A transcript from Charlie Mace (Senior Editor)'s interview with Darius Brubeck on City Jazz Radio.
Hi Darius, it's really great to be able to talk to you!
Hello. It's really nice to be able to sit down with you.
I think quite a few of our readers will be familiar with you, but for those who aren't, could you give a brief overview about who you are?
Well, I'm Darius Brubeck. I lead a group, inventively called the Darius Brubeck Quartet, which has been together for like 16 years now. We have CDs out on the Ubuntu label. The most recent one is the Darius Brubeck Quartet Live in Poland, which we actually launched at the Jazz Café in 2019.
I spent 23 years in South Africa as the Head of Jazz Studies at, what was at first the University of Natal, and became the University of KwaZulu-Natal. I founded the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music right in the middle of the big transition that happened in the late 80s and 90s.
My wife Catherine, who is South African, is a big part of this story too, and I'm bringing her into this because we wrote a book together called Playing the Changes, and that's a little bit of a play on words because of course Jazz musicians talk about playing the changes of a tune, but we were also playing the political changes that were very evident at the time, and Jazz was a surprisingly big part of that.
Since retiring from my professorship, I moved to England and I've been leading this group. I kind of went back to where I was before I became an academic so many years ago.
So that's kind of my life story in a nutshell.
Fig.1, Darius during the interview
That's so great, thank you. My first questions revolve around your time spent teaching and performing Jazz in South Africa, and my first question about the South African Jazz scene. How does it differ to England, and America, where you spent some time in your youth.
Yeah, I more than spent time in America. I grew up there!
Well, the cultural roots are different. We're talking about three very different places, and I would say that none of the three are like each other. Maybe the best way to put it is that Jazz is a common language through which these quite different cultures communicate.
Of course, speaking of language, even though it's not the majority language in South Africa, Jazz musicians speak English. In fact, they do almost anywhere in Europe, but English is a prevalent language in the arts world in South Africa. But the Jazz scenes are just organized differently in America and England. There's a very, very big emphasis on conservatory training, and that's great. In South Africa, I introduced something like that, but I can only say 'like that': in that it's based in a university, but the circumstances, the lifestyles, the opportunities, the educational background is so different that it's difficult to compare.
Now I've been in England quite some time now since 2006, and have gone back and forth a lot of times. Mainly when I was teaching the 80s, 90s, early 2000s, but in South Africa it was a analogous to an earlier period in American Jazz history where most of the support for Jazz and most of the transmission of Jazz knowledge took place within self-organized groups, within communities. The ambition to become a Jazz musician always came from role models in the townships, in these very deprived areas, incidentally, or not so incidentally. This was an important outlet and introducing a way to study formally: it was a novel idea. People at first really couldn't relate to it, and I had to actively find students, but the ones I did find at first were already professional musicians. They were good players, and they knew that they had something to gain through following an organized course of study.
I want to emphasize that it's not as if there was no Jazz education and then Darius Brubeck came and brought it! It's more that Jazz education was finally given a platform with all the physical advantages of being in a university.
So do you think that you have a stronger calling to teaching or playing jazz?
That's an interesting question. It's very subjective. I don't miss teaching. I was a professional Jazz musician in the States, and that's what I did before I became an academic. I had to really catch up, in a way, with colleagues whose whole trajectory had been from undergraduate to postgraduate to being supervised in a Master's Degree to a Doctorate and so forth, and eventually getting a job. I just didn't have that trajectory at all. I was driving through, if it were this time of year, I might have been driving through a snowstorm to get to a gig in Vermont.
Well, the story is very much in the book, but just through a remarkably serendipitous timing, it worked out that I was able to take this job at the University of Mattel.
I had to work to adapt to that, but I felt called to it, to use your term 'calling', because it was an opportunity to really go somewhere and make a difference.
I respect all musicians who do it for a living. It's hard. So I'm not doing that down, but I'm saying that here was a chance to do something unprecedented that would have a big impact, socially and artistically. Or I could go on being a piano player in New England and New York, and so what? That's what the choice came down to.
Fig.2, Darius playing at Howard College Theatre
That definitely makes sense. Do you think that your time teaching actually influenced your own music?
Very much so, because of the South African musicians I came in contact with. Once Kathy and I had created this venue on the university campus, you know, we could invite some of the great South African players. And then, of course, I'd be the pianist in the rhythm section. You know, they came as soloists.
I also put together a group there called Afro Cool Concert.
Yes, I'm familiar.
Wow. Well, you're you're a fan of some depth.
One of my next questions was going to be about Afro Cool!
Well I'm the last man standing. Yeah...
But these were great friends as well as great musicians and a big influence on my music.
So you toured with Afro Cool for quite a while. What was it that like touring South Africa and internationally as well?
Oh, I don't know. As far as stories, they would be kind of complicated and long. The main thing is that we were coming out of South Africa at a time when it was controversial. And the interesting thing about that group and actually my presence there at all had had to do a lot with the politics of the time was also the era when in terms of more of the popular music world, you might say Johnny Clegg was touring. And Sabuka.
