Paul Desmond: We were sort of fairy-taleing it: Video

photo Breitenfeld Family Collection

Paul Desmond

*

“Paul can now crawl very fast and yesterday crawled from the living through the dining room, kitchen and hall, but usually of course we don’t like him to be on the floor except on a blanket or in his coop…He doesn’t care much for the coop, and instead of playing in it he pulls himself up at the rail and complains bitterly against being left alone.”

– Desmond’s father Emil

photo Breitenfeld Family Collection

Desmond’s parents, Emil and Shirley Britenfeld, 1933

*

“By the time Paul was eight, his mother was so bad that, for some reason we never figured out, his father Emil, whom Paul adored, decided that he really had to be out of the house because Mom was too ill.  I was never told anything persuasive about why Emil called his three siblings in New York to say, ‘I have to send Paul to you while I get this woman treated.”

– Desmond’s cousin Rick Breitenfeld

photo Breitenfeld Family Collection

Desmond, age 12 or 13

*

“I am getting along swell in music.  I think I stand a slight chance of (being) put in a higher class.  I have the same books I had with you, Singing and Playing and The 1st Melody Book.  I got several extra pieces, also.  When you get 10 stars you get a prize, and I have about 14 of them, but the music teacher forgot to get the prize.”

– Desmond, in a letter to his father

photo Breitenfeld Family Collection

Desmond in the Polytechnic High School Band

*

” [When Desmond entered San Francisco’s Polytechnic High]…writing was still on his mind.  He would pursue it at Polytech, but he was surrounded by and fascinated with music.  His active musical existence was narrowly concentrated in piano and clarinet lessons, but the harmonic knowledge he had acquired by osmosis during his first eight years in Emil Breitenfeld’s house inhabited his mind and spirit.”

– Doug Ramsey

photo Breitenfeld Family Collection

“The two people who hugely influenced the way Paul ended up playing were Lester Young – -for his soft palette, so to speak — and Artie Shaw, for his lyricism.”

– Childhood friend Hal Strack

_____

“Just You, Just Me”, by Lester Young

“My Blue Heaven”

, by Artie Shaw

photo Breitenfeld Family Collection

Desmond and wife Duane, 1946

*

“I don’t remember a big deal of getting engaged.  We were sort of fairy-taleing it.  He loved love stories.  He loved love, as such, and I think marriage fit whatever criteria, or most of the criteria, he had.  He gave me a ring.  It isn’t like I was pregnant.  I was still a virgin.  Yeah…He was my first.”

– Duane Lamon

photo Brubeck Institute

The Dave Brubeck Octet at the Blackhawk, San Francisco, 1950

*

“[Darius] Milhaud liked our music…He loved Kriedt’s ‘“Fugue on Bop Themes”‘  He said it was a wonderful example of a real fugue, written in a jazz style.  He was as strict as could be about counterpoint.  You had to follow his rules, which were Bach’s rules.”

– Dave Brubeck

_____

“Love Walked In” , by the Dave Brubeck Octet

photo Francis Lynne and John Coppola Collection

Norman Bates, Desmond, Brubeck and Francis Lynne at the Band Box, 1949

*

“‘Paul considered himself a terrific driver,’” Brubeck once told me. ‘He had calculated that the traffic lights on a stretch of road down the peninsula to Palo Alto were timed for 45 miles an hour. Using perfect logic, he figured out that if you could make all the lights at 45, you could make them at 90 and leave later for the gig. Every time we drove down there, I thought there was a good chance I was going to die.”