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For reasons that aren’t completely clear, Clark mostly separates Brubeck’s musical history from his early family history, saving the latter for the last quarter of the book. But the family history is actually an important background to the music. Brubeck’s mother, Elizabeth, was highly cultured. She had been tutored by composer Henry Cowell and at one point moved to London — her three young kids staying at home in California with her husband — to study with the great pianists Myra Hess and Tobias Matthay. (Brubeck’s father, Pete, by contrast, was a rancher and wanted his sons to follow in his footsteps, the source of some tension in the family.) Elizabeth gave him piano lessons at an early age, and taught him how to harmonize Bach chorales. Though Brubeck was influenced first and foremost by the jazz stars of his youth — Benny Goodman, Art Tatum, and Fats Waller — all this classical training made Brubeck’s approach to composition and playing unique among jazz musicians.
In fact, the voracious Brubeck’s musical consumption extended even further. One set of recordings he listened to avidly while growing up was The Belgian Congo Records of the Denis-Roosevelt Expedition, a collection of ritualistic dances, songs, and chants assembled in the 1930s. There’s no doubt that these recordings influenced Brubeck’s radical (by Western standards) approach to rhythm, certainly his most enduring legacy. But the figure who exerted the greatest overt influence on him was the French avant-garde composer Darius Milhaud, whom Brubeck studied with at Mills College. Significantly, Milhaud was very taken with American jazz, having enthusiastically visited Harlem jazz clubs and collected records from the Harlem-based Black Swan label. But Milhaud was also a proponent of polytonality, which entailed playing in two or more keys simultaneously, a nearly heretical idea in classical music in the early 20th century, and more heretical still in jazz. Polytonality would be one of the identifying features of Brubeck’s music from the beginning. His early piece “Curtain Music,” for example, opens with Brubeck playing an A major chord with his right hand and a G major with his left.
full: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dave-brubeck-unsquared-on-philip-clarks-new-biography/
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