As one of the most famous and prolific jazz musicians of the 20th century, Dave Brubeck was so well documented there would seem to be precious few unexplored corners of his career. But Brooklyn saxophonist Jon De Lucia, a musician drawn to overlooked musical nooks and crannies, has uncovered and refurbished the long-neglected arrangements that launched Brubeck’s career in the late 1940s as a classical-curious student studying composition at Mills College on the GI Bill. The Brubeck Octet Project takes a fresh look at the West Coast’s alternative to Miles Davis’s epochal Birth of the Cool sessions.

Before gaining fame on the college circuit with his quartet in the mid-1950s, Brubeck was an experimentally minded player drawn to Oakland’s Mills College by French composer Darius Milhaud. The Octet started as a school project first known as the Jazz Workshop Ensemble and later as The Eight, and finally as the Dave…