Playing the Changes by Darius Brubeck

Author:Darius Brubeck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music / Genres & Styles / Jazz
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2024-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Darius

Marc Duby

Marc talks like this in real life. Sometimes you need to pause for a moment, then when you get it, you realise how much deep thought is compressed into one sentence. ‘Cliché after cliché is what you’ll get from me,’ he adds cheerfully before moving on.7 He bears a passing resemblance to the British actor-musician Hugh Laurie and has a similarly polished and charming manner that conveys self-confidence seasoned with self-deprecating irony. We go back a long way, having met shortly before I was hired at UND, but it is best to start in the present.

Marc, with the title of Professor Extraordinarius of Musicology at UNISA, has been a senior academic, heading music departments and programmes at (in reverse order) UNISA, Tshwane University of Technology and Rhodes University for the last ten years. He has supervised graduate students from several countries and has published articles on subjects ranging from Malcolm Lowry and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to the glory days of the Rainbow.8 And yet, as he said in a recent interview, ‘the purpose of my life was always wound up with jazz’.

We first connected in 1982 (the year before I was appointed to UND) as jazz musicians in Cape Town and performed at the People’s Space Theatre. He felt then he was drifting, gigging at night while holding down a day job at Ragtime Records, a high-end record store. He claims that he moved to Durban ‘without expectations’, but I had enough for both of us, anticipating working together as musicians and how much it would help the overall mission if Marc got a foot on the academic ladder in the new field (in South Africa) of Jazz Studies. Given the busy jazz scene in Durban, he had nothing to lose by enrolling at the university for a Master’s degree. Marc has kindly acknowledged the role I played in his life, referring to me as a mentor and father-figure and his excitement at playing with, as he humorously put it, ‘a real American jazz musician’. I humbly accept all of this because he says so, but ours was a highly symbiotic relationship, where both sides benefited. It was a bit of a stretch for the Music Department to take on a graduate student in jazz and appoint me as his supervisor since I only had an Honours degree in Ethnomusicology and History of Religion from Wesleyan University, but it was a soundly practical decision that gave Marc a small stipend and access to everything on campus, and the department gained a top-class part-time teacher.

Victor Masondo recalls my arranging for Marc to tutor him in music theory for admission to the university: ‘Bra Sandy told me to talk to Darius about study at university and Darius was very encouraging, but said I had to know theory’.9 The minimal standard was Royal Schools Grade 5. Passing the grades meant sitting an exam administered by or on behalf of Royal Schools (ABRSM). I didn’t believe that anyone with real musical ability should be

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