The release of this CD presents, for the first time ever, the complete concert by the Dave Brubeck Quartet at the Sunset Center, Carmel, California on 26 June 1955. It is an amateur recording, but possesses surprisingly good fidelity. A part of this concert apparently circulated many years ago among a handful of West Coast jazz aficionados as a very limited edition LP entitled University of Carmel, but to all intents and purposes the rest of the world was unaware that this valuable documentation of Brubeck's quartet existed at a crucial period in its evolution. In late 1953, George Avakian signed Brubeck to the Columbia label, recording the quartet at three midwestern universities in early 1954 and releasing the best tracks as Jazz Goes to College (until Time Out it was his best selling album for Columbia). This group, with the exception of Ron Crotty on bass for Bob Bates, had earlier made a considerable impression with Jazz at the College of the Pacific on the Fantasy label, which many people (including Brubeck himself) think contains some of Desmond's finest playing on record. Brubeck's appearance at the idyllic Sunset Center on 26 June 1955 was a part of a series of promotions by the Monterey Jazz Festival called ‘Jazz at Sunset’. As an aside, Erroll Garner's classic Concert By The Sea, recorded on 19 September the same year, was also a part of the ‘Jazz at Sunset’ series. Brubeck presents a series of standards that were part of the quartet's not inconsiderable repertoire, and with the exception of ‘Take the ‘A’ Train’, none of the titles clash with the three classic Brubeck albums from this period, Jazz at Oberlin, Jazz at the College of Pacific (including the lesser known Volume 2) and Jazz Goes to College. The Sunset quartet also recorded Jazz Red Hot and Cool live in Basin Street, New York for Columbia in 1956, but still no repertoire clashes with the Sunset album. Here then is Brubeck in sparkling form, the group had been introduced by Desmond's friend comedian Mort Sahl (who had just done the warm-up spot for the quartet, later issued by Fantasy as Mort Sahl at Sunset). The group were in excellent spirits, straight out of the blocks with an excellent interpretation of ‘Gone With the Wind’ and ‘Jeepers Creepers’, contrasted by the Frank Sinatra hit ballad with the Tommy Dorsey Band of 14 years earlier, ‘I'll Never Smile Again’ followed by ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime?’, written at the height of America's Great Depression. Then follows what can only be described as a joyous romp through ‘The Trolley Song’, ‘Little Girl Blue’, climaxing with ‘Take the ‘A’ Train’ by exploiting its major/minor tonalities. Finally, there's a bonus track from 1956, Brubeck's ‘Two Part Contention’, a study in polytonality inspired by Mozart's ‘Divertimento for Two Horns and String Quartet K. 522’.