TWO years ago, music maestro and academic, Professor Darius Brubeck, was fighting for his life after he was infected with Covid-19.
Medics gave the jazz pianist a “fifty-fifty” chance of survival.
After a 25-day stay in the intensive care unit at an English hospital, months of treatment and rehabilitation, the son of American jazz legend, Dave Brubeck, has since got his groove back.
“It was a learning experience. It was frightening. It’s like you’re looking over the edge,” Brubeck said about his near death experience.
On June 26, 2021, he played in his first concert and already has a growing list of gigs lined up for the coming months.
Brubeck, 74, and his wife Catherine are now eagerly awaiting the publication of the memoir they penned together, which unpacks their nearly 25-years of living in Durban, where Darius worked at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
UKZN’s first Jazz degree was pioneered by Brubeck in 1983, where he headed their Centre for Jazz and Popular Music.
The couple went the extra mile to help especially aspiring black musicians who were constrained by apartheid policies.
At times, the couple provided for and even housed students in their own home.
The couple’s jazz project received the blessings of the then banned ANC and Brubeck said its impact on UKZN was huge in terms of changing mindsets, bringing people together and identifying with the ANC’s liberation struggle.
There’s also a movie in the pipeline that encapsulates Brubeck and Catherine’s time in the country, which is being produced by an US-filmmaker.
The movie and their book are both titled “Playing the Changes”.
“It’s a play on words, as jazz musicians do.
“The big names like Miriam Makeba, Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela, were all politically inclined and their careers were mainly overseas. So, bringing jazz into the university was playing the changes in both senses of the words,” he explained.
Brubeck said the book referenced a cohort of UKZN jazz students which included Zim Ngqawana, Melvin Peters, Natalie Rungan, Victor Masondo and Concord Nkabinde.
“These are local people who we took overseas to international jazz conferences where they got great exposure.
“In 1988 we took a group of the best musicians on campus to a jazz education conference in Detroit. They were called The Jazzanians. It was the first multi-racial university band from South Africa to go overseas.”
For Brubeck and Catherine, the book was a personal memoir of the people, places and journeys they took with students.
He named his long-time friend, Professor Chris Ballantine, who also hired him at UKZN in the 1980’s, and his mother Iola as the people who encouraged them to write the book.
“My mother always told me that we were in South Africa at such an important time and that we had our own experiences. Therefore, we had to write a book about what we witnessed.”
2020 was meant to be a landmark year for his family as it was the centenary of Dave’s birth, but the Covid-19 pandemic muted much of the planned celebration events, including international concerts.
Brubeck and his brothers’ (Dan, Chris and Matt) programme, which was planned in advance, started hitting the right notes in January 2020.
They were in New Orleans for the Jazz Education Network conference and launched the Brubeck Living Legacy, a charity initiative, which also provides scholarships.
In the same month, they unveiled The Brubeck Collection, which comprises items like musical recordings, legal and business documents and pictures dating back to the middle of the 20th century.
“My mum was good at keeping everything. She was a lyricist for some of my father’s tunes and she kept the family going when he was away on long road trips. She deserves lots of credit.
“We looked to honour both our parents.”
Brubeck remembered that people were talking about Covid-19 “as something in China” and media reports about the disease began increasing.
He continued performing with his brothers and in March that year they played in seven “sold-out” concerts at popular jazz club, Ronnie Scotts in London, with no masks or restrictions.
“The place had no ventilation, half the people were from London, and the others from around the world; all of us got exposed to it.”
They had planned to travel to Poland next, but began to feel “bad”, besides, Poland was on lockdown.
“My brothers went back to their homes in New York. Dan the drummer was quite sick”.
Brubeck returned home to Rye, East Sussex, and got sicker. Catherine called the emergency services.
“I was so out of my head on March 16, 2020. The paramedics were polite and nice. They were masked men wearing space suits, I felt like I was being kidnapped.
“From then on it was crazy for a while.”
He was intubated and received “very powerful drugs”.
“With those drugs in your system and you are running a high fever, you are in unfamiliar circumstances and you become disorientated.
“My greatest fear was not dying but going mad.”
When the feeling of death came over him, he remembered a line from his brother Chris’ composition about the biblical character, Mary Magdalene.
“I kept remembering the line, ‘love is stronger than death’, that was a tonic for living.”
He said the nurses were “fantastic”.
“I was taking trips to India and New York in my mind and they kept notes on what they observed.
“I wrote a version of my hallucinatory life and I was able to track it against what they wrote. It was like an obsession with me, which was part of my recovery. I didn't want to pass through something that traumatic and forget about it.”
Brubeck said it was impossible to express how much the support of Catherine, close family members and many others had helped his recovery.
“I believe their love and good wishes made the difference.”
Darius Brubeck’s father, Dave, was seminal musical influence
It was inevitable that Darius Brubeck would develop a deep fondness for jazz music given his father Dave’s influence from an early age.
Dave was an acclaimed jazz pianist whose biggest hit, Take Five, was regarded as the biggest jazz single of all time. He died in 2012.
Brubeck Jnr, remembered going on tour with his UK-based group (The Darius Brubeck Quartet) to Poland in 2018.
“That was the 60th anniversary of the 1958 tour of Poland that the Dave Brubeck Quartet went on. It was the first time that an American modern jazz group went behind the Iron Curtain,” said Brubeck.
He was 10 years’ old at the time. “My father wanted me to see the world, different nations and what they were like.”
He said Dave’s influence shaped his music development. “My father’s mother was a classical piano teacher. She taught my two uncles and dad. They all grew up on a cattle ranch in the early 1900s.”
Brubeck said they herded cattle during the day and practised Mozart at night. His grandfather thought he should remain on the ranch and take over, but Dave went to university.
When World War ll erupted, Brubeck said his father joined the army as a musician, and ended up leading army bands in Europe.
“In our family’s early days we didn’t have much money, but my father had a record player and liked playing classical and jazz music.”
It took many years before Dave became an international star and he played at various venues like concert halls and restaurants to earn a living.
Darius said: “I was surrounded by music but not formally taught. Having those records was a big influence on me.”
He said he and his brothers aimed to continue their father’s legacy. Therefore, much planning went into the centenary celebrations of 2020.
Among their plans was a concert at the Royal Albert Hall and they were going to use the London Symphony Orchestra, until Covid-19 struck.
SUNDAY TRIBUNE