Funny thing happened on the way here tonight. Come to think of it a great number of things happened on the way here tonight. Thirty years or so full of things - some funny, some not so funny, some boring, some terrifying. You could start, and it's certainly as good a place as any, the afternoon I first met Dave Brubeck.

It was early in 1944. I was in an army band in San Francisco; he was on his way overseas as a rifleman. Although as is his custom, he soon ended up with his own band, touring Germany with the Rockettes and ultimately sleeping in Herman Goering's bed. (Goering, I hasten to add, was not actually present at the time.)

That afternoon, though, he was straight off the ranch: hawk-faced, suspicious and quick-moving, engulfed in a fleece-lined purple jacket. We got together with a few other musicians and played for about half an hour. "Rosetta," I think it was in the key of F major.

During that period (am I sounding too much like Dr. Watson? I must have another look at the contract) the closest Dave got to F major was an occasional reluctant B chord.

"Wild," I said as we disbanded. "BAD changes, baby, like tote wigsville." (Or whatever they said in those days.)

"White man," replied Dave stonily, "speak with forked tongue." And he left.

After the war, Dave and I would occasionally find ourselves together with some small group, usually in a hopelessly doomed situation - filing in for another band on a Monday night, or playing for the wedding of a friend of a friend. We were still far too radical for anything in the nature of a steady job. I was mostly screeching away at the top of the alto and Dave appeared to be playing Bartok with his right hand and Milhaud with his left. Together we could empty any club in half an hour with no mention of the word "fire". For months we worked weekends at a college hangout near Stanford, along with a girl singer named Francis Lynne. As I remember, we each got $12.50 a night (as the leader of record, I got to pay for the gas.)

Ultimately, things began happening at a sort of glacial pace. A local disc jockey, jazz promoter and saint named Jimmy Lyons took an interest in the group. Dave organized the Octet, composed mainly of fellow graduate students from Mills College. Jimmy Lyons put together a radio show with the rhythm section of the Octet - Cal Tjader on drums and vibes. Ron Crotty on bass. Gradually Dave began to play more lyrically and I stopped screeching.

Finally, in the spring of 1951 (which I suppose makes this roughly our 25th anniversary), we opened at the Blackhawk with a quartet. (An official assist for all was provided by the wartime entertainment tax, which mysteriously decreed that groups which sang, qualified as entertainment, thereby subjecting the audience to a 20% entertainment tax. Instrumental groups were regarded as background music and were therefore tax-free. Anyone who had ever heard me and Dave sing in earlier groups would, I'm sure, gladly have paid upwards of 50% to avoid that privilege; as it turned out, the 20% break was just enough to make us marginally employable, which at that point was critical.)

And so, many years and innumerable rhythm sections later, we were joined by Joe Morello and Eugene Wright, Which with a little bit of luck is the group you'll be seeing tonight. For your listening and non-vocal pleasure.

As mentioned earlier, the years have been crammed with more than enough things - funny and otherwise - to fill a fair-sized book. (Which, if you can hang about for another year or so, I will have finished.)

Oh. For the technically minded among you, and as a way of saving everyone involved a bit of time and repetition, here are some answers to questions we sometimes get asked.

Dave plays a Baldwin piano when it's available, which it usually is (although there have been times when we'd arrive at a concert and the promoter would peer nervously into the back of the station wagon and ask where our piano was.)

Joe plays Ludwig drums with sticks named after him, and if you send a dollar to the William F. Ludwig company, along with a young drum student, they might send you a set. But don't ever expect to see the drum student again.

I play a Selmer alto and a Gregory 4A-18M mouthpiece, both circa 1951, and Ricco 3 1\2 reeds.

Gene has several basses, and if he risks bringing his favourite one on the road this time, it's beautiful, was made in Europe, is older than water, and don't even ask how much it's worth.

So there, in ridiculously abbreviated fashion, is part of our story. Thanks for coming by, and we hope what you hear tonight is more or less what you wanted to.

And who knows, maybe something funny will happen on the way home.

January, 1976

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