Some know Dave Brubeck as a jazz revolutionary; others praise him for making 5/4 time signatures cool; I know him as the man whose anthology I slept beside from the fourth grade onward; but to Darius Brubeck, he's simply "Dad."
"I'm old enough that I can remember a time when my father wasn't a world famous jazz musician," Darius says.
As the oldest of the Brubeck bunch, Darius followed in his father's footsteps, formally taking up piano around the age of six. "But that's almost arbitrary. If you can understand the environment I grew up in – my grandmother and father both piano players – then you can understand that naturally it was what you did, you played piano."
Surprisingly, music was never forced upon Darius. "My dad may even have been a little too laissez-faire," Darius chuckles.
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Darius attributes much of his early career path to music appreciation. His parents, Dave & Iola, were both devoted symphonic listeners. "I fondly remember my parents, and therefore myself, listening repeatedly to Bartok's string quartet. And when we were old enough, they'd take me and my siblings to concerts...I was exposed to a lot over a very influential period in America."
Concert outings weren't the only family 'activities' the Brubecks partook in. Darius (piano) and his brothers Chris (bass and trombone) and Dan (drums) have been collaborating musically since high school. To this day, they take their parallel project "Brubecks Play Brubeck" on tour roughly once a year.
The Darius Brubeck Quartet coming to Israel, however, is Darius' permanent UK-based group, with Dave O'Higgins (saxophone) as the overlapping force.
Darius shares insight on his upcoming tour in Israel as a part of the Hot Jazz series: "In the Jazz world, we're not playing sell-out stadiums, so financially, it's quite usual for an artist to put together a group in the country they will be touring as opposed to bringing their own group. One of the unique things about the upcoming tour of Israel is that I get to bring my own quartet; we have 10 years of experience together, two CDs, and enough material to produce more."
Darius feels blessed to play abroad with the same band he gigs with regularly at local London jazz clubs like Ronnie Scott's.
While it has been a while, this is not Darius' first time in Israel. He was here back in 2011 to play the release of the Clint Eastwood documentary, "Dave Brubeck: In His Own Sweet Way" as a part of a Tel Aviv film festival.
"We had one trip over to Haifa, but this is my first free-standing concert tour in Israel," Darius shares. This time around, Darius expresses his excitement to add more humor and audience banter to his show as well as take some calculated risks.
What kind of risks?
"Well, I’d like to introduce more of my music into the show." Audiences expect the iconic Dave Brubeck tunes, so "of course we will play them with pleasure," Darius admits. "As I explain in my album notes, there are three and a half streams that organically combine in any of our shows [the half being that odd standard or two] : my originals, Dave Brubeck classics, and South African jazz.
While one ever-flowing constant in Darius' life is music, another accounts for this third tributary: South Africa. Not only is his drummer, Wesley Gibbens, South African, but Darius also spent 23 years in Durban, South Africa where he helped introduce jazz to the music department of what is now the University of KwaZulu Natal in 1983.
"It was an amazing change from the way music departments thought of themselves at that time, which was mainly as an anchor to preserve colonial legacy. You could say it was a political mission of sorts; our intention was to culturally transform the institution by introducing mixed global culture to a fairly insular campus and foregrounding black cultural achievement on a global basis."
Popping that post-colonial bubble opened up a whole world of experience for everybody, not just jazz musicians, a phenomenon that Darius has recently been invited – alongside his wife and manager, Catherine – to write a memoir about (working title: "It Was a Jazz Life").
"We're not trying to write a comprehensive 10-volume history," Darius explains over the phone from South Africa. "We've been encouraged to write this memoir because as a musician in Durban, one has a unique perspective. I'm one of the few people who could go to a party at the American Embassy one night, then have a beer with struggle leaders at an illegal shindig the next."
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His mobility as a musician was one that other people in the country simply could not risk.
"Jazz worked on a love beyond race...in South Africa, you just felt that the music mattered. Each show was a mix between a political rally, a church service, and a soulful celebration. It was all so cathartic," he adds.
While Darius tries to break apart the struggles and obstacles associated with his efforts in South Africa, he ends on a more positive note: "While there are huge problems here, it's wonderful that the one problem we don't have is racial antagonism," which he attributes to the fact that people from all walks of life can appreciate jazz since it has yet to be 'captured' by any specific culture.
Darius feels that the residue of such concerts is underestimated. "People come away from a concert and think, 'we had a good time for two hours and now we can go back to our own lives,' but there is much more to that. Within those groups, there is an overarching sense of TRUST."
Since everyone can share this [musical] space, no one tries to contest it. "And that trust eventually translates to trusting one another in [one]'s daily lives."
"I only hope something like this can happen in Israel, incidentally. It would personally make me feel very good if our concerts while there could convey that sense of solidifying trust."
Darius Brubeck will perform from June 3-10 in venues across Israel, including Zappa Herzliya and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. For more details, visit the Hot Jazz website.