Chartbuster diplomat

Early in the spring of 1958, Dave Brubeck was driven past the gate separating the communist world from the West and dropped off on a street corner in East Berlin.

Brubeck was already one of the best-known jazz musicians in the world but he felt alone and conspicuous in the Cold War city of armed soldiers and a thousand lurking spies.

His mission: to pick up tickets and visas for his quartet to travel through East Germany to Poland. He was embarking on a State Department goodwill tour that would make him the first jazz musician from the United States to perform behind the Iron Curtain.

On this leg of the journey, however, he was left to his own devices. No one from the State Department was there to help him. Call him the jazzman who was left out in the cold.

Eventually, as Brubeck tells it, a burly-looking man approached him and said: “You Mr Kulu.''
“No, I'm Mr Brubeck,'' he replied.
“You Mr Kulu,'' the man repeated.

He then pulled out a Polish newspaper and pointed to Brubeck's picture. Finally, Brubeck realised what he meant: To the Poles, he was “Mr Cool''.

This was his introduction to the strange, ill-defined world of cultural diplomacy, a little-known sidelight of international relations, when musicians and other artistes were sent abroad by the State Department and US Information Agency as emissaries of the American way.

“There is no American alive who has done more extensive and effective cultural diplomacy than Dave Brubeck,'' says Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “Dave is not only one of the greatest living American artistes, he's also one of the greatest living American diplomats.''

Statesman of jazz

Brubeck's 50-year legacy of musical statesmanship will soon be honoured with receptions, seminars and concerts all across Washington. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will present him with the first Benjamin Franklin Award, for civilian service to international cooperation.

Brubeck's legacy of cultural diplomacy will be celebrated at the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, Meridian International Centre and George Washington University. He will also lead his quartet in a concert at the Kennedy Centre, on a double bill with Ramsey Lewis.

Dave Brubeck, now 87, is the reigning statesman of jazz. He has made hundreds of recordings as a pianist and bandleader, and his 1959 record Time Out — inspired in part by the international music he heard on his State Department tour — was the first jazz instrumental album to sell a million copies. Take Five, the album's big hit, remains the bestselling instrumental jazz single of all time.

He received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1996 and, three years later, was named an NEA Jazz Master, America's highest official honour for a jazz musician. Last year, he was designated a “Living Legend of Jazz'' at a Kennedy Centre ceremony and he is on the selection committee for the Kennedy Centre Honours. Oh, and Clint Eastwood is producing a documentary about his life.

Brubeck says that whenever someone mentions retirement, he recalls the words of his good friend Duke Ellington: “Retire to what?''

Then, as he laughs, his dark brown eyes are alternately gentle, fierce and deeply wise. He has the look of the tanned, leather-faced rancher he might have become if he hadn't found music — or Iola.

They have been married for 65 years and she helped Brubeck believe in himself when no one else did. She has written lyrics for many of his songs and she sits in the wings at every one of his concerts.

“We lived in a corrugated tin one-room shack with no windows,'' Brubeck says of the hard times that lasted well into his thirties. But Brubeck kept playing his music. Little by little the whole world took notice.

Ever since his career began in San Francisco in the late 1940s, Brubeck has happily defied musical conventions. His style is catchy but never simple.

By the early 1950s, he was finding a foothold with the public and in 1954 he became the second jazz musician — Louis Armstrong was the first — to be featured on the cover of Time.

The article lauded Brubeck and his group for “some of the strangest and loveliest music ever played since jazz was born'' and described him in pseudo-hip prose as “a wigging cat with a far-out wail''.

Price of success

Soon enough, though, as his records topped the jazz charts and “West Coast jazz'' became a phenomenon in the US, there came a backlash among musicians and critics.

rubeck didn't swing, they said. His playing was too stiff, his music was too fussy or else it was too bombastic, he wasn't from New York, he made the cover of Time before Duke Ellington. He was criticised, in some circles, for painting the historically black art of jazz with the pastel shades of California and classical music.

Brubeck has been honoured for his work overseas, but he has helped open as many doors at home. In 1958, before leaving on the US State Department trip, he was scheduled to make a tour of colleges in Southern United States.

He cancelled 23 of 25 concerts when local officials refused to allow his bass player, Wright, the lone African American member of the quartet, to appear on stage with the rest of the group.

“I was aware in 1958 that we were being used in the Cold War propaganda battle,'' Brubeck has written in an unpublished autobiography, “and acutely aware of the irony that Eugene [Wright] did not enjoy all the privileges that the rest of our group did in the US.''

Thirty years later, when the Cold War was thawing, President Ronald Reagan had invited Brubeck to dinner at Spaso House, the US ambassador's residence in Moscow, during Reagan's summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. During Take Five, people noticed that even Gorbachev was drumming his fingers to the music.

It may be a bit of an exaggeration to say that a piano player helped end the Cold War but Brubeck and his music certainly didn't hurt. Ever since that first jazz journey in 1958, he understood the power of music to cross the boundaries of language, culture, politics and race.