Category - Documentary Feature

Director - Michiel ten Kleij

Summary - "Playing the Changes shows the social impact of jazz music, by telling the story of jazz pianist Darius Brubeck (born in 1947), the eldest son of legendary jazz musician Dave Brubeck. People quite often see him as 'the son of’ but he has used this distinction with idealism. This story examines why and how jazz had a transformative role in different types of societies such as Poland and South Africa and tracks Darius Brubeck’s involvement in both. Not only by embracing it - but also carrying on his father legacy in his own social, educational and musical way. In 1983, during the apartheid-era in South Africa, he started the very first university degree in Jazz on the continent, which was open to everyone, regardless of social class or skin colour. Darius has inspired and taught countless talented musicians. Because of the programme’s success, Darius and his South African wife, Cathy, were able to create the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music, a venue where students rehearse, perform and gain exposure and where visiting international musicians play and teach. It brought people together and created hope. Darius unfolds his explanation of the meaning of the Brubeck legacy. He shows how it influenced his life and career and the lives of many others. Using archival footage and interviews, the film highlights his part in a music department that stood at the forefront of cultural opposition to apartheid, and became a flagship anticipating the ‘new’ South Africa. Darius and Cathy are on anniversary tours in South Africa as well as in Poland. In Poland the seed was planted when Dave Brubeck took his then 10-years old son Darius on the Jazz Ambassador tour, sponsored by State Department in 1958. The tour resulted in the writing and recording of the first no. 1 hit jazz album ever Time Out. War-torn Poland was a Communist satellite state for the Soviet Union and American jazz was embraced as the music of freedom. Dave exposed a very young Darius to a politically segregated country in which jazz was a relief to social oppression and a hope for a better future. This added to Darius’ view that jazz can unite people of all colour and creed. Playing the Changes is a film about what it is like to grow up as a jazz musician in a turbulent time of racial segregation in the US, political tension during the Cold War and applying these experiences to living and teaching in South Africa, in a time when it was ruled under apartheid law. Why did the unlikely hero Darius chose the path he took and how much of Dave Brubeck’s legacy is reflected in Darius’ career 100 years after Dave’s birth? And in what way can we benefit in our current days and in the future from the Brubeck legacy?"​​