Remembering Dave Brubeck

Music director and radio host Tom Hall remembers his friend and colleague, jazz musician Dave Brubeck, who passed away just short of his 92nd birthday.

I try to make a habit of counting my blessings. Of the many I can count, one of the greatest is the chance I’ve had over the last 18 years to perform the music of Dave Brubeck, and to get to know Dave and his wife, Iola. Knowing them has been one of the most transformative experiences of my life.

Dave’s legacy as an innovator, an ambassador for jazz, a performer, and a composer, is unparalleled in the history of American music. No one has brought jazz to as wide and diverse an audience as Dave. The list of artists who count him among their most significant influences is long, and multi-generational. The Baltimore Choral Arts Society and I have had the great pleasure of performing with Dave many of his major works for chorus, orchestra, and jazz ensemble. And as we learned his music, we also learned what a remarkable person he was.

I will continue to marvel at the great musical legacy, as I continue to perform Dave’s music. But I will also cherish knowing that his legacy includes not just a phenomenal musical opus, but a beautiful love story. Dave and Iola celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary in September. Theirs was an amazing partnership, a fantastic bond, an immutable connection, lived-out over decades on the road and at their home in Wilton, CT. For many of the decades of Dave’s 60-plus year career, Dave and Iola were inseparable. They traveled together. They wrote together. They navigated the vagaries of the music business together. They enjoyed their kids and their friends around the globe together. Their love story serves as a paradigm and an inspiration to us all. My heart aches for Iola. She is such a gracious and elegant person, and she and Dave were so perfectly in step with each other.

They were not always in step with the pervading notions of society or the accepted wisdom in the music industry. Dave was one of the first, and certainly one of the most famous artists to stand-up against racism, refusing to play or stay at places where his black band-mates or black fans were not allowed. In 2001, we recorded with Dave “The Gates of Justice,” one of his most important large compositions. Iola wrote some original poetry, and she and Dave assembled texts from Hebrew Scripture, Hillel, and Martin Luther King Jr. Dave composed the music in the shadow of the riots that tore through U.S. cities in the 1960s, making a striking and profound case for equality and respect. His commitment to justice was visceral, as deep and abiding as his faith.

The great love story of Dave and Iola Brubeck is paralleled by the love story between Dave and his fans. After a concert Choral Arts did with Dave in 2003, he and I emerged from the dressing room and encountered a woman who was clutching her LP copy of “Time Out.” She told Dave that that record had saved her life. Years earlier, when an abusive husband had robbed her of her dignity and her money, she said that she listened to “Time Out” over and over again, and that it gave her the strength to put one foot in front of the other, and pick up the pieces of her life. I’ve never seen a person’s face radiate as much joy as hers did when Dave signed her album.

In September of 2010, Baltimore Choral Arts recorded a Christmas hymn that Dave had just composed a few months earlier. It’s on a poem by Iola. We performed it again December 4, 2012, in a concert broadcast live on the local public radio affiliate, WYPR. Dave passed away the following morning, before I had the chance to tell him how well that performance had gone. The hymn is called “Precious Gift, His Wondrous Birth.”

Precious Gift. Dave Brubeck left us all so many precious gifts.

Listen to this remembrance of Dave Brubeck as a podcast from WYPR 88.1, which includes a 2009 interview that Brubeck did with Maryland Morning.


Tom Hall is the Music Director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, the co-host of Maryland Morning and the host of Choral Arts Classics on WYPR Radio in Baltimore.

Photo credit: Frank C. Müller; Wikimedia Commons; CC-BY-SA-2.0