Jon De Lucia Revives Lost Dave Brubeck Octet Charts on 'The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!'

Alto saxophonist Jon De Lucia has released The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!, a second album devoted to the little-documented Dave Brubeck Octet. The album came out Oct. 23 on Musaeum Clausum Recordings, according to De Lucia's website and streaming listings, and JazzTimes included it in its Oct. 26 roundup of top October releases.

De Lucia's first volume, The Brubeck Octet Project (2024), recreated and rearranged the octet's recorded output. Brubeck formed the group in the late 1940s while studying composition with Darius Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland, and its recordings were later collected on the 1956 Fantasy LP Dave Brubeck Octet. De Lucia's notes compare the group to the Miles Davis nonet of the Birth of the Cool sessions.

The new album goes further. According to De Lucia's notes, the octet in fact lasted until 1953 and played a number of charts that were never released, most of them lost. Through research in the Mills College and Brubeck archives, he says, he unearthed 11 more arrangements for this release. He recorded them with the same band as the first volume: trumpeter Brandon Lee, Scott Robinson on tenor saxophone, trombonist Becca Patterson, Jay Rattman on clarinet and saxophones, pianist Glenn Zaleski, bassist Daniel Duke and drummer Keith Balla.

The charts come mainly from three members of the original group. Tenor saxophonist Dave Van Kriedt, whom De Lucia credits with most of the octet's arrangements, contributes the polytonal blues "Goodnight Eileen," the Latin-tinged "Kon-Tiki" and "Fugue II," one of five fugues the notes say he wrote for the band, of which only "Fugue on Bop Themes" was ever released. Clarinetist Bill Smith is represented by an expansive "Tea for Two," "Lullaby in Rhythm" and "Stardust," a chart originally written as a feature for Paul Desmond. Its parts were incomplete, and De Lucia says he reconstructed it to feature his own alto. The album closes with bassist Jack Weeks' arrangement of "Perdido," a tune later associated with Brubeck's quartet.

De Lucia also contributes his first original for the project, "By Heart," a contrafact on "My Heart Stood Still" that uses the octet's polymeter and counterpoint. Zaleski, the notes say, knew and studied with Brubeck. The cover art comes from Arnold Roth, the illustrator behind original Brubeck album covers, who gave De Lucia permission to use his drawing of a Loch Ness monster.

De Lucia, born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1980, studied at Berklee, moved to Brooklyn in 2005 and studied with Lee Konitz. He teaches at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. His website says the Brubeck Octet Project has played Birdland and Dizzy's Club at Lincoln Center and is booking dates for fall 2026 and spring 2027.