Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Jazz musician best known for his signature tune 'Take Five' and being one of the world's biggest-selling jazz artists.
On the island
Eight records
Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major, BWV 1047: III. Allegro assai
Conducted by Karl Münchinger. This is the recording that I like to put on at home in the morning. It's very good wake-up music. It's kind of like a third cup of coffee.
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
Duke is my favorite jazz composer and he's still my favorite jazz band, big band. But this particular recording struck me when I was quite young. And it opened my eyes to a possibility of polytonality.
Art Tatum is my favorite, a jazz pianist, and I think he always will be. He could play faster than anyone, he had a tremendous harmonic and rhythmic sense, and he was my inspiration when I was starting jazz.
String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10: II. Assez vif, bien rythmé
I see a great similarity between jazz and classical music that I've never seen compared before. In this movement there's a typically African rhythmic beat and almost melodically it's very much like recordings I've heard from Africa.
It is the first time, to my knowledge, where composition and jazz have come together, Darius Milhaud's creation of the world, and I think the best time that they have ever come together.
This would help me bring Newport and all my years of playing there and all my association with the jazz musicians to the island. The Negro Spiritual is to me perhaps the most moving music in the world and her voice I would say one of the greatest.
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47: I. Moderato
Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of London
Conducted by Artur Rodziński. I chose this because of the theme being a very important theme to me, and I would want to be composing on this desert island.
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125: IV. Presto – 'Ode to Joy'Favourite
Philharmonia Orchestra of London / Friends of Music Chorus of Vienna
Conducted by Herbert von Karajan. I think this is the most powerful piece of music ever written. And I would want that definitely with me. I wouldn't want to waste my final choice.
Whenever I wonder how I got where I am, I could listen to this and understand some of the things I I was doing that hadn't been done much, if ever, in jazz.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major, BWV 1047
It's the music I love to wake up to in the morning if I want to be happy. It's it's just the most exciting, joyful music I know.
Duke Ellington & His Orchestra
A very uh pivotal point in my life was the discovery of the Duke Ellington Band.
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47
There was something about the Symphony piece, the Shostakovich fit, that made me decide that some way I want to compose music some day for symphony orchestra.
Orchestre du Théâtre des Champs-Élysées
This is Didarius Mio conducting one of the most important pieces in Music. It predates George Gershwin. You can hear Gershwin all through this piece.
If I were ever going to quit, it was after hearing our tatum. and he has destroyed so many of us.
What an experience to really know, Louis and for him to tell me that I captured a lot of the feeling of what went in on in New Orleans in the arrangements I wrote for him.
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 "Choral"Favourite
Chicago Symphony Orchestra & Chorus
This is a great ode and some of my first uh choral pieces. were written by my looking up the ranges of the chorus
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:34What would be your reaction to solitude, could you take it?
Well, I've been alone a lot in my life, being raised on a huge forty five thousand acre cattle ranch and I always kind of liked it.
Presenter asks
1:52What tests did you apply in choosing the eight discs? What quantities were you looking for?
Well, in choosing the eight discs, I think I chose the ones that were the most important to me in my development as a musician. And they have the qualities that I like the best in music, the emotional quality.
Presenter asks
3:43Your parents – musical?
Well, my father was a cattleman. My mother was a musician, which was a very odd combination. She came here to London to study with Tobias Mattei in nineteen twenty six.
Presenter asks
4:09When the idea first hit you that you were going to make music your career?
The keepsakes
The book
Raoul C. Faure
which is about a man trapped on an island looking for tips?
The luxury
A grand piano. Nine foot. Not an electronic instrument, but an acoustic instrument, because you might not have electricity on that island.
Well, it didn't actually seem that way until my second year of college because I had gone to school as a veterinarian major and then I switched to music the second year.
Presenter asks
4:55You mentioned you had a brief visit to Britain when you were in the army. Did you have any chance to make music?
I enlisted as a musician, but when we became short of men, they took all the bandsmen and put us in the infantry. … I remember scrambling over the tops of all the GIs to get up to the piano. I hadn't touched one for months. So the officers, the next day our group was shipping out to the front, they came right up to our unit and asked for me to stay behind, which was a fortunate thing because most of those fellows didn't get back.
Presenter asks
9:17You've been talked of as leader of an esoteric school, making your own kind of private jazz. Is that fair comment?
No, I don't think so. … After all, the work songs, the field cries of the early negro… I know I can prove we're in five four. Well, has anybody used five four in jazz? Rarely. So we come over here and play a five four piece and they say it isn't jazz. I don't think they know the tremendous rhythmical music of Africa… So if it doesn't sound in 2-4 or 4-4, they say it isn't jazz. I say it might have more traditional jazz in it than they think.
Presenter asks
1:37When you walk out onto that concert platform, do you still get the same thrill that you ever did?
Well, you still get scared and nervous. In fact, Dame Myra [Hess] … said the worst part of a concert was walking from the wings to the piano, and then looking out at the audience over a river of ice.
Presenter asks
6:13Can you explain why [Take Five] captured the mass musical imagination?
Hard to know. Columbia Records did not want to put it out. It was an album of originals. It had a painting on the cover. And you couldn't dance to it. Only the president of the company, who was a musician, thought it was the best thing I'd ever done … Because it it was in five four time, which which was not considered to be really jazz then.
Presenter asks
8:12Did you have much to do with [writing Take Five]?
Well, I gave it a lot more than a title. Ball [Paul Desmond] didn't have a tune when he came to rehearse. … He had a statement, I can't write anything in five four, was his opening statement. And that beat was my drummer's Joe Morellos. and I asked Paul to put a melody over it. and he had attempted two melodies, but he he didn't have a tune. And I've fixed it so that it became a piece.
Presenter asks
16:06How did you manage to con most of the people at Music College [when you couldn't read music]?
By not playing the piano. You see, you have to take clarinet or a reed instrument, and so you're just learning the scales and everything. So they don't know that you can't read well. … And then they made me take piano. And boy, that lady came marching down the stairs to the dean and said, Brube can't read a note. The dean said, You're a disgrace to the college. and said I couldn't graduate.
Presenter asks
20:59How do you compose? Is it true that you can dream a piece of music and then write it down?
Yeah. That happened with the Mass. … in the middle of the night I dreamt the whole Our Father with the choir singing and the orchestra playing. I jumped out of bed and wrote it down.
“I didn't experience racism at home … it was when I left that it came into focus.”
“Later on I found out that it wasn't conceived with the idea of two keys, but when I heard it, I heard it in two keys, and it opened a lot of doors for my future development.”
“Mio, of all people, said I must stick in jazz. That why should I give up something that I could do and just become a copy of the Western European type composer, which I at that time wanted to do.”
“I wanted to play polyrhythmic jazz and polytonal jazz. And I'm still working all these years trying to do it, trying to get other musicians to do it with me and our next LP, called Time Out, will be the closest I've come to that.”
“This is when improvisation comes in, whether it's on the sports field or Plain jazz.”
“the f pure time of that composition is when you first think of it in your head.”
“I think the greatest influence is African. The reason for jazz is from Africa.”