Pianist and Composer Dave Brubeck

Larry Appelbaum, Senior Music Reference Specialist with the Library of Congress, conducts a conversation with jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck.
Speaker Biography: Dave Brubeck (b. Concord, CA, 1920) is a jazz composer, pianist and bandleader. He studied composition with Darius Milhaud, worked in both octet and trio formats, and later achieved artistic and commercial success with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. In addition to his formidable prowess on piano, Brubeck helped popularize unusual time signatures with recordings such as Blue Rondo a la Turk and Take Five, and he made important contributions to the jazz repertoire with memorable composition such as The Duke, In Your Own Sweet Way, and Strange Meadowlark. Brubeck toured the world as a jazz ambassador for the U.S. Department of State in the late 1950s, and he has received commissions and written many large scale compositions since then. In 1999, Dave Brubeck was recognized as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2003 he received the Living Legend Award from the Library of Congress.