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Dave Brubeck, Whose Distinctive Sound Gave Jazz New Pop, Dies at 91

By BEN RATLIFFDEC. 5, 2012

Dave Brubeck, the pianist and composer who helped make jazz popular
again in the 1950s and ’60s with recordings like “Time Out,” the first jazz album to sell a million copies, and “Take Five,” the still
instantly recognizable hit single that was that album’s centerpiece,
died on Wednesday in Norwalk, Conn. He would have turned 92 on
Thursday.

He died while on his way to a cardiology appointment, Russell Gloyd,
his producer, conductor and manager for 36 years, said. Mr. Brubeck
lived in Wilton, Conn.

In a long and successful career, Mr. Brubeck brought a distinctive
mixture of experimentation and accessibility that won over listeners
who had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop
single.

Mr. Brubeck experimented with time signatures and polytonality and
explored musical theater and the oratorio, baroque compositional
devices and foreign modes. He did not always please the critics, who
often described his music as schematic, bombastic and — a word he particularly disliked — stolid. But his very stubbornness and
strangeness — the blockiness of his playing, the oppositional
push-and-pull between his piano and Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone —
make the Brubeck quartet’s best work still sound original.
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Outside of the group’s most famous originals, which had the charm and durability of pop songs ( “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” “It’s a Raggy Waltz”
and “Take Five”), some of its best work was in its overhauls of
standards like “You Go to My Head,” “All the Things You Are” and “Pennies From Heaven.”

David Warren Brubeck was born on Dec. 6, 1920, in Concord, Calif.,
near San Francisco. Surrounded by farms, his family lived a bucolic
life: his father, Pete, was a cattle buyer for a meat company, and his
mother, Elizabeth, was a choir director at the nearby Presbyterian
church. When Mr. Brubeck was 11, the family moved to Ione, Calif.,
where his father managed a 45,000-acre cattle ranch and owned his own
1,200 acres.

Forbidden to listen to the radio — his mother believed that if you
wanted to hear music you should play it — Mr. Brubeck and his two
brothers all played various instruments and knew classical études,
spirituals and cowboy songs. He learned most of this music by ear:
because he was born cross-eyed, sight-reading was nearly impossible
for him in his early years as a musician.

Playing for Local Dances

When Mr. Brubeck was 14, a laundryman who led a dance band encouraged
him to perform in public, at Lions Club gatherings and Western swing
dances; he was paid $8 for playing from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., with a
one-hour break. But until he went to college he was an aspiring
rancher, not an aspiring musician.

At the College of the Pacific, in Stockton, he first studied to be a veterinarian but switched to music after a year. It was there that he
learned about 20th-century culture and read about Freud, Marx and
serial music; it was also there that he met Iola Whitlock, a fellow
student, who became his wife in 1942.

He graduated that year and immediately enlisted in the Army. For two
years he played with the Army band at Camp Haan, in Southern
California. In 1944 Private Brubeck became a rifleman, entering basic
training — first in Texas, then in Maryland — and was then sent to
Metz, in northeast France, for further preparation for combat.

When his new commanding officer heard him accompany a Red Cross
traveling show one day, Mr. Brubeck recalled, he told his
aide-de-camp, “I don’t want that boy to go to the front.” Thereafter,
Mr. Brubeck led a band that was trucked into combat areas to play for
the troops. He was near the front twice, during the Battle of the
Bulge, but he never fought.

Finished with the Army at 25, Mr. Brubeck moved with his wife into an
apartment in Oakland, Calif., and, on a G.I. Bill scholarship, studied
at Mills College there with the French composer Darius Milhaud.
Milhaud asked the jazz musicians in his class to write fugues for jazz ensembles, and Mr. Brubeck played the results at a series of
performances at the college. Mr. Brubeck had such admiration for his
teacher that he named his first son, born in 1947, Darius.

An Instant Partnership

Mr. Brubeck first met his most important musical colleague, Mr.
Desmond, the alto saxophonist, in an Army band in 1943. Mr. Desmond
was a perfect foil; his lovely, impassive tone was as ethereal as Mr. Brubeck’s style was densely chorded. In 1947 they met again and found
instant musical rapport, fascinated by the challenge of using
counterpoint in jazz.

Mr. Brubeck’s first group, an octet formed in 1946, contained several
of Milhaud’s students, and played pieces influenced by his teachings,
using canonlike elements. The group’s earliest recorded work predated
a much more famous set of similarly temperate jazz recordings, the
1948-50 Miles Davis Nonet work later packaged as “Birth of the Cool.”

In the late 1940s and early ’50s Mr. Brubeck also led a trio with Ron
Crotty on bass and Cal Tjader on drums. It was around this time that
he started to develop an audience. He was given an initial boost by
the San Francisco disc jockey Jimmy Lyons, later the founder of the
Monterey Jazz Festival, who plugged the band on KNBC radio and helped
secure it a record deal with Coronet.

