In the era before Monterey Jazz Festival was founded, the building blocks for the idea of an outdoor festival originated with deejay Jimmy Lyons. Lyons had been working at southern California radio stations had had been drafted in the Army during WWII, where he was assigned to the Armed Force Radio Network. His jazz program, Jubilee, became popular, and he became friends with the leaders of the growing modern jazz movement known as bebop — including Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, and Charlie Parker, for their first West Coast appearance. After the war, he moved to San Francisco where he started another popular radio show called Discapades on KNBC radio. In 1949, Lyons encountered Dave Brubeck (who had grown up in the Bay Area) and had been studying composition as a graduate student with French composer Darius Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland, along with classmate Paul Desmond.

Dave’s newest group, the Octet, had booked a concert at the Marine’s Memorial Theatre in San Francisco’s theatre district. “…we invited [Jimmy] to act as master of ceremonies,” said Dave in a 1980 box set reissue. “Jimmy was so taken by the originality of the group that he started an enthusiastic crusade on our behalf and arranged an audition at NBC. We wrote special material for our audition, some of which appeared on the Octet’s second release. The radio show didn’t materialize, but Jimmy continued to tout us to other musicians, to their managers and to record company representatives who passed through town. It was he who arranged for us to open a Woody Herman concert at the San Francisco Opera House.”

Economic conditions at the time forced Dave to pare the group down to a Trio. “The Trio’s first club job was at the Burma Lounge near Lake Merritt in Oakland, and over the next six months we became the favorite jazz hangout for university students,” wrote Brubeck. “Jimmy Lyons played our recordings on his late-night show, and on the strength of the initial response to those airings, he persuaded the KNBC program director, Paul Speegle, to give us a 15 minute once-a-week show. “Lyons Busy” as the program was called, could be heard the length of the West Coast and far beyond Hawaii into the Pacific. Many young people in the military who heard our broadcasts would subsequently come to see us when they passed through San Francisco.”

Ralph J. Gleason, the jazz critic and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle (and eventual co-founder of the Monterey Jazz Festival) met Jimmy Lyons in the late 1940s and “Their shared passion for jazz resulted in a conversations focused – a few years before the experiment was actually carried out at Newport in 1954 – in the idea of an outdoor festival by the sea. According to Lyons, Gleason was the one to who encouraged him to find a place ‘away from the sultry, dark webby settings of clubs; to put the music out in the open,'” wrote author Bill Minor in the book Monterey Jazz Festival: 40 Legendary Years in 1997.

In 1953, Lyons was looking for a change and moved from city life to the bucolic and rugged Central Coast community of Big Sur, about 30 miles south of Monterey. Upon seeing the Monterey County Fairgrounds, Lyons called up Gleason and said “I think I found it.”

As Dave Brubeck’s music became internationally recognized throughout the 1950s, Jimmy Lyons would eventually ask Dave’s assistance in 1958 to persuade the Monterey’s city council to allow a jazz festival take place at the County Fairgrounds. They would remain friends for the remainder of Jimmy’s life. Brubeck is considered the “Godfather” of the Monterey Jazz Festival.