The late Dave Brubeck left behind a legacy as a jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, husband, and father. He wrote everything that ranged from opera and ballet, to a contemporary mass. Brubeck was well known for experimenting with time signatures unusual to the traditional jazz sound. The uneven meters, along with the incorporation of all kinds of different rhythms in his music, is how he captivated the attention of younger listeners. The significance of Brubeck in the history of jazz is unambiguous. The Dave Brubeck Quartet helped spark an obscure interest in Jazz after World War II, and was a fundamental part of the “West Coast Cool Jazz” style of music that jazz in the fifties and sixties would be known for.
David Warren Brubeck, born on December 6, 1920 in Concord, California, “was one of Jazz’s first pop stars.”(Brown) In his younger years, his mother Elizabeth played an immense role in the conditioning of his music career. His two older brothers were musicians and Brubeck himself would eventually be playing at weekend dances by the age of fourteen. His schedule was from nine at night to as late as four in the morning. The strenuousness of it caused him to find playing unappealing, and he pursued his dream of being a rancher. His family had moved to a ranch in Ione, California when he was eleven, so he knew how things on the ranch worked. By the time he was eighteen, though reluctant to leave, he attended The College of Pacific in Stockton, California with the intent to study to become a veterinarian and return to the ranch. After only a year, he decided to change his major to music. While in still enrolled in college he, along with a man by the name of Darius Milhaud, whom Brubeck’s first son would eventually be named after, led a twelve piece band. By 1942, he met his wife Iola Whitlock and graduated that year with a degree in music. Immediately following, he enlisted in the Army. In 1944, Brubeck was sent to Europe, however, he never actually