{"id":20104,"date":"2021-01-05T05:30:31","date_gmt":"2021-01-05T10:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=20104"},"modified":"2021-01-06T09:05:57","modified_gmt":"2021-01-06T14:05:57","slug":"the-chris-brubeck-interview-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/01\/05\/the-chris-brubeck-interview-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chris Brubeck Interview, Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>. In this segment of my conversation with Chris Brubeck, he reflects on what he learned <\/i>from<\/i> his famous father, and <\/i>his rather unusual choice of instrument<\/i>.<\/i><\/p>\n

What would you say are some of the most important musical values that you learned from your father? <\/b><\/p>\n

I think, like for me, it\u2019s kind of interesting to keep track. I was so fortunate to be able to hear some of the greatest jazz musicians of the day, just around the house all the time. And of course, you only know what you know when you\u2019re little. So, it was like, Uncle John Morello and Uncle Paul Desmond. I didn\u2019t know that Uncle Joe Morello is Joe Morello<\/i>. [I didn\u2019t know] the big debate was, \u201cWho is the best drummer in the world? Is it Buddy Rich or Joe Morello?\u201d<\/p>\n

And Paul Desmond, one of the great sax players \u2026 I would hear these guys. And I loved their music. I would literally crawl under the piano to listen to them rehearse. And as we grew up, we were very lucky to go from just babies to rug rats to people that started to learn how to play instruments to people that would sometimes jam with those guys to finally sharing the stage with them and being on tour.<\/p>\n

You know, I\u2019m never going to say that I\u2019m as great as Eugene Wright, but we used to perform together. We went from infancy and non-music, and just a dream of becoming musicians, to sharing the stage together. So, that was an incredibly beautiful life. You know? To be little caterpillars, crawling around the floor and turn into butterflies eventually. That was a cool thing.<\/p>\n

And the other thing I learned \u2013 because I was born in \u201952 \u2013 rock and roll was interesting to me. Well, actually, it was kind of weird; I was sophisticated enough by accident that I thought early rock and roll was just stupid. It just wasn\u2019t interesting enough, but the best Beatles and the best Beach Boys were happening. That<\/i>, to me, was interesting music.<\/p>\n

And so, you ask what I got from my father? I think I got from my father that if you really have an original musical vision, and you hang onto it, and you fight for it, that it can happen<\/i>. The belief in yourself and belief in your originality.<\/p>\n

Dave, for example, started Fantasy Records, which went on to be a big deal. The reason he started Fantasy Records is because every other record company he tried to be with said, \u201cOh, you\u2019re out of your mind. Your music is too far out. It\u2019s never going to work. Who wants to listen to that? Go away. Do something else.\u201d You know?<\/p>\n

So, in desperation he started Fantasy Records with two guys whose father owned a pressing plant. Dave\u2019s life is filled with these different miracles, and I sometimes laugh because now we have that in our cultural vocabulary \u2013 not that he was stupid by any means \u2013 but he certainly had a Forrest Gump kind of life.<\/p>\n

His partners screwed him out of his own record company that the three of them started, but when he got screwed and suddenly had no record company, he was really lucky. Because a very famous jazz producer named George Avakian \u2013 who worked with John Hammond and Columbia Records \u2013 had heard of Dave and saw his reviews, and had heard his records, and said, \u201cDave, you know, I heard you just got screwed. You want to join Columbia Records?\u201d Which was the biggest distribution system in the world.<\/p>\n

It was like if you invented something for a computer program and your partner screwed you, but Apple said, \u201cWell, we\u2019re going to put it in every Mac.\u201d You know what I mean? It was a huge blessing that he got screwed, ultimately. In terms of people hearing him from all over the world.<\/p>\n

So, to follow your dreams and believe in yourself, and invest in yourself. And it\u2019s cool to march to the beat of a different drummer. That\u2019s what I think I learned from my dad.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This is a tangent, almost an \u201cinside baseball\u201d question, but I have to ask. I\u2019ve seen a couple photos of the quartet showing you holding a Rickenbacker 4001. I could be way off the mark on this, but I don\u2019t recall seeing many jazz artists playing that instrument. <\/b><\/p>\n

Are you a bass player to ask such a question?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a rock and roll keyboard player. So I\u2019m very familiar with the Ric 4001 because of the mid-period Beatles \u2026 lots of really cool bands use it. It has a very distinctive sound, like nothing else. But I don\u2019t know that I\u2019ve ever seen a jazz<\/i> player play one.<\/b><\/p>\n

Yeah, well, it\u2019s sort of my own little Forrest Gump moment, because when I was in my rock and roll groups, before I started playing jazz professionally, in the late \u201860s on West 48th<\/sup> Street in New York City is where all the big music stores were. Like Sam Ash and Manny\u2019s, etc., and littler shops that had all these basses and guitars hanging in the windows, and I just thought, \u201cIt\u2019ll be cool: I want to be the first rock musician to play fretless bass!. I think it would be a different sound.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, I went out, went up and down the street and there were only two fretless basses on that whole street that I saw. And one was, literally, the one that I bought: the Ric as a fretless instrument. And, oddly enough, it always had those nylon wound strings on it, which give it a whole different world, because, you know, the bass player in Yes, the Chris Squire sound, that very twangy metallic.<\/p>\n

The other [fretless at the time] was a Fender jazz bass, and this was way before Jaco [Pastorius]. So, even the idea of how Jaco might sound didn\u2019t exist yet. I\u2019m sure Jaco existed somewhere in a night club in Florida playing his ass off, but we<\/i> didn\u2019t know about it.<\/p>\n

So, as soon as I heard it, I said, \u201cWow, this sounds really a lot more like an upright than most basses, and I think that could come in handy if I start playing with my dad for any reason.\u201d And at that point I had done some playing with him.<\/p>\n

And you\u2019ll be happy to know that you\u2019re very perceptive to wonder about it, because there is a magazine, which is semi-defunct now, called Bass Player<\/i> magazine. The guy who is the editor of it heard me play a concert in New York City and went, \u201cOh my god, you play in such a different style and have such a different sound. That instrument is so bizarre. I\u2019m going to do an article about your bass and you.\u201d And it was in the last issue to be printed \u2026 Let\u2019s see who\u2019s on the cover. \u201c25 years with Alice in Chains.\u201d And now they only print that magazine in England, because a lot of people ride the subway and, therefore, they\u2019ll buy the magazine and read it on the subway. I think, they\u2019ve stopped printing it in the United States.<\/p>\n

Come back for still more from my fascinating chat with Chris Brubeck<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One. In this segment of my conversation with Chris Brubeck, he reflects on what he learned from his famous father, and his rather unusual choice of instrument. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20112,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,41,42,62],"tags":[4383,4382,620],"class_list":["post-20104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classical","category-interview","category-jazz","category-rawk","tag-brubeck-brothers-quartet","tag-chris-brubeck","tag-dave-brubeck","cat-17-id","cat-41-id","cat-42-id","cat-62-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20104"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20413,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20104\/revisions\/20413"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}