About Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and Brazilian music and make extensive use of polytonality. Milhaud is considered one of the key modernist composers. He taught many future jazz and classical composers, including Burt Bacharach, Dave Brubeck, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, György Kurtág, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis among others. On his father's side, Milhaud's Jewish lineage was thus neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi, but specifically Provençal—dating to Jewish settlement in that part of France as early as the first centuries of the Common Era. On a trip to the United States in 1922, Milhaud heard "authentic" jazz for the first time, on the streets of Harlem, which greatly influenced his music. My older brother Howard was his assistant and had taken all of his classes." Brubeck named his first son Darius.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.