I went to a Dave Brubeck Quartet concert at the
Festival Hall in Brisbane in 1963, when I was a seventeen year-old first-year student
at the University of Queensland.
I went with some senior students, all members of the College Rowing Eight, for which I was the coxswain. (They took me along to their parties, dinners and pub crawls as a kind of talisman.)
The Brisbane Festival Hall has long since been demolished and replaced by a classy international hotel, but in 1963 it was the venue for championship boxing and concerts by touring international musicians.
Even after 54 years, I can still remember the concert vividly:
Dave playing the piano (and with our heads) with unbelievable time-signatures like 5/4.
Dave playing the piano (and with our heads) with unbelievable time-signatures like 5/4.
Gene
Wright playing extended, sinoatrial-node-commandeering drum solos.
Joe Morello, on bass, cool
as a blue cocktail.
And
Paul Desmond blowing liquid gold that spilled across the Festival Hall stage
and flowed over the audience like a haar.
My only other experience of listening to the music they play in heaven was when I was working in San Francisco in the early 1980s.
My route to UCSF Medical Center took me past a defunct movie theatre. On the pavement outside the old building a small blackboard displayed a sign written in chalk: "APPEARING TONIGHT: STAN GETZ."
Of course I was there.
Stan sat on a stool on the flat, unpolished wooden floor. I suppose there may have been a couple of other backing musicians, but I don't recall.
There was a makeshift bar off to one side.
The
audience comprised maybe 20 to 30 guys drinking Anchor Steam Beer, sitting on kitchen chairs arranged in an
arc in front of the great man.
In between sips of whiskey and draws on his cigarette,
Stan played, watching us.
Simply, overwhelmingly, viscerally, beautiful music.
Beautiful like the beauty of the Pieta in St
Peters.
The beauty of his music lives on.
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