Drummer/vocalist RUBY LAKS joins Brent Madsen (trumpet), Brad Linde (baritone saxophone), and Zoe Jorgenson (bass) playing music from "Sings A Song with Mulligan" (Annie Ross with Gerry Mulligan Quartet recording)
Ruby began playing drums at age 9 and studying more seriously after moving to Los Angeles at age 11. She attended LACHSA, where she developed skills in jazz drums and classical voice. She attended Oberlin Conservatory and had the privilege of honing her skills in both jazz drums and vocals under the guidance of Billy Hart and La Tanya Hall.
Ruby’s performance experience ranges from intimate jazz clubs and private events to notable stages like Carnegie Hall, The Neuehouse Hollywood, and The Monterey Jazz Festival with the Women in Jazz Band. She’s currently based in NYC.
As one of the most famous and prolific jazz musicians of the 20th century, Dave Brubeck was so well documented there would seem to be precious few unexplored corners of his career. But Brooklyn saxophonist Jon De Lucia, a musician drawn to overlooked musical nooks and crannies, has uncovered and refurbished the long-neglected arrangements that launched Brubeck’s career in the late 1940s as a classical-curious student studying composition at Mills College on the GI Bill. The Brubeck Octet Project takes a fresh look at the West Coast’s alternative to Miles Davis’s epochal Birth of the Cool sessions.
Before gaining fame on the college circuit with his quartet in the mid-1950s, Brubeck was an experimentally minded player drawn to Oakland’s Mills College by French composer Darius Milhaud. The Octet started as a school project first known as the Jazz Workshop Ensemble and later as The Eight, and finally as the Dave Brubeck Octet. And like Davis’s contemporaneous sessions that came to be known as Birth of the Cool, the octet’s 1946-50 recordings were first released piecemeal before Fantasy compiled the tracks on the 1956 12-inch LP Dave Brubeck Octet.
Jon De Lucia - leader/arranger/tenor saxophone
Brad Linde - alto saxophone
Leigh Pilzer - baritone saxophone and clarinet
Brent Madsen - trumpet
Danny Grewen - trombone
Harry Appelman - piano
Zoë Jorgenson - bass
Deric Dickens - drums
