You know, I'm used to seeing you behind the piano. It's hard for me to imagine you as a cowboy.

BRUBECK: Well, I could send you pictures.

(LAUGHTER)

BRUBECK: And there even are some, what we call movies in those days, some of the very first kind of home movies, where I'm with my dad, lassoing and branding and big round-up. So it is documented.

GROSS: Did you sing cowboy songs?

BRUBECK: Oh, all of them, yeah, when they were real cowboy songs like "Strawberry Roan" and "Little Joe the Wrangler," tunes that people don't sing anymore. I loved those songs. The words can still make me cry, and I used to make my kids cry by singing: Joe you take my saddle; Bill, you take my bed; Jim you take my pistol after I am dead. And think of me, please, kindly, when you look upon them all, for I'll not see my mother when the work's all done next fall. Now, that's a cowboy tune.

GROSS: Did you like singing?

BRUBECK: Oh, yeah. I used to sing that and play my ukulele.

GROSS: Ukulele? No, wow.

(LAUGHTER)

BRUBECK: Some of my friends played guitar, cowboy songs, yeah.

GROSS: Let me get back to what we were talking about, which was life on the cattle ranch. And there were two cattle ranches in your life, the one that your father owned, and the larger one that he managed. Did you have really strong arms and hands from the work? And do you think that that helped you as a piano player?

BRUBECK: It didn't hurt. My mother would not allow my dad to have me rope anything larger than a yearling because she didn't want my fingers to become hurt. And my uncle, who was also a rodeo roper, got his finger caught between the saddle horn and the rope, and it took his finger right off. And he used to kid the other cowboys and said: I would've been a great pianist like my nephew, Dave, had I not lost this finger.

GROSS: Was your mother convinced that you were going to become a pianist, or she was just worried about your fingers on general principles?

BRUBECK: Well, she thought that I had a certain amount of talent that I was not developing. And so after my first year as a veterinary pre-med, I switched to the music department, which was across the lawn. And that was at the advice of my zoology teacher, Dr. Arnold(ph).

(LAUGHTER)

BRUBECK: He said: Brubeck, your mind is not here with these frogs in the formaldehyde. Your mind is across the lawn at the conservatory. Will you please go over there next year?

GROSS: How did he know?

BRUBECK: He - I guess he'd just seen me become kind of blank and be listening to everybody practicing and the music and drifting away from what he was trying to teach me.

DAVIES: Dave Brubeck, speaking with Terry Gross in 1999. We'll hear more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: We're listening to Terry's interview with Dave Brubeck, recorded in 1999. Brubeck died Wednesday at the age of 91.

GROSS: Now, I think in spite of the fact that you studied piano with your mother as a boy, you weren't very good at reading music. How well could you read when you started majoring in music in college?

BRUBECK: I couldn't read, and that caused a lot of trouble in the conservatory. So I hid it until I was a senior by not taking piano. I'd take - the other instruments were cello and clarinet. So I was just playing scales and getting by and doing the subjects I had to pass in.

But in my senior year, they said you have to take piano. And the piano teacher in five minutes ran downstairs to the dean and said: Brubeck can't read at all. So the dean said, you know, you're a disgrace to the conservatory, and we can't graduate you.

And when some of the younger teachers heard this, they went to the dean, and they said you're making a big mistake because he writes the best counterpoint that I've ever had, said Dr. Brown(ph). And Dr. Bodley(ph) went in and said, you know, you're wrong. You know, this guy is talented.

So they convinced the dean to let me graduate if I - and the dean said you can graduate if you promise never to teach and embarrass the conservatory.

(LAUGHTER)

BRUBECK: So that's the way I graduated, and that's the way I've gotten through life is having to substitute other things for not being able to read well. But I can write, which is something very few people understand.

GROSS: Well, you know, I thought we might pause here and listen to another recently re-released recording, and this features you with the great singer Jimmy Rushing. Now, you haven't done a lot of work with singers over the years, at least not that I'm aware of. Tell me how you managed to do this session with Jimmy Rushing, who had sung with Basie. And he's considered a great blues singer, but he's also a great singer of swing tunes and standards.

BRUBECK: I was on tour with Jimmy in England, and we had to take the train together to the next city. So we were riding in the train for about three hours. And he said: Dave, I want to do an album with you.

And I said: I don't think I'm the right group for you, Jimmy. And he said: I know you're the right group. I've been listening to you for years. And I'm going to set this up at Columbia Records as soon as we get back.

GROSS: Well, why don't we hear you and Jimmy Rushing doing "There'll be Some Changes Made."

BRUBECK: Oh.

GROSS: You like that?

BRUBECK: Yeah.

GROSS: Yeah. So do I. And this is from the recently re-issued 1960 recording "Brubeck & Rushing," The Dave Brubeck Quartet featuring Jimmy Rushing.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THERE'LL BE SOME CHANGES MADE")

JIMMY RUSHING: (Singing) There's a change in the weather, change in the sea. From now on there'll be a change in me. Walk will be different, my talk and my name. Nothing about me's going be the same.

(Singing) Change my long tall for a little short fat. Change my number where I'm stopping at. Nobody wants you when you're old and gray. There'll be some changes made today. There'll be some changes made.

(Singing) Change in the weather, change in the sea. From now on there'll be a change in me. Walk will be different, my talk and my name. Nothing about me's going to be the same.

(Singing) Change my long tall for a little short fat. Change my number where I'm stopping at. Nobody wants you when you're old and gray. There'll be some changes made today. There'll be some changes, oh, some changes made. Oh baby, there'll be some changes made.

DAVIES: That's the Dave Brubeck Quartet with Jimmy Rushing in 1960. We'll hear more of Terry's 1999 interview with Dave Brubeck in the second half of the show. Brubeck died Wednesday on the eve of his 92nd birthday. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. We're remembering jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck, who died Wednesday at the age of 91. Terry spoke to him in 1999.

GROSS: Moving along with the story of your life, you were in the Army, I think, toward the end of World War II. Did you see combat?

BRUBECK: I saw it.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: OK, didn't participate, huh?

BRUBECK: I avoided participation. But, you know, I was in the Battle of the Bulge, and I was on the wrong side of the lines. I was in German territory and...

GROSS: How did you end up in German territory?

BRUBECK: We didn't know where we were, and everything was going wrong. And so the truck driver just took the wrong turn. And I was up there to play a show for the frontline troops with my band, which were all infantry guys that had been wounded. When I say all, most of the guys in my band had been wounded, and when they'd come back behind the lines, if they were musicians, the doctors would send them to me or who was ever interviewing them.

So I had a good band and a band that was very accepted at the frontline because if you wore your Purple Heart - the frontline guys are hard to reach. The USO people usually didn't go up that close, and also, they would have trouble reaching guys that, in the morning, were going to face a terrible kind of life.

But my guys could reach them because they'd been there since D-Day. Some of them had been three months at the front. And so it made it a lot easier for the soldiers to accept my band.

GROSS: After the war was over, you went back to college on the GI Bill, and I think it was then that you studied with the French composer Darius Milhaud. Had you known Milhaud's work very well?

BRUBECK: Well, my brother was his assistant, Howard.

GROSS: Oh.

BRUBECK: And just before I went into the Army, I went to see Milhaud and ask him if, when I got out, I could come back and study with him. And he said I could. So that's exactly what I did on the GI Bill. I went directly after I got out of the Army back to Mills College and studied with him.

GROSS: And were you expecting then to write classical music?

BRUBECK: Yeah, and he would tell me don't give up jazz. He said you can do that so well. Why do you want to give it up and become a classical composer?

And so we'd discuss that a lot, and then he said: Look, if you're going to compose, you have to use the jazz idiom, or you won't represent this country. And he said: My favorite composers are Duke Ellington and George Gershwin.

And this really surprised me because you wouldn't have heard that at probably any other conservatory in the country. But, you see, Milhaud was the first guy, first European composer, to use the jazz idiom in classical music, a piece called "The Creation of the World," a ballet.

So he would say: Don't ever give up jazz. You're free. You can go any place in the world where there's a piano, and you can play, and you can make a living. And you don't have to teach or do some of the things that other composers have to do in order to survive.

And he said: And the worst thing you want to get out of are faculty meetings. And I think that's a good reason not to become a teacher in a university or college.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: So it sounds like he gave you some good advice.

BRUBECK: Oh, yeah. He said: Travel the world. Keep your ears open. Bring back everything you hear. Put it in the jazz idiom. And that's what I did. I still follow his advice.

GROSS: Well, I want to play a 1956 recording, and this is your recording of "The Duke," which you've described as your tribute to both Duke Ellington and Darius Milhaud.

BRUBECK: Right.

GROSS: And Ellington also, you know, was wonderful at connecting classical form and jazz. Do you want to say anything else about this composition before we hear it?

