Dave Becomes David

Conductors of symphony orchestras are not the only musicians complaining about hectic schedules and overwork these days. Jazz Pianist Dave Brubeck has abandoned his quartet. After 16 years spent in demonstrating that jazz can be for the mind as well as the emotions, Brubeck (TIME cover, Nov. 8, 1954) decided to cut down on performing and devote more time to composing. Last week he sat in the Wilton, Conn., glass-and-stone house that he built four years ago, tinkering with final revisions on the first fruits of his lei sure--a 63-minute oratorio, The Light in the Wilderness, an impressively imaginative step into the realm of large-scale serious composition.

Brubeck has been working on Light for the past two years in hotel rooms and airplanes during tours with the quartet. But it has only been since the quartet's last concert in Pittsburgh on Dec. 26 that he has had time to put in a full day's work on the score. Recently it was given its world premiere by a student chorus at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, under Professor Lara Hoggard, in a utility version for organ, percussion, chorus and baritone solo; its first orchestra performance is scheduled by the Cincinnati Symphony late next month.

A Bit of Turkey. Even with reduced scoring at the Chapel Hill performance, Brubeck's oratorio attested the composer's solid training as a serious musician, mostly under the eye of the French master Darius Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. In twelve extensive, complex vocal movements, it traces a series of meditations on the universality of faith, with textual fragments drawn by Brubeck and his wife lola from the Gospels and Psalms. What little jazz there is in the score is far removed from the usual Brubeck sophistication: it is a more primitive, elemental sort, blended with folk overtones (including, at one point, a bit of Turkey in the Straw), depicting the rejoicing of the people of Galilee after the Sermon on the Mount.

For the most part, the piece glows with an inner, radiant simplicity in which elements of the contemporary harmonic and rhythmic language are mingled with sureness and originality--of a different scope certainly, but at least on an equal plane, with the kind of deeply thought-out stylishness that characterized Brubeck's jazz work at its best. "I am quitting at my peak," said Brubeck of the quartet's disbandment, and Light in the Wilderness bears this out.

Brubeck is already at work on two more oratorios as well as on a number of projects "around the house," including a Broadway musical and a string quartet. From all appearances, Serious Composer David Brubeck may, indeed, be as busy in the future as Jazzman Dave was in the past.

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