The Power of Music

Written by Dave Brubeck, pianist

Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood asked us to play at a Veterans Hospital, in a ward with sever catatonic patients who didn’t move from a position that they were sitting in for days…What they wanted to determine, Huxley and Isherwood, was whether live musicians playing for them make more of a different than canned music…Shortly after we started playing, the doctors got very excited because people were tapping their feet to the beat…Then all of a sudden one guy got up and took the trumpet out of our trumpet player’s mouth and started playing and obviously he had never played before but for some reason he was making some kind of rhythmic sense…Well, you should have seen the joy of these doctors when this happened because this is someone who had shown no interest in anything and had responded to nothing…They recorded our performance and then came back and played the recording to the exact people in the same room at a later date and there was no response.

I’ve always said that the audience was the fifth member of my quartet