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Any musician who’s been in the game for any length of time has stories about extraordinary gigs they’ve played. I was sent this piece yesterday, a description by Paul Desmond of an engagement with the Dave Brubeck Quartet at the Orange County (New Jersey) State Fair.

Dave Brubeck Quartet at Newport, 1956 (via scarlatti2004)

Desmond was not only a talented musician, but widely-read and witty, as evidenced by this report. Here’s an excerpt, and you can download the full 2-page article as a PDF:

Dawn. A station wagon pulls up to the office of an obscure motel in New Jersey. Three men enter – pasty-faced, grim-eyed, silent (for those are their names). Perfect opening shot, before credits, for a really lousy bank-robbery movie? Wrong. The Dave Brubeck Quartet, some years ago, starting our day’s work.

Today we have a contract (an offer we should have refused) for two concerts at the Orange County State Fair in Middletown. 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Brubeck likes to get to the job early.

So we pull up behind this hay truck around noon, finally locating the guy who had signed the contract. Stout, red-necked, gruff and harried (from the old New Jersey law firm of the same name), and clearly more comfortable judging cattle than booking jazz groups, he peers into the station wagon, which contains four musicians, bass, drums, and assorted baggage, and for the first and only time in our seventeen years of wandering around the world, we get this question: “Where’s the piano?”

Read On…[PDF]

Another one of those painfully posed photos, but at least Dave has a piano.