Portrait of Dave Brubeck, 8 October 1954. Carl Van Vechten. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, LC-USZ62-103725
Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck died in 2012 at the age of 91. A respected and popular jazz musician in the 1950s, his quartet released Time Out in 1959, which became the first jazz record to sell more than a million copies and took Brubeck’s appeal outside the jazz mainstream.
In 1962 he toured Australia and, before leaving the US, recorded a single-sided 7-inch record with five short ‘Messages to Australia’, to be sent to radio statons as publicity for the tour. A copy of the disc was part of a recent large donation of material to the NFSA from radio station 2TM in Tamworth. Listen to excerpts below.
While he was here he also recorded a half-hour television special for ATN-7 in Sydney. The NFSA has a Kine film copy of the program, both as a composite print and as negatives, which was telecined and supplied to Brubeck’s management in the 1990s. A copy of that television special is in the Dave Brubeck Collection at the University of the Pacific in California. Watch clips below.
