The Brubeck Octet Project

NYC Saxophonist Jon De Lucia has spent the past 10 years working with the original parts for the Dave Brubeck Octet, a short lived group in the pianist's early career, heavily influenced by Brubeck's time studying with Darius Milhaud at Mills. In 2024, De Lucia released The Brubeck Octet Project with saxophonist Scott Robinson and an all star New York band last year to critical acclaim. For the first time in 80 years, this music is returning to Oakland for an exciting show featuring Patrick Wolff, Erik Jekabsen, Alan Ferber, Mark Ferber, Adam Shulman, John Wiitala and Will Berg.

As one of the most famous and prolific jazz musicians of the 20th century, Dave Brubeck was so well documented there would seem to be precious few unexplored corners of his career. But Brooklyn alto saxophonist Jon De Lucia, a musician drawn to overlooked musical nooks and crannies, has uncovered and refurbished the long-neglected arrangements that launched Brubeck’s career in the late 1940s as a classical-curious student studying composition at Mills College on the GI Bill. The Brubeck Octet Project takes a fresh look at the West Coast’s alternative to Miles Davis’s epochal Birth of the Cool sessions.

Before gaining fame on the college circuit with his quartet in the mid-1950s, Brubeck was an experimentally minded player drawn to Oakland’s Mills College by French composer Darius Milhaud. The Octet started as a school project first known as the Jazz Workshop Ensemble and later as The Eight, and finally as the Dave Brubeck Octet. And like Davis’s contemporaneous sessions that came to be known as Birth of the Cool, the octet’s 1946-50 recordings were first released piecemeal before Fantasy compiled the tracks on the 1956 12-inch LP Dave Brubeck Octet.

While hewing close to the original charts, De Lucia opens up the long-buried material with space for solos, essentially reconducting Brubeck’s experiments from a 21st-century perspective.

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