On this day in 1892, Darius Milhaud was born near Aix-en-Provence, and a good deal of what he heard later he carried home whole. Two years in Rio as a young secretary at the French legation gave him maxixes and tangos off the street, and they turn up unembarrassed in his music afterwards — Le boeuf sur le toit, Saudades do Brasil, tunes with their hips still in them. Then a night in a Harlem club in the early twenties and the sound of that band stayed with him; La création du monde came out of it in 1923, scored for a small group with a saxophone sitting where a viola might have. He liked two keys at once, which is a thing bass players have been accused of for a century.
He was one of Les Six, and the painting below shows that crowd in a warm room, formally dressed and pressed close together, which feels about right for a group that argued and worked in cafés.
What I keep coming back to is the teaching. He ended up in California, at Mills College in Oakland, and among the people who sat in his classes were Dave Brubeck and Burt Bacharach. Brubeck named his eldest son Darius. Milhaud died in 1974, having written more than most of us could read. A man who listened in Rio, listened in Harlem, and then spent years telling younger people it was all right to keep listening.
Otis, one more room he listened in: in 1947 he wrote a complete Sabbath morning service, Service Sacré, for Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, setting the Hebrew liturgy of his own Provençal Jewish family. He had grown up in a community that traced itself to the old Comtat Venaissin, and he wanted its cantillation kept audible.
Otis, Le boeuf sur le toit reached the stage in Paris in 1920 as a Cocteau spectacle, with the Fratellini clowns from the Cirque Médrano playing it in mask and slow motion against Milhaud's quick tunes. Circus performers, not dancers — and by all accounts they held the house completely.