Jazz at Oberlin

Jazz at Oberlin is a live album by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. It was recorded in the Finney Chapel at Oberlin College in March 1953, and released on Fantasy Records as F 3245. The Fantasy Records album back cover states that drummer Lloyd Davis had a 103-degree fever during the performance.

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[1]

Critic Nat Hentoff wrote in Down Beat magazine that the album ranks with the College of the Pacific and Storyville sets "as the best of Brubeck on record",[2] and jazz critic Gary Giddins has written that it would "make many short lists of the decade's outstanding albums".[3]

The concert is credited with making jazz a legitimate field of musical study at Oberlin, and furthermore initiating it as a subject of serious intellectual attention; Wendell Logan, the chair of Oberlin's Jazz Studies Department, described it as "the watershed event that signaled the change of performance space for jazz from the nightclub to the concert hall".[4]

In addition, it was one of the early works in the cool jazz stream of jazz; The Guardian's John Fordham wrote that it "indicated new directions for jazz that didn't slavishly mirror bebop, and even hinted at free-jazz piano techniques still years away from realisation"; he further observed that it "marked Brubeck's eager adoption by America's (predominantly white) youth - a welcome that soon extended around the world ... for a rhythmically intricate instrumental jazz".[5]