It would be all but impossible to know how many bands have performed the piece unlicensed and unauthorized. Only a country-by-country survey could confirm the number of authorized foreign versions. Nine-hundred-fifty-nine recorded versions have been licensed in the United States. The single record of the piece from the Dave Brubeck album Time Out was the first jazz instrumental to sell a million copies. It is ubiquitous in elevators, dentists offices and restaurants, and on internet and cable-system music channels. During halftime of a high school football game, I heard a band play it while marching in twenty-degree weather. It played the first eight bars of Paul Desmond's "Take Five.” I have heard 'Take Five" from the overhead speakers in a subway station in Mexico City, in the neighborhood Safeway while reaching for the Cheerios, at gas stations when I am filling the tank and from too many sidewalk saxophonists to count. The box did not play a Moravian folk song or a Dvorak melody. Desmond was credited with writing the one tune everyone identifies most with Brubeck, “Take Five.” Brubeck had a big hand in piecing the tune together, but the melody was Desmond’s, and Brubeck magnanimously gave him full credit as its sole composer.“In 1993, I was looking at tourist doodads in a little shop just off Betlemska’ in Prague when a woman behind me opened the lid of a small wooden music box. Not with a whim, but a banker.”ĭesmond had an unmatched gift for melody, and his pearl-toned alto saxophone sound was the perfect counterpart to Brubeck’s rough-edged, aggressive attack on piano. Once, after noticing an attractive woman at a nightclub, accompanied by a considerably older businessman, he quipped, “This is how the world ends. He also took a portable typewriter with him on the road and was immensely well-read. (In fact, Brubeck’s six kids took to calling Desmond “Uncle Paul.”)ĭesmond was also quite the ladies’ man, who often lamented the ones who got away. They met in California in the 1940s, worked together off and on and had their occasional spats, but theirs was a musical partnership that ranks among the most important in jazz history, like those of Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn or Count Basie and Freddie Green.īack in the 1950s, Desmond and Brubeck looked enough alike – with wavy hair and thick, horn-rimmed glasses – to be often mistaken for brothers. The other great long-term relationship of his life was with the witty, erudite and somewhat mysterious Paul Desmond, who played alto saxophone with Brubeck for a quarter century. There was a deeply spiritual side of him, and he had an affinity toward the Catholic Church, even though his true religion was the church of jazz.īrubeck and his wife were married for 70 years. He wrote catchy little jazz numbers, as well as complicated orchestral and choral works. There are dozens, if not hundreds of tunes that have yet to be recorded. He wrote music every day of his life – every single day. I got to know Brubeck fairly well late in his life and spent time with him and his remarkable wife, Iola, at their winter home in Florida. Even if he hadn’t played a tune in decades, he could still call it up at a moment’s notice and play it in full, and with the improvised variations that are the hallmark of jazz.īrubeck was a humble guy who, even after traveling the world and living in Connecticut for more than 50 years, still seemed to retain the aw-shucks aura of a cowboy from an earlier, more rural time. Once a tune was in his head, it never left. Never comfortable reading music off the page, Brubeck gravitated toward jazz and learned tunes by the old-fashioned way of the bandstand: by ear. He grew up as a cowboy in Northern California – his father was a champion roper – and took an interest in music early in life. He deserves to be remembered as not just a jazz original but as an American original. “Time Out,” which contains half a dozen other tunes equally as original and exciting as “Take Five,” broke musical boundaries but still manages to be, after all these years, accessible, lyrical and timeless.īrubeck died today at 91, just one day before his 92nd birthday. View Photo Gallery: Jazz pioneer Dave Brubeck dies at 91.
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