This was supposed to be the year that drummer Dan Brubeck toured the world with two of his brothers in a jazz combo celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of their musical giant of a father, Dave Brubeck.
That’s the way 2020 started, and the way it will pick up again when Dan kicks off this year’s Sechelt Arts Festival with a musical homage to his dad, The Dave Brubeck Centenary Concert, on Friday, Oct. 9 at Raven’s Cry Theatre.
But just a few months into the winter, things had gone seriously sideways.
The band had played in the U.K. in early March and was about to depart for shows in Poland when that country closed its doors due to the pandemic. Other nations quickly followed suit, forcing an end to the tour. But show cancellations proved to be the least of the brothers’ problems. Dan was on his way back home and suddenly became gravely ill with COVID-19 after arriving in New York.
“It just was like, wow, I’d never felt like that in my life,” Dan told Coast Reporter from his home in Halfmoon Bay, where he’s been based for the past six years. “It’s an odd thing because you’re oxygen-deprived and you can’t really think straight, like even about how sick you are. I wound up in the hospital for two months.”
Dan, 65, was on a ventilator for 11 days. His brother, 73-year-old pianist Darius, also got the disease and fared even worse, spending three weeks on ventilation in a hospital in England. Both Dan and Darius are well along in their recovery now. Brother Chris, 68, who plays bass, was also hit by coronavirus but had a relatively minor bout of illness.
Dan said he suspects they were infected during a series of concerts at a jazz club in London. “We did two shows a night for a week. They crammed a zillion people into that place – the worst kind of COVID environment. I’m pretty sure that’s how we got it.”
It’s a different world now. The show at Raven’s Cry Theatre, Dan’s first gig since his recovery, will not be crammed, but limited to an audience of 50 people safely scattered among the venue’s hundreds of seats. That small crowd will be treated to a big evening. All the numbers will be Dave Brubeck compositions, including two of the best-known tunes in jazz, Take Five and Blue Rondo. They were on Brubeck’s breakthrough 1959 album Time Out, the first jazz recording to sell more than a million copies.
The concert also will be interwoven with video clips of the elder Brubeck taken from interviews, and from concerts as he was introducing songs, which the live band will then play. Dan – who was a teenager when he started performing professionally with his father – will be accompanied by pianist Miles Black, Adam Thomas on bass, saxophonist Steve Kaldestad and vocalist Katherine Penfold, who will bring a seldom-heard feature to the concert. The senior Brubeck is known for his instrumentals, but many of his tunes also have lyrics, written by his wife and Dan’s mother, Iola Brubeck.
Dan advises ticketholders to arrive 15 minutes before the 8 p.m. curtain to hear videotaped tributes to his father from the likes of Barrack Obama, Bill Clinton, and others in tribute to the senior Brubeck’s ahead-of-his-time social awareness.
“People don’t really realize the impact that he had on society, not only as a jazz musician but as a civil rights person,” Dan said. “In the [U.S.] south, he had to give up a whole tour after showing up somewhere where they thought he had an all-white band. Either they accepted that he was going to play with some Black musicians or they just wouldn’t play. That was a stand that not too many people were taking that early on.”
The few dozen tickets, available through the arts festival website, have sold out, but the ensemble also plans to videotape a separate performance of the set list – without the recorded Dave Brubeck inserts – that will be livestreamed later in October.
