It’s past midnight in The Netherlands. Dave Brubeck has just walked offstage at North Sea Jazz, — still warm from the concert, two more shows planned tomorrow — and he’s giving an interview already.
He doesn’t look tired. He says he isn’t. But there’s something in the way he says it — “I wish I could be tired, because I could sleep two hours now” — that tells you everything about the life of a working musician at the top of his game. You don’t sleep after a concert. You just keep moving.
What follows is one of those rare conversations where a great artist just talks. About sleep, about God, about what it feels like to walk onto a stage and touch a piano for the first time in front of a full house. About criticism, about creativity, about writing a Catholic mass on hotel notepads before 1980 arrives.
It starts with a small story about cameras.
The First 15 Minutes His Manager Banned
Before the interview began, the journalist mentioned something. Brubeck’s manager had quietly asked the TV crew to hold off filming for the opening stretch of the concert — the first 15, maybe 20 minutes. Could Brubeck explain why?
He hadn’t known his manager had said it.
His reaction wasn’t irritation. It was something closer to quiet admiration. “That makes a good manager,” he said.
Because here’s what most people watching from the audience never see: Brubeck walked onto that stage without ever having touched the piano. No soundcheck. No warm-up. Just a cold instrument in a strange room in front of a full house.
And every piano is different.
“Some pianos shift when you pedal and some don’t,” he said. “My whole concentration is finding out about the piano. That’s the first thing.”
The acoustics are different every night. The lights affect your concentration. The microphones change what you hear. Everything is hitting you at once, and you’re processing all of it in real time — through your fingers, your ears, your eyes.
“Everything affects his senses,” Brubeck said of his manager’s instinct to protect that opening window. “The less things thrown at you at first, the better.”
He would never have asked for it himself. But he was glad someone was thinking about it.
It’s a small story. But it opens a door into something most concert audiences never think about — the invisible work happening on that stage before the music finds its footing.
Nice Tomorrow. Munich After That.
The interview was recorded after a late concert in 1979. Brubeck had flown in that day. Two more concerts were scheduled in Nice the next day. Then Munich. Then England.
He wasn’t complaining. This was simply the shape of his life.
“You have to get used to working without sleep,” he said. Not as a boast — more as a plain fact, the kind of thing you say when you’ve long since made your peace with it.
For someone watching from the outside, the schedule sounds punishing. For Brubeck, it was just Tuesday.
Brubeck On God, Creativity, and the Imitation of Something Bigger
The interviewer tried a harder question. Could Brubeck explain the philosophy of jazz?
He deflected gently. “Most things that are said about any of the Arts can’t be true,” he said. But he offered something in its place — an idea that clearly meant something to him.
“God is very creative. And man often likes to imitate God. So art is creative — the imitation of the great Creator.”
Was he a religious man?
“Who isn’t?” he said. “If you’re not religious, you’re religious. You have some belief — nothing or something. But you have a belief. I think that’s a religion.”
It’s not a complicated theology. But it’s a genuine one. And coming from a man who was, at that very moment, finishing a mass for the Catholic Church — due in time to welcome the decade of the 1980s — it wasn’t abstract. It was the work on his desk.
Brubeck’s Catholic Mass, the Cantata, the Ballets
The scope of what Brubeck was carrying at this moment is worth pausing on.
He was finishing a mass for the Catholic Church, commissioned to mark the arrival of 1980. He had recently completed an Easter cantata for the Lutheran Church. A Christmas cantata — a Mexican Christmas cantata — had just been recorded by CBS and would be released the following December. Two new ballets were in progress.
All of this, while flying between Nice and Munich and England, playing concerts on cold pianos in strange rooms, giving late-night interviews to journalists who wanted to know the philosophy of jazz.
“Very busy,” he said, with what sounds like understatement.
On Happiness, and Problems
Was he a happy man?
“Sometimes,” he said. “Depends.”
He wasn’t being evasive. He meant it as a simple truth. “No one’s totally happy. Life has problems for everyone. And anyone that doesn’t have problems isn’t involved with somebody else — and you must be involved. You can’t just totally be yourself.”
The world bothered him, he said. But that was correct. “You’d like to make it better. I think all of us would.”
It’s the answer of someone who has thought about these things without needing to perform the thinking.
Dave Brubeck On Criticism, Statues & Bernstein
Late in the interview, the journalist asked what Brubeck made of the criticism his music had attracted over the years.
He smiled.
“What did it do to Beethoven? What did it do to Bernstein? What did it do to Ellington, Kenton? You just know you’re in good company.”
Then he quoted Bernstein directly — a line that has clearly stayed with him: “I never seen a statue to a critic.”
Bernstein, he said, had traveled the world looking. Never found one.
For young musicians coming up, facing the same gauntlet, Brubeck’s advice was simple and unsentimental: “It’s a tough life. You’ve got to stick your neck on the block every day, and there’s a lot of people who want to chop it off. It’s a great life — if you don’t weaken.”
After the Interview
The journalist wrapped up. Thanked him. Brubeck thanked the audience — “beautiful audience, lovely audience, that’s what you want” — and that was that.
Tomorrow, Nice. The day after, Munich. Then England.
The piano in the next city would be different. He’d find out about it in the first fifteen minutes.
The cameras could wait.
Looking for more? Check out our pick of the greatest Dave Brubeck albums here.