So the story sort of had to do with the very warm reception we would get, but also kind of awkwardness about it. You know, overcoming that. But Afro Cool was very popular in South Africa itself. The news making things we did were our tours. And, you know, I had the honour of being asked to do a tour with Afro Cool that was celebrating 10 years of democracy in South Africa. I did that in 2004. So we went to England, Denmark, U.S.A.
Interestingly, we were invited to play in Memphis, which is historically significant on the positive side. Everyone associates Memphis with the blues and early jazz, but it was also a very strong gesture because sadly, Memphis was where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Barbara Masekela, who is the minister for culture from the new South African government, came to Memphis and we played. So with that group, we had this aura, even though obviously I'm American and the rest of the guys were South African.
We had this aura of carrying a message from place to place about democracy in South Africa and how Jazz linked South Africa with the rest of the world.
So I can't give you a story story, but that's that's what it felt like.
That definitely satisfied my question. As a result of living in America, South Africa and England, your music often incorporates different elements from different cultures. How does cultural diversity influence your compositions and performances?
It's just integral. It's more than an influence. It's real.
From the perspective of my younger self, I could have almost predicted that. At university, I didn't study Jazz as such. I was playing, but I studied ethnomusicology and I've always been interested in every aspect of music making, which doesn't mean that you go around imitating other cultures, but they certainly feed into what I do and how I feel about music.
And that's how I compose.
So in a more basic version of the question, how do you start song composition? Is there a certain way that you would approach creating?
Well, it depends on the creation. I often create from visual images or non-musical ideas. Earthrise, which is the first track on Live in Poland, was created from the famous NASA 1973 photograph which was on a lot of college dorm room walls back in the day.
You know, of the Earth coming over the horizon of the moon and that holistic vision.
But also, musical ideas are ultimately musical. So, you know, I create something in seven, four time. And I wanted to, you know, have a kind of spatial or spacey atmosphere. It's a little bit Indian, but it's a little bit Blues.
I created a different composition in the Spanish mode, which I wrote because I wanted to use guitars. Guitars, you know, iconically, if you want to think about Spanish music, if you had a poster saying, you know, Spanish music tonight, you'd probably put a guitar on it, just like for Jazz, you'd usually see a saxophone on it.
I wrote that for Larry Coryell. And I think I sort of copped from Miles Davis sketches of Spain, which in turn had its roots in Spanish classical music, which in turn had its roots in Spanish folk music.
You mentioned Miles Davis as someone that you took inspiration from. Are there any other artists that particularly influenced your music?
Well, the obvious answer is the truest one, which is my father. Both as a pianist and in terms of his musical interests, which were amazingly broad. And he brought in a lot of musical ideas from his studies with Darius Mio, who was his teacher. He was a famous French-Jewish composer. He came to America as a refugee, as did a lot of the main European composers during the Second World War. My father studied with him under the GI Bill of Rights. I was born during the period when Dave Brubeck was a Master's student under Darius Mio.
Fig.3, Darius Brubeck with his father, legend of Jazz, Dave Brubeck
As someone who typically plays what you might call 'traditional Jazz', I'm interested to hear your opinion on electronic Jazz, for example, Herbie Hancock's Headhunters: how do you view the role of technology in contemporary jazz? Hancock is well known for his use of synthesizers.
According to Herbie's biography, he has literally purchased every new synth as soon as it came out. When he was just a kid in Chicago, he thought he wanted to be an electronic engineer and he loved anchoring with those things.
When all that stuff came out in the 70s, I did a lot of that too. And I had an ARP set up there. There were kind of two main companies, ARP and Moog. And that was sort of like Mac and PC. You sort of chose one route or the other and they kept developing new products. So I even had what was called a star card for ARP, which meant that, you know, when I was at a gig, they'd have a rep there to, you know, make sure all my stuff worked right.
I love so much of the music of that era. Like, you know, you can put on Earth, Wind and Fire anytime. And it feels great. And what Chick and Herbie were doing at that time was really pioneering stuff. But everyone eventually came back to playing piano. And The Headhunters is fabulous, but it's a period thing. It is of an era. The music is valid, it always will be. Just, you know, in classical terms, if you had instead of something electronic on stage, suppose the keyboard on stage is a harpsichord. You know, you say, well, that's cool music. That's a different instrument. That's something different. But it's definitely of an era.
It was contained within a certain span of time. And I can't really explain all the reasons for that. But I think weirdly enough, having all of those different keyboards is limiting in a way. You really have to plan what you're going to do on each number and make sure you do it and make sure you've got all your settings right and everything. And it's an art. I mean, those guys were great at it. I wasn't bad. But in the end, we all end up focusing on the basic jazz keyboard, which is piano. I'm happy to see there's still a few Hammond organ trios in business. You know, because that came in in the 60s. I think that's very good, too. Technology has benefited a lot of artists, though not so much in terms of instruments as making recording a lot cheaper and easier. So, you know, anyway, one moves with the times. But it's interesting. It's like the piano is the real thing. It's kind of like going back to vinyl. That's the real thing. The whole tradition of what a record is, was built on vinyl.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Thanks so much Darius, it's been a pleasure.
Great speaking with you.
Photo Credit:
Fig1: Darius Brubeck Interview with Charlie Mace on City Jazz Radio
Fig 2: University of Kwazulu-Natal School of Arts
Fig 3: Fatherly, Lizzy Francis
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