JAZZ COMPOSER and pianist Dave Brubeck, whose pioneering style in pieces such as Take Five caught listeners’ ears with exotic, challenging rhythms, has died. He was 91.
Brubeck died of heart failure after being taken ill while on his way to a cardiology appointment with his son Darius, said his manager Russell Gloyd. Brubeck would have turned 92 on Thursday.
Brubeck had a career that spanned almost all American jazz since the Second World War.
He formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951 and was the first modern jazz musician to be pictured on the cover of Time magazine and he helped define the swinging, smoky rhythms of 1950s and 60s club jazz.
The seminal album Time Out, released by the quartet in 1959, was the first million-selling jazz LP and is still among the best-selling jazz albums of all time.
It opens with Blue Rondo a la Turk in 9/8 time snf also features Take Five, in 5/4 time, which became the quartet’s signature theme and even made the Billboard singles chart in 1961.
It was composed by Brubeck’s long-time saxophonist, Paul Desmond.
“When you start out with goals mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically you never exhaust that,” Brubeck said in 1995.
“I started doing that in the 1940s. It’s still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements.”
After service in the Second World War, Brubeck formed an octet including Desmond on alto sax and Dave van Kreidt on tenor, Cal Tjader on drums and Bill Smith on clarinet.
The group played Brubeck originals and standards by other composers, including some early experimentation in unusual time signatures.
Their groundbreaking album, Dave Brubeck Octet, was recorded in 1946.
The group evolved into the quartet, which played colleges and universities.
Their first album, Jazz at Oberlin, was recorded live at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1953.
Ten years later, Joe Morello on drums and Eugene Wright on bass joined with Brubeck and Desmond to produce Time Out.
In later years Brubeck composed music for operas and ballet.
In 1988, he played for Mikhail Gorbachev at a dinner in Moscow that President Ronald Reagan hosted for the Soviet leader.
In 2006, the University of Notre Dame gave Brubeck its Laetare Medal, awarded each year to a Roman Catholic “whose genius has ennobled the arts andsciences, illustrated the ideals of the church and enriched the heritage of humanity.”
More acclaim came his way when it was announced that he would be a recipient of the Kennedy Centre Honours at a ceremony in late 2009.
Born in Concord, California, Brubeck actually had planned to become a rancher like his father.
He attended the College of the Pacific, intending to major in veterinary medicine but within a year was drawn to music.
Brubeck and his wife, Iola, had five sons and a daughter.
Four of his sons Chris on trombone and electric bass, Dan on drums, Darius on keyboards and Matthew on cello played with the London Symphony Orchestra in a birthday tribute to Brubeck in December 2000.
“We never had a rift,” Chris Brubeck once said of living and playing with his father.