US pianist Dave Brubeck pretends to play piano on July 14, 1982 during the 9th Jazz Festival in Nice, France (AFP Photo/Ralph Gatti)
By Patrick Baertjun 14, 2014
Rennes (France) (AFP) - Right after the D-Day landings, their fathers' paths crossed in the war-torn villages of northern France, one a US jazz musician turned soldier, the other a French teenager.
Now the sons of jazz icon Dave Brubeck and a Normandy doctor have come together to write a transatlantic symphony as the world remembers the 70th anniversary of the Allied operation that changed the course of World War II.
"Brothers in Arts -- Hommage a Nos Peres", or homage to our fathers, is a symphony written by Chris Brubeck, a composer and jazzman himself, and the musician Guillaume Saint-James, which opens in France in June before moving to the US later this year.
It was a chance meeting in Rennes, in France's northwest Brittany region, in 2012 that saw the two decide to write a symphony about the lives of their fathers and the music they both loved.
Brubeck, one of the greatest jazz innovators of the 1950s who hit the big time in 1959 with his album "Time Out", featuring the classic "Take Five", arrived in Normandy in the summer of 1944, in the weeks after the Allied landings.
Then aged 24, his unit had moved onto Metz in northeastern France where one night he was called on to help out three singers in need of a pianist in an impromptu show.
Spotted by his general, Brubeck was tasked with creating a jazz band to raise the troops' spirits and introduce the local population in newly-liberated villages to this American genre still new in Europe and definitely exotic in the countryside.
read more: http://news.yahoo.com/sons-brubeck-french-doctor-write-d-day-symphony-183557247.html
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