Oakland, CA–September 15, 2009. Jazz and classical pianist and composer and Mills College alumnus Dave Brubeck is among this year's recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, DC.

The award ceremony will be held on Dec. 6, which is also Brubeck’s 89th birthday, and nationally televised at the end of the year.

Other recipients include musician Bruce Springsteen, actor Robert De Niro, director Mel Brooks, and opera singer Grace Bumbry. Brubeck and the other recipients will also be invited to a reception hosted by President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama at the White House before the performance gala at the Kennedy Center, where each honoree will be saluted by their peers.

Brubeck is also the first recipient of the State Department's "Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy" and has been inducted into the California Hall of Fame.

After four years of military service in World War II, Brubeck, the young pianist from Concord, CA, came to Mills College as a graduate student in 1946 and studied with French composer Darius Milhaud, who came to Mills from Paris in 1940. Under Milhaud, Brubeck studied polytonality and polyrhythms. By 1951, he formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet, arguably one of the best-loved jazz groups, and later recorded the best-selling jazz single of all time, 1959’s “Take Five.”

In an interview with Oakland Magazine, Brubeck recalled how the group formed, initially called the Jazz Workshop Ensemble on the Mills campus, and then evolved off campus into the Dave Brubeck Octet and eventually the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

“The octet was born right in Milhaud’s class,” Brubeck said. “When he [Milhaud] said, ‘How many of you play jazz?’ We all started thinking, ‘Uh oh, is this going to be like all the other teachers in conservatories.’ But we raised our hands anyway, and he said, ‘All right, I’d like you to write for the jazz instrumentation,’ and that’s the way the octet was born. He got the first concert for us right there at Mills, for the girls. The guys all, well, I think quite a few romances and some marriages came out of that.”

Brubeck had weekly private lessons with Milhaud, who encouraged him to be a composer and hung out at his professor’s home on campus. “There were about five of us… and we all wanted to come, so we’d often meet there,” he said. “We’d listen to some of his recordings, or maybe Stravinsky—it was really nothing planned, just whatever happened.”

Brubeck also received a Doctor of Fine Arts honorary degree from Mills College in 1982 but a Mills diploma eluded him during his graduate training when he failed to hand in the final to one class.

“You couldn’t have an F in the master’s degree program,” Brubeck said in his Oakland Magazine interview. “When Milhaud heard about it, he said, ‘Well, if you have to leave, just come to me once a week; I won’t charge you, and you can study with me.’ So that’s the way that went, off and on up until 1949.”

Brubeck has released more than 100 albums, including last year's "50 Years of Dave Brubeck: Live At The Monterey Jazz Festival, 1958-2007" and his most popular album "Time Out," which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Brubeck continues to tour as part of the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California, Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering a dynamic progressive education that fosters leadership, social responsibility, and creativity to approximately 950 undergraduate women and 500 graduate women and men. Since 2000, applications to Mills College have more than doubled. The College is named one of the top colleges in the West by U.S. News & World Report, and ranks as one of the Best 371 Colleges by the Princeton Review. Forbes.com ranked Mills 55th among America's best colleges and named it a "Top Ten: Best of the All-Women's Colleges." Visit us at www.mills.edu.

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