After his eye surgery a few weeks earlier, said Dave Brubeck, he complimented his wife: "It's wonderful that you're putting on your lips again." The answer baffled him.
"I always put on red," replied Iola Brubeck, "you just couldn't see it anymore." Brubeck beamed: "Now the colors are back!", He will enjoy his European tour even more than any previous one.
The jazz musician told this in a hotel in Milan, shortly before his 80th birthday on December 6, 2000. Before the interview, Brubeck had invited me to breakfast with his wife.
He was my idol, I happily told the still young-looking man how I heard him on the radio at AFN and Voice of America in the 1950s as a schoolboy in East Berlin.
At that time Brubeck went on tours to Poland and the Soviet Union.
At a time when jazz musicians thrilled the masses like rock and pop stars do today, his performances were of huge importance to young people.
"The Russian fans all sounded like Willis Connover when they spoke English," recalled Brubeck with a smile.
Connover moderated the jazz programs of the "Voice of America".
Jazz ambassadors in the Cold War
During the Cold War, Brubeck was a "weapon" in the cultural competition between systems.
The Communist USSR sent the Bolshoi Ballet to America;
the capitalist United States countered with jazz greats.
The US State Department financed guest performances by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in countries of the Eastern Bloc and the Third World.
Jazz promoters for America!
What the musicians meant as ambassadors for their country, a cartoon in 1958 in the magazine "New Yorker" summed up.
At a meeting in the White House about an "extremely delicate mission" one participant asks, "Should we send John Foster Dulles or Satchmo?" Dulles was Secretary of State, Satchmo the nickname of star trumpeter Louis Armstrong.
Brubeck, however, saw the inconsistency of the PR offensive using jazz.
The US bands, made up of white and black musicians, gave the world a picture of harmony, while racial segregation still prevailed in the American southern states.
A subject of the satirical musical "The Real Ambassadors", which Brubeck wrote together with his wife.
Racial segregation was not acceptable to him.
Whenever the promoter or TV station asked him to replace his black bassist Eugene Wright, the concerts were canceled.
And jazz musicians used their assignments abroad to apply pressure at home.
In 1957, for example, Louis Armstrong refused to travel to the Soviet Union when black children in Little Rock, Arkansas were refused entry to school.
As a GI in Germany
At the meeting in Milan, Brubeck reported on his first stay in Germany.
In 1945 he was stationed as a soldier in Nuremberg.
“We were rehearsing in a factory with an army band.
Although fraternization was forbidden at the time, I made friends with a German.
His name was Hans Hermann Flüger, he was just 19 years old and had lost a leg on the Eastern Front.
He hobbled for miles on his crutches to hear our music.
That touched me very much. "
Brubeck had to interrupt his composition studies in California in 1943 because of his conscription and temporarily led a military orchestra in Europe.
After serving in the army, he returned to university and, while still a student, founded an avant-garde octet that fused classical forms of music and jazz.
The son of a cattle farmer, born exactly 100 years ago, had piano lessons from his mother at the age of four.
The young Brubeck preferred to improvise rather than play what was prescribed by sight.
"He was a loner who followed his own unconventional path," said his teacher Darius Milhaud (1892-1974);
the French composer emigrated to the USA during World War II.
Brubeck found his audience after founding a quartet with the alto saxophonist Paul Desmond.
Light, lyrical and floating, Desmond's style of playing formed a delightful contrast to Brubeck's bombastic piano chords.
Accompanied by bass and drums, the two improvised contrapuntal over extended harmonies and unusual time signature, from the waltz to their surprise hit "Take Five".
The quartet recorded the piece in five-quarter time with the bulky rhythm and the distinctive melody composed by Desmond as early as 1959.
"Take Five" only became a huge success two years later - and is considered the best-selling jazz single of all time.
"Dave, you're on the 'Time' cover"
"When Dave is at his best," said Paul Desmond, "his game becomes an experience that moves hearts and minds alike." The two moved a generation of students.
Her quartet traveled tirelessly from college to college.
Recordings of concerts appeared on the album "Jazz Goes To College" in 1954, after which the magazine "Time" put Brubeck
on the front page
as
"the most exciting new jazz artist"
(as the second jazz musician after Louis Armstrong five years earlier).
The news of the "Time" title reached Brubeck on November 4th in San Francisco during a tour in which Duke Ellington and his orchestra also took part.
"In the morning at seven o'clock there was a knock on the door of my hotel room," Brubeck is quoted in the book "Jazz" by Ken Burns.
"Ellington stood in front of me and said: Dave, you are on the cover of 'Time'." Brubeck's reaction: "It should have been you." Brubeck admired Ellington as America's most important composer and dedicated his composition "The Duke" to him.
After Brubeck's breakthrough in America, his band traveled the world permanently.
Brubeck reported on a trip to Poland in the SPIEGEL interview: In 1958 he came with his quartet, his wife and sons Darius and Michael from Scandinavia to Berlin, which was not yet divided by the Wall.
He obtained transit visas for the GDR and the tour to Poland.
Then he got on a train with his entourage - but to Frankfurt am Main instead of Frankfurt an der Oder.
Fellow travelers explained the error to the confused Americans.
They left the train head over heels and finally found the right connection.
Confused Polish border guards: "Who is Mr Cool?"
At the Polish border, Brubeck experienced another problem.
The border guards who were probably not jazz-savvy were expecting a "Mr Cool" (a Warsaw newspaper had announced Brubeck in a large photo).
And had to realize first that his name wasn't really "Mr Cool" but Dave Brubeck.
Nevertheless, the American pianist was well known in Poland.
After years underground, jazz was officially condoned under the Gomulka government.
Twelve concerts were an unforgettable experience for Brubeck's quartet.
The band felt that the audience's enthusiasm was not just about the music.
The Poles also celebrated the Americans as guests from a freer world.
Miles Davis found critical words.
In his autobiography, he accused Brubeck and other white colleagues of only smoothing out the blacks' music and then earning far more than the authors.
"Good old Miles," Brubeck mused about the superstar who had died three years earlier;
Davis said "this today and that tomorrow - also about himself."
But he sees "of course the dominant role of Afro-Americans in the history of jazz."
Brubeck: "I myself have always understood jazz as a call for freedom."
After the meeting in Milan, Dave Brubeck performed publicly for a good decade, until shortly before his death on December 5, 2012. He described himself as a “composer who plays the piano” and called jazz “the only art form that exists today, in which the individual is free without losing group contact «.
Icon: The mirror