Music: Subconscious Pianist

In Manhattan the word went out among the live-wire jive set: hear Brubeck. At 31, Dave Brubeck of lone, Calif, is best known on the West Coast, but his piano playing has begun to get around. To his admirers, it is not only a brand-new style, it is the handsomest stuff since the birth of bop. In one of Manhattan’s basement jazz dens last week, Brubeck and his quartet gave the East an earful.

The little band plays in quiet tones. Picking out a popular tune like All the Things You Are, Pianist Brubeck and Saxophonist Paul Desmond toss the theme back & forth for a while. Then, before long, the tune disappears and in its place, stream-of-consciousness style, come whimsical variations hinting at everything from Stravinsky to Gershwin to Bach. When he comes to his solo part, Brubeck picks a random theme and toys with it, reflectively trying it first on the white keys, then on the black, allowing traces of Mozart or John Philip Sousa to creep in. Then his eyes close, his head weaves, and the music settles into a firm idea and starts prancing up the keyboard.

Brubeck harmonies become more & more complicated, build up to a pulsing climax, then, rather unbelievably, push on past it. At the final peak Brubeck is often playing in two keys at once before he finally wrings his idea dry and the music subsides. When it is over, the jive fans look at each other in something like a daze before they burst into applause.

Dave Brubeck plays in a kind of daze of his own: he can never remember exactly what he did during his finest solos (“When I’m playing my best I never know my fingers are there”). But as a man who is conscious of his subconscious, he has decided that his best flights of fancy occur only when he can “get through” to it.

He started creating music and playing the piano at home in Concord, Calif, when he was four. Later he studied at Mills College in Oakland with Composer Darius Milhaud (who remembers him affectionately as a “good composer”), and worked at “counterpoint until it ran out of my ears.” When listeners notice his Bach-like counterpoint and his big, polytonal chords, he says, “When I play jazz I am influenced by classical music. And when I compose I am influenced by jazz.”

Like many a post-bop jazzman, Brubeck has no name for his style of playing. He just calls it “music.”