Dave and Iola Brubeck were invited to be part of the Regional Oral History Office's music series in 1999. The idea was to focus on Brubeck as a composer and to interview Dave and Iola jointly, since she has not only been involved in every aspect of his life during their sixty-plus-year marriage, but has served as librettist for several of the large works Dave has composed since the 1960s. Brubeck is a living legend as a jazz musician, less known as a composer who spent several years studying with Darius Milhaud at Mills College in the 1940s. Milhaud was passionate about jazz and nurtured Brubeck's explorations in polytonality and polyrhythm, which have marked his piano style throughout his career. The Brubecks wrote back that the idea of participating in an oral history interested them, particularly because they were currently writing their story for their family and because Dave would welcome a discussion of the large works and particularly the religious works that have occupied him in the last decades since he converted to Catholicism. Dave Brubeck has been documented as much or more than any other jazz figure in history, including life histories by the BBC and NPR. He figured significantly in Ken Burns' nineteen-hour television presentation on PBS, and his reminiscences about seeing the scars on the back of one of the hands on his father's California ranch was perhaps the most moving moment in the documentary, the episode people took away as a symbol of African American suffering. "I asked him to cut that out," Brubeck says, and he replied, 'I'd rather cut my throat.'"