BRUBECK: Well, it is one of my favorite compositions, and the second theme is where I use Milhaud kind of influences with polytonality, which wasn't being done too much in early jazz. It was being done some, but Milhaud was a master of that.

And then the first part is just kind of my impression of Duke's wonderful band.

GROSS: Let's hear it. This is "The Duke," composed and performed by my guest, Dave Brubeck.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE DUKE")

DAVIES: We're remembering pianist and composer Dave Brubeck with an interview he recorded with Terry in 1999. Let's listen to a track from the album "Brubeck Time," a tune written by Brubeck and alto saxophonist Paul Desmond. It's called "Audrey."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AUDREY")

GROSS: The recording we just heard was released 45 years ago, which was the same year that you were on the cover of Time magazine. What was the impact of this recording, "Brubeck Time," on your career?

BRUBECK: Well, it's a wonderful time in my life, because we had been struggling for years to get to be more known. And as you mentioned, the cover of Time magazine was really something that helped us a lot. But when you mentioned "Audrey," it was Audrey Hepburn that we had in mind, and we never realized that she ever had heard this tune. There was no communication like that. And because she was so important at the United Nations for the work she did with children, when they did a memorial service for her there, her husband asked that they play what you just played. And they said that she usually played it every night or put it on her headphones as she walked through her garden in Switzerland. So it was wonderful to hear that. I wish Paul Desmond had been around to know that she listened to it and liked it.

GROSS: Now, your first record that I think really made an impression on the record-buying public - I mean, it got bought a lot was "Jazz Goes to College."

BRUBECK: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: And it was sessions recorded at three different colleges.

BRUBECK: Yeah.

GROSS: And, you know, there's a picture of you on it, and you're wearing your glasses. And those glasses are really such a part of your image. And I think in part because that record was "Jazz Goes to College" and part because of those kind of thick, plastic glasses, you maybe had the image of being what was known in those days as an egghead?

BRUBECK: I wish I had. I'm not that smart.

(LAUGHTER)

BRUBECK: But people forget that at the same time, we had a huge following at places like the Apollo Theater...

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

BRUBECK: ...the Howard Theatre in Washington and the universities that they used to call black universities - Afro-American universities. We played the so-called black clubs all through the South, where there were - no white people came in. And in some of the black clubs, we were the only white group that came in. This is what I wish people would remember.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

BRUBECK: And we integrated many, many universities in this country, and those are important things to remember. It wasn't just Ivy League places. We were really doing some work that people seem to forget how hard it was to do, where you had to have a police escort to the concert, the president of the college refusing to let you go on and the students demanding you go on. I could tell you a lot of stories about that.

GROSS: The problem was that you were white, or that one of the musicians in the band was black?

BRUBECK: Eugene Wright was black. Yeah.

GROSS: So that was a problem?

BRUBECK: And we couldn't do some television shows, because in those days, you couldn't have black and white together. One show I had to turn down, Duke Ellington took because he, at the moment, he had an all-black band. Sometimes Duke would have a white drummer like Louie Bellson, and that would maybe give him problems. They just didn't want mixed groups on television.

GROSS: Let me play what might be the most famous of the Brubeck Quartet recordings, and that's "Take Five," which you recorded in 1959. Would you talk about this composition? It's a Desmond composition, but I think you worked with him on it.

BRUBECK: Yeah. Paul has - done a radio show in Canada before he died, where he said I'm so fortunate that Dave assigned me to do the section in 5/4, because that was the one track I wanted Paul to do as a solo for my percussionist, the great drummer Joe Morello, because Joe would often play in 5/4 time backstage, which is a time signature that was very rarely, if ever used in jazz. So I would hear Paul start to improvise over Joe playing on a drum pad before he'd go on stage. And so I said just write some of the melodies, the ideas that you're doing, and bring it to rehearsal in a few days. So that's what happened.

He came and he had some ideas that I thought were great. The first thing he said, I can't write anything in 5/4. I've tried and tried. I said let me see what you've got. So he showed me what he had, and I said I can put this together and it'll be great.

And I put the - what he had together as theme one, theme two, and that's how the thing was born. And I named it "Take Five," and he objected to that name. And I said why, Paul? And he said, nobody knows what take five means. What does it mean? I said everybody knows but you, Paul Desmond, what take five means. So I argued with him and I kept that title, which I think is a great title.

(LAUGHTER)

BRUBECK: Then, of course, I later wrote the words to it. So I had a little bit to do with this tune.

