Jon De Lucia was born on November 26, 1980, in Quincy, Massachusetts—just outside Boston, a city that has always felt like a greenhouse for serious musical study, especially if jazz is the thing that keeps you up at night. He found his footing early, studying with Berklee College of Music woodwind professor Dino Govoni while still in high school, and when graduation came, he did what the committed do: he went straight into the fire, heading to the Boston Conservatory with a clear plan and a very specific dream—writing music for video games.
But the thing about a real scene is that it changes you. Surrounded by the kind of talent that doesn’t let you stay comfortable—classmates like Kendrick Scott and Walter Smith III—De Lucia’s ambitions began to shift. The craft demanded more. The room demanded more. So he answered. He added a performance major, leaned harder into the language of jazz, and at the same time refused to keep his ears in one place. Alongside improvisation and tradition, he studied folkloric musics from around the world, letting rhythm, melody, and culture widen his lens until “jazz musician” no longer felt like a job title, but a way of seeing.
After graduating from Berklee in 2005, De Lucia moved to New York—because that’s where you go when you want the music to talk back. There, he played and studied with a range of jazz masters, absorbing the city’s intensity and its constant demand for evolution. And then, as if his curiosity still wasn’t satisfied, he stepped into yet another world: Baroque music. Not as a detour, but as an expansion—another set of rules to learn, another history to interrogate, another way to understand structure, tension, and release.
That instinct—to dig, to connect eras, to make the past speak in the present—sits at the center of De Lucia’s work as both jazz historian and alto saxophonist. It’s also what fuels his latest release: The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!, the second album from his critically acclaimed Octet, arriving October 23 on his own Musæum Clausum Recordings imprint.
If the first album, The Brubeck Octet Project, was an act of reverent reimagination—reframing the recorded oeuvre of the original Dave Brubeck Octet (1946–53)—Strikes Again! takes the mission deeper. This time, De Lucia and company go after the arrangements the original Octet never got the chance to record. The result is more than a tribute; it’s a recovery operation.
Through thorough archival research, De Lucia has brought forward premiere recordings of 11 tunes arranged and composed by Octet members Dave Van Kriedt and Bill Smith—music that has lived in the shadows of history, waiting for the right hands to lift it into sound. These pieces carry the DNA of cool jazz, West Coast sensibility, and bop’s sharp edges, while also revealing the modernist classical fingerprints of the Octet’s mentor, Darius Milhaud. It’s a meeting point of movements—American swing and European modernism, elegance and urgency—rendered with the clarity of musicians who understand they’re not just playing charts; they’re restoring a story.
And there’s an added gift for the collectors and the romantics: original cover art by Arnold Roth, the legendary nonagenarian cartoonist behind many of Brubeck’s iconic 1950s album covers. His artwork will grace the vinyl and CD packaging—an aesthetic bridge between then and now, like the final signature on a recovered manuscript.
After the first album earned critical praise from DownBeat, The New York Review of Books, and NYC Jazz Record, De Lucia knew this couldn’t be a one-time event. So he brought the band back together—this time with special guest soloists Scott Robinson, Brandon Lee, and Glenn Zaleski—alongside a lineup built for both precision and personality: De Lucia on alto, Becca Patterson on trombone, Jay Rattman on baritone sax and clarinet, Daniel Duke on bass, and Keith Balla on drums.
What De Lucia is doing here is bigger than nostalgia. This is the work of someone who believes jazz history isn’t finished—because it isn’t. Pages are still missing, tapes were never made, and arrangements never met air. The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again! doesn’t just honor the past; it reopens it, restores it, and lets it breathe again—right on time.
The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again! arrives October 23 via Musæum Clausum Recordings.
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JonDe Lucia Photo by Jacob-Blickenstaff, courtesy of Crossover Media
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