David Warren Brubeck was an American jazz pianist and composer. Often regarded as a foremost exponent of cool jazz, Brubeck's work is characterized by unusual time signatures and superimposing contrasting rhythms, meters, tonalities, and combining different styles and genres, like classic, jazz, and blues.
No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene that emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-rock genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic world view.
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any general rules, instead following the intuition of its performers. The term can refer to both a technique—employed by any musician in any genre—and as a recognizable genre of experimental music in its own right.
Samuel Carthorne Rivers was an American jazz musician and composer. Though most famously a tenor saxophonist, he also performed on soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, flute, harmonica, piano and viola.
The Newport Jazz Festival is an annual American multi-day jazz music festival held every summer in Newport, Rhode Island. Elaine Lorillard established the festival in 1954, and she and husband Louis Lorillard financed it for many years. They hired George Wein to organize the first festival and bring jazz to Rhode Island.
Perry Morris Robinson was an American jazz clarinetist and composer. He was the son of composer Earl Robinson.
All Night Long is a 1962 British neo noir drama film directed by Basil Dearden and starring Patrick McGoohan, Keith Michell, Betsy Blair, Paul Harris, Marti Stevens, and Richard Attenborough. The story by Nel King and Paul Jarrico is an updated version of William Shakespeare's Othello, set in the London jazz scene of the 1960s. The action takes place in a single evening, during an anniversary party. The black-and-white film features performances by several prominent British jazz musicians—among them John Dankworth and Tubby Hayes—as well as the Americans Dave Brubeck and Charles Mingus, who were in the UK in 1961 when filming took place and were recruited to participate.
Established in 2002, the CGI Rochester International Jazz Festival Presented by M&T Bank takes place in June of each year, in Rochester, New York. It is owned and produced by RIJF, LLC, whose principals are John Nugent, Co-Producer and Artistic Director, and Marc Iacona, Co-Producer and Executive Director.
Eugene Joseph Wright was an American jazz bassist who was a member of the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
The Village Gate was a nightclub at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village, New York. Art D'Lugoff opened the club in 1958, on the ground floor and basement of 160 Bleecker Street. The large 1896 Chicago School structure by architect Ernest Flagg was known at the time as Mills House No. 1 and served as a flophouse for transient men. In its heyday, the Village Gate also included an upper-story performance space, known as the Top of the Gate.
Darius Brubeck is an American jazz pianist, author, and educator. He is the son of jazz legend Dave Brubeck with whom he worked professionally in the 1970s, while also performing in his own bands, The Darius Brubeck Ensemble and Gathering Forces.
The Real Ambassadors is a jazz musical developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Dave and Iola Brubeck, in collaboration with Louis Armstrong and his band. It addressed the Civil Rights Movement, the music business, America's place in the world during the Cold War, the nature of God, and a number of other themes. It was set in a fictional African nation called Talgalla, and its central character was based on Armstrong and his time as a jazz ambassador. It was the first major large scale musical collaboration between Dave and Iola Brubeck and served as a template for their future musical collaborations. Songs from the musical were recorded by Columbia Records and a soundtrack album was released in 1962, just before the show's premiere at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival with an all star cast.
Loft jazz was a cultural phenomenon that occurred in New York City during the mid-1970s. Gary Giddins described it as follows: "[A] new coterie of avant-garde musicians took much of the jazz world by surprise... [T]hey interpreted the idea of freedom as the capacity to choose between all the realms of jazz, mixing and matching them not only with each other, but with old and new pop, R&B and rock, classical music and world music... [S]eemingly overnight new venues - in many instances, apartments or lofts - opened shop to present their wares." According to Michael Heller, "lofts were not an organization, nor a movement, nor an ideology, nor a genre, nor a neighborhood, nor a lineage of individuals. They were, instead, a meeting point, a locus for interaction." Heller stated that "loft practices came to be defined by a number of key characteristics, including (1) low admission charges or suggested donations, (2) casual atmospheres that blurred the distinction between performer and audience, (3) ownership / administration by musicians, and (4) mixed-use spaces that combined both private living areas and public presentation space." Regarding the music played in these venues, Michael J. Agovino wrote: "This was community music. Part of the point was that, free of the strictures of clubs, the music could be anything, go anywhere, go on for as long as it wanted." David Such stated that "the cutting contests, personality cults, and vices that characterized the jazz scene of the 1940s and 1950s were mostly missing." The scene was reviewed and documented by Giddins, Peter Occhiogrosso of the SoHo Weekly News, Leroi Jones, Robert Palmer, and Stanley Crouch.
John Fischer was an American pianist, composer, and artist. He was a pioneer in the field of computer art. In the 1970s, during the loft jazz era in New York City, Fischer ran a performance loft and gallery known as Environ. He was leader of the group Interface, and he performed with Perry Robinson, Mark Whitecage, Arthur Blythe, Rick Kilburn, and Lester Bowie.
The Wisconsin Union Theater is a performing arts center in Madison, Wisconsin, located in the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Memorial Union. Wisconsin Union Theater performances include world stage, concerts, dance, jazz and other special events.
Tier 3 was an influential but short-lived 300-capacity no wave art nightclub in New York. Founded by Hilary Jaeger in 1979, Tier 3 was a major venue in the city's underground music and counterculture post-punk art scene, along with the Mudd Club. Live performances showcased punk rock, no wave, ska, noise music, free jazz, new wave and experimental music. The club was located at 225 West Broadway in the TriBeCa neighborhood of lower Manhattan.
Storyville was a Boston jazz nightclub organized by Boston-native, jazz promoter and producer George Wein during the 1940s.
"In Your Own Sweet Way" is a 1955 jazz standard, and one of the most famous compositions by Dave Brubeck. It was written around 1952, but its copyright notice was dated 1955. Brubeck's wife Iola, for whom the song was written, later wrote a lyric for the song, which led to singers such as Carmen McRae recording it. "In Your Own Sweet Way" was first released on Brubeck's 1956 studio album Brubeck Plays Brubeck; an earlier live recording is known.
Slugs' Saloon was a jazz club at 242 East 3rd Street, between Avenue B and C in Manhattan's East Village, operating from the mid-1960s to 1972.
Countdown—Time in Outer Space is a studio album released by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1962 on Columbia LP record CS 8575 (stereo) and CL 1775 (mono). The front cover features the 1959 painting Orange and Black Wall by Franz Kline. In Australia the album appeared on the Coronet label. It was re-released, for the first time in digital format, in 2004 as part of a compact disc collection titled Dave Brubeck: For All Time. It was again released as part of the box set The Dave Brubeck Quartet: the Columbia Studio Albums Collection 1955-1966. Both CD re-releases feature a bonus track titled "Fatha".