GROSS: Well, before we hear it, I want to thank you very much for talking with us about your early career. It's really been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

BRUBECK: Thank you, Terry.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "TAKE FIVE")

DAVIES: Dave Brubeck spoke with Terry Gross in 1999. He died Wednesday at the age of 91. Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews two new literary biographies of Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. This is FRESH AIR.

DAVE DAVIES, HOST: Book critic Maureen Corrigan has just read two new literary biographies that deal with the families of Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. And she's startled by the fact that one of them is actually a happy story.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Famous writers and their families: That's the subject of two recent biographical studies that read like novels - one a gothic nightmare, the other a romance. "Great Expectations" is the tongue-in-cheek title of Robert Gottlieb's marvelous little book about Charles Dickens and the lives of his 10 children.

Despite Dickens' single-handed invention of the Victorian Christmas, I would not recommend giving Gottlieb's "Great Expectations" as a holiday gift to any impressionable loved one. That's because as his children matured, Dickens turned out to be an emotional Scrooge. His seven sons, most of whom appear to have been affably normal, came in for particular scorn.

I never sing their praises, Dickens said, because they have so often disappointed me. A modern reader would assume that Dickens was supporting his sponging kin well into adulthood, but one of the minor revelations of Gottlieb's book is that college was not then the default option for sons of the affluent.

Only the brainiest Dickens boy, Henry, was sent to Cambridge. Most of the other sons were exported to the far-flung reaches of the empire to fend for themselves. Walter was enrolled as a cadet in the East India Company and sent to India. Frank, whom Dickens deemed a good sturdy fellow but not at all brilliant, lived out his days as a Canadian Mountie. And saddest of all, sensitive homebody Edward, nicknamed Plorn, was exiled at age 16 to the Australian outback.

Daughters Kate and Mamie, who stayed at home, were socially ostracized after their middle-aged papa publicly deserted their mother and quietly took up with the 18-year-old actress Ellen Ternan. Gottlieb, who served as editor-in-chief of The New Yorker and of Knopf Publishers, enlivens his book with sharp editorial pronouncements on Dickens' bad behavior and the limp life trajectory of so many of the Dickens offspring.

Louisa May Alcott's feckless philosopher father, Bronson, is a character Dickens might have conjured up. He was forever vanishing on his wife and four daughters to travel or rent rooms alone where he could read Dante and Kant and in general avoid earning filthy lucre. Practicalities were left to Bronson's wife, Abigail, who was immortalized in her daughter's novel "Little Women" as the beloved Marmee.

The eye-opener of Eve LaPlante's marvelous new dual biography, called "Marmee and Louisa," is that Abigail was every inch the social philosopher that Bronson was when it came to issues of abolition and women's rights. As Abigail dreamed her dreams of social reform, however, she was also supporting her family through jobs as a social worker and sanitarium matron in addition to the daily domestic round of caring for her own children, mending clothes, and cooking up her vegan husband's porridge.

"Marmee and Louisa" charts Abigail's relatively unacknowledged influence as a progressive thinker on her famous daughter Louisa. Author Eve LaPlante starts out with the home team advantage - she's a descendant of the Alcotts and her book opens with a scene every biographer dreams of. LaPlante describes coming upon old trunks in her own mother's attic filled with Alcott family personal papers.

Some of Abigail's writings, thought to have been destroyed, are collected in a paperback companion volume edited by LaPlante called "My Heart is Boundless." Judging by the excerpts in both books, Abigail was a tart observer, especially of gender inequalities. Writing about a visit to a Shaker utopian community in 1843, Abigail notes that the Shaker men have a fat, sleek, comfortable look, but among the women there is a still, awkward reserve that belongs to neither sublime resignation nor divine hope.

Throughout her journals, Abigail is charmingly blunt, confessing among other things her disrelish of cooking and her enjoyment of her separations from her husband. Abigail gave her daughter Louisa the practical and symbolic gift of a fountain pen for her 14th birthday. When Louisa began to write "Little Women" in 1865, she drew material from her mother's approximately 20 volumes of diaries.

Until Abigail's death at 70, she was her daughter's closest confidante and biggest booster. Of course it wasn't a perfect relationship, but as LaPlante chronicles, Marmee and Louisa enjoyed the kind of bond that Dickens' children could only imagine through reading their father's fiction.

DAVIES: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens" by Robert Gottlieb, and "Marmee and Louisa" by Eve LaPlante. You can download podcasts of our show at freshair.npr.org and follow us on Twitter @nprfreshair and on Tumblr at nprfreshair.tumblr.com.

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