Opinion

The legacy of jazz pianist Dave Brubeck lives on in a new prize that seeks to bridge the gap between an artist’s musical education and a recording career. Steve Harris salutes its founder

Countless are the awards and scholarships offered to young musicians in the US. But there’s now one rather special jazz prize, with a transatlantic twist.

The great jazz pianist Dave Brubeck died in 2012. In 2019, his family set up Brubeck Living Legacy as a charitable foundation supporting jazz education and ‘promoting awareness, interest and the understanding of jazz and its role in American and international culture’.

Its president is Darius Brubeck, Dave’s eldest son, also a pianist and composer. Back in 1983, he’d moved to South Africa to teach at the University of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), instituting Africa’s first degree course in jazz studies. With his wife Cathy he organised the Jazzanians, a multi-racial group that toured overseas in 1988. He now lives in England and tours with his own long-running quartet.

Talent spotting

Brubeck Living Legacy organises the annual Brubeck Jazz Summit for pre-college musicians and offers the Dave Brubeck Composer & Pianist Scholarship for collegiate level students. But now there is also the Brubeck Living Legacy Prize, awarded in association with the Royal Academy of Music. The idea for this came from the founder of the London-based Ubuntu jazz record label, Martin Hummel, who passed away in January this year.

On first meeting Hummel some years ago, says Brubeck: ‘We had a conversation about two overlapping interests. First of all, jazz and music, but also South Africa, which is the reason for the label having the name Ubuntu. It sounds like the headquarters should be in Cape Town or Johannesburg. There’s not an English word for it, but it embraces mutual respect, ethics, politeness, appreciation of other people. Martin made that not only his label but, you know, a sort of motto’.

So the Darius Brubeck Quartet’s 2019 album Live In Poland album appeared on Ubuntu. And appropriately, Ubuntu reissued the Jazzanians’ 1988 album We Have Waited Too Long in 2024.

With the BLL Prize, says Brubeck: ‘We wanted to have an international reach. And Martin’s idea kind of completes something that is just missing in the education process. Which is, okay, you’ve done everything to complete your course, and you’re a distinguished student and everyone cheers for that – and then what? The idea of having an album that the artist proposes, this is part of getting the prize. The winner has an opportunity to do a project knowing that it will be supported through the whole complex production and release chain’.

The first winner, announced in July 2024, was Dutch saxophonist and composer Kasper Rietkerk [pictured above, second from left], who had just completed his Master’s degree at the RAM. He had already recorded one album with his London sextet KRSIX but for the BLL Prize he’d proposed something quite different – a quartet with veteran guitarist John Parricelli and no piano, to be ‘very spacious and open-sounding’.

Rietkerk’s fine album The Happy Worrier came out at the end of June 2025. The artist dedicated it to Martin Hummel. Asked about the title, Rietkerk says it describes himself, maintaining a happy frame of mind while inevitably worrying about things that he can’t do anything about.

He must have had little to worry about in June, though. At home in the Netherlands he was presented with another prize, the VandenEnde Foundation’s Next Step Award of €25,000. And whatever his next steps are, he’ll be deservedly successful.