CEMENT MIXER:

Even now, as I pour through various prog and jazz albums, I'm always on the lookout for Brubeck's influences.  

As a case in point, Pat Metheny's latest, From This Place--arguably this jazz master's best--reflects widely and deeply the compositional structure of Brubeck's best album, 1964's Time Changes. The resemblance is simply too obvious to ignore. Even the theme is critical. Brubeck's album was inspired by a short story involving two cellmates and a crust of bread. The religious essence of the album is blatant, with Brubeck trying to find that which ties all humans together, regardless of ethnicity or race. It is, for all intents and purposes, a meditation on human decency and divine agency. Metheny's latest calls us to be the best we can expect of ourselves as Americans.

In 2012, when Brubeck died around Christmas time of that year, I vowed that I would one day write a biography of him.  Despite preliminary research and reading, I've really not dived into this project, but Brubeck remains a profound part of my life, nonetheless. 

Two stories from Brubeck's own life mean everything to me.

First, at Ronald Reagan's last summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, held in Moscow in 1988, the Reagan administration insisted that Dave Brubeck represent America as her greatest cultural achievement. Brubeck's producer, Russell Gloyd, recognized this grand achievement for what it was. "You have to put this in perspective," he argued. "There was Perestroika, the whole awakening of the Soviet Union, the whole concept of what was taking place at that time in world history. This was the first time there was hope of a real chance for an understanding between the East and the West," he continued. "For Dave to be the representative artist meant everything to everyone who was close to us."

The atmosphere was tense. Reagan was exhausted from his trip, Gorbachev's security was worried about assassination plots, and it was a ridiculously hot and humid day in Moscow. "I walked in thinking that this was the hardest room Dave had ever had to work in his life," claims Gloyd. After a number of lackluster diplomatic niceties in the stuffy room, Brubeck walked up to the piano, sat down, and started playing "Take the 'A' Train."

"It brought down the house," Gloyd reports. "People were up and cheering. I'll never forget Bob Dole--he looked like a little kid. He had his one good hand raised above his head like he was at a football game. He'd turn around, and there was a Soviet general, loaded with medals, doing the same thing! They looked at each other like, 'You like Brubeck? I like Brubeck! We like Brubeck." It was, Gloyd notes, "the greatest single twenty-minute set in his life." The Cold War became much less frigid that day.

Second, though he came from a Presbyterian family, Brubeck converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult. "I never had belonged to any church. I was never baptized before," Brubeck remembered. "I was the only son in the family who wasn't baptized a Presbyterian. It was just an oversight." To be certain, religious music--from the African-American community as well as from the white/European community--had always intrigued and influenced him. He wrote liturgical-jazz pieces about Easter, Christmas, and Martin Luther King. 

Though he had written a number of albums and pieces on religious themes, the greatest expression of his Christianity came when Our Sunday Visitor (headquartered in Huntington, Indiana) commissioned Brubeck to write a Mass. He, in very Brubeck fashion, entitled it, To Hope! A Celebration, and performed it--with Gloyd conducting--at Washington National Cathedral. The premier music review website, Allmusic, writes of it:

This stunning work incorporates jazz interludes into the hypnotic Responsorial "The Peace of Jerusalem" and "Alleluia," a particularly challenging section for the choir. The vocal soloists are impressive; tenor Mark Bleeke's feature "While He Was At Supper" is especially moving. The overall effect of this beautiful work is absolutely stunning; it resists being labeled in any one category, it is simply great music.

Fundamentally optimistic about the human experience, Brubeck had said in a commencement address in 1982: "What is really important in the community, in the worst of times, is often music. It's the cement for the community that holds it together, and the thing that gives it hope."

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