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Master took jazz into the pop charts

DAVE BRUBECK, a pianist and composer whose distinctive mixture of experimentation and accessibility made him one of the most popular jazz musicians of the 1950s and '60s, has died at the age of 91.

Brubeck, pictured, helped repopularise jazz at a time when younger listeners had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop single. The Dave Brubeck Quartet's 1959 recording of Take Five was the first jazz single to sell 1 million copies and became the best selling jazz song of all time.

Brubeck experimented with time signatures and his polytonality, playing style and the push and pull between his piano and the alto saxophone of Paul Desmond makes his quartet's best work still sound original.

David Warren Brubeck was born on December 6, 1920, in Concord, California, the son of a cattle rancher and a classically trained pianist. He studied zoology at college but came to love the music department.

In 1951, he and Desmond created the Dave Brubeck Quartet, which would become one of the US west coast's most popular jazz acts. Brubeck was also at the forefront of integration, playing in black jazz clubs throughout the deep south in the '50s, a point of pride for him.

He once explained what jazz meant to him: ''One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It's the same any place in the world, that heartbeat. It's the first thing you hear when you're born - or before you're born - and it's the last thing you hear.''

Brubeck died of heart failure in hospital in Connecticut, a day short of his 92nd birthday, his manager said.


The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune