To the Editor,
Chris and Dan Brubeck offer so many wonderful musical gifts to our town, as their performance at the Wilton Library this past Sunday afternoon, Oct. 29, illustrated so well. They performed in the Brubeck Brothers Quartet with their colleagues, guitarist Mike DeMicco and pianist Chuck Lamb.
It is an extraordinary experience to watch such consummate musicians in performance in the packed Brubeck Room while close enough for us to feel intimately involved in the action. As they perform amazing riffs in such close coordination with one another yet with glorious improvisation throughout, their love of performing together radiates in their faces, and none more so than in Chris’.
Dan will gladly smile after the performance is over, but during a concert, he is in such focused concentration that there’s time for nothing else, and often especially in long solo riffs, he seems transported to a transcendent place. He takes his delighted audience there with him as we all glory in his performance and marvel at how anyone can produce such extraordinary rhythms with so much energy on so many separate percussive instruments.
Chris likewise leaves us spellbound on electronic bass and his signature trombone. What he can do on those instruments really inspires an audience, and he even experimented with a little jazz vocalization in one of the last pieces of the evening. Chris is also an accomplished raconteur, and before each piece on Sunday he entertained the audience with eloquent and often witty insights into the works the Quartet was performing and, with that backdrop, into related aspects of his father’s life that were new to even seasoned Brubeck fans — and what Wiltonian is not?!
Chris’ work extends beyond these performances with the Quartet to include composing jazz pieces like those performed by the Quartet but also encompassing major orchestral works, one of which, his concerto Confluence for Classical Guitar, Blues Guitar, and Orchestra, had its world premiere a month ago with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and another of which is his widely performed Concerto for Bass Trombone & Orchestra.
All of this work, including with the Quartet of course, keeps Chris on the road a lot and Dan likewise, and it’s very thoughtful of them to find time to perform for Wilton audiences as they do regularly to the delight of us all. The program on Sunday included new compositions, one by Mike DeMicco that is hauntingly beautiful. It also included several of Dave’s pieces that are less well known including the lyrically evocative Weep No More written by Dave for his beloved Iola immediately upon his return from the European Theater at the end of World War II, with a beautiful extended piano improvision performed by Chuck Lamb.
Chris introduced the piece to Sunday’s audience with the story of his father’s first meeting of his mother. It happened at a dance that Dave’s mother pressed him to attend in the face of Dave’s vehement protests that he didn’t even know how to dance. Dave, the ever-obedient son (except as to taking up veterinary medicine, his father’s intended profession for him), went to the dance anyway and struck up a conversation with the beautiful Iola off the dance floor. Dave and Iola wound up spending the whole evening talking and concluded the evening by deciding to get married. According to Chris’ recounting of it, no dancing was involved — at least that evening….
The Quartet wrapped up the evening with what it knew would especially please its audience: Blue Rondo a la Turk and Take Five. It is one of the many joys of jazz that hearing a piece is ever new since while the basic melodic theme is unchanged of course, the improvisations take off in new and often exciting directions — as they certainly did on Sunday evening to the spellbound joy of the audience.
The Brubeck Family chose to loan Dave’s collected works to the Wilton Library on a long-term basis as yet one more very generous gift to their hometown of so many years — even though institutions as august as the Smithsonian and Yale University had vied for that honor. The Curator of the Brubeck Collection Michael Bellacosa, who is also the Library’s Head of Adult Programming, offered tours of the Collection after the performance.
The Collection is housed in its own large space on the Library’s main floor near the reference desk. It offers regular access to scholars and aficionados of jazz. It also provides research opportunities for those interested in the many ways in which Dave and Iola used jazz and its performance as a catalyst for improving both international relations and domestic race relations and also together enriched church liturgical music gloriously.
The Brubecks — parents, brothers and their whole family — have indeed enriched our town in so many ways, and their generosity continues in many more ways like this very special concert.
Steve Hudspeth