In 1951 the trio expanded to a quartet, with Mr. Desmond returning.
(The permanent lineup change was perhaps inevitable, as Mr. Desmond
was desperate to join his old friend’s increasingly popular band, but
it may also have had to do with physical necessity: Mr. Brubeck had
suffered a serious neck injury while swimming in Hawaii, limiting his dexterity, and he needed another soloist to help carry the music.)

Quickly the constitutionally different men — Mr. Brubeck open,
ambitious and imposing; Mr. Desmond private, high-living and
self-effacing — developed their lines of musical communication. By the
time of an engagement in Boston in the fall of 1952 they had become
one of jazz’s greatest combinations.

The next part of the equation was a record label, and for that Mr.
Brubeck had found another booster: Fantasy Records, just started by
the brothers Max and Sol Weiss, who owned a record-pressing plant and
had little interest in jazz apart from wanting to make a profit from
it.

They did, eventually, with Mr. Brubeck. But Iola Brubeck also played a
role in the growth of his audience. Before Mr. Brubeck became a client
of the prominent manager Joe Glaser, she handled her husband’s
business affairs. In 1953 she wrote to more than a hundred
universities, suggesting that the quartet would be willing to play for
student associations. The college circuit became the group’s bread and butter, and by the end of the 1950s it had sold hundreds of thousands
of copies of its albums “Jazz at Oberlin” and “Jazz Goes to College.”

In 1954 Mr. Brubeck became only the second jazz musician (after Louis Armstrong) to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. That year he
signed with Columbia Records, promising to deliver two albums a year,
and built a house in Oakland.

For all his conceptualizing, Mr. Brubeck often seemed more guileless
and stubborn country boy than intellectual. It is often noted that his
piece “The Duke” — memorably recorded by Miles Davis and Gil Evans in 1957 on their collaborative album “Miles Ahead” — runs through all 12 keys in the first eight bars. But Mr. Brubeck contended that he never
realized that until a music professor told him.

Mr. Brubeck’s very personal musical language situated him far from the
Bud Powell school of bebop rhythm and harmony; he relied more on
chords, lots and lots of them, than on sizzling, hornlike right-hand
lines. (He may have come by this outsiderness naturally, as a function
of his background: jazz by way of rural isolation and modernist
academia. He was, Ted Gioia wrote in his book “West Coast Jazz,”
inspired “by the process of improvisation rather than by its
history.”)

It took a little while for Mr. Brubeck to capitalize on the greater
visibility his deal with Columbia gave him, and as he accommodated
success a certain segment of the jazz audience began to turn against
him. (The 1957 album “Dave Digs Disney,” on which he played songs from
Walt Disney movies, didn’t help his credibility among critics and connoisseurs.) Still, by the end of the decade he had broken through
with mainstream audiences in a bigger way than almost any jazz
musician since World War II.

In 1958, as part of a State Department program that brought jazz as an
offer of good will during the cold war, his quartet traveled in the
Middle East and India, and Mr. Brubeck became intrigued by musical
languages that didn’t stick to 4/4 time — what he called “march-style jazz,” the meter that had been the music’s bedrock. The result was the album “Time Out,” recorded in 1959. With the hits “Take Five”
(composed by Mr. Desmond in 5/4 meter and prominently featuring the
quartet’s gifted drummer, Joe Morello) and “Blue Rondo à la Turk” (composed by Mr. Brubeck in 9/8), the album propelled Mr. Brubeck onto
the pop charts.

Initially, Mr. Brubeck said, the album was released without high
expectations from the record company. But when disc jockeys in the
Midwest started playing “Take Five,” the song became a national
phenomenon. After the album had been out for 18 months, Columbia
released “Take Five” as a 45 r.p.m. single, edited for radio, with
“Blue Rondo” on the B side. Both album and single became hits; the
album “Time Out” has since sold about two million copies.

Standing Up to Racism

In 1960, realizing that most of the quartet’s work centered on the
East Coast, the Brubecks, with their children, Dan, Michael, Chris,
Darius and Catherine, moved to Wilton, where they stayed. They later
had one more child, Matthew.

Genial as Mr. Brubeck could seem, he had strong convictions. In the
1950s he had to stand up to college deans who asked him not to perform
with a racially mixed band (his bassist, Gene Wright, was black). He
also refused to tour in South Africa in 1958 when asked to sign a
contract stipulating that his band would be all white. With his wife
as lyricist, he wrote “The Real Ambassadors,” a jazz musical that
dealt with race relations. With a cast that included Louis Armstrong,
it was released on LP in 1962 but staged only once, at that year’s
Monterey Jazz Festival.

When Mr. Brubeck’s quartet broke up in 1967, after 17 years, he spent
more time with his family and followed new paths. In 1969 he composed “Elementals” (subtitled “Concerto for Anyone Who Can Afford an Orchestra”), a concerto grosso for 45-piece ensemble. He later wrote
an oratorio and four cantatas, a mass, two ballets and works for jazz
combo with orchestra. Most of his commissioned pieces from the late
’60s on, many of them collaborations with his wife, whose
contributions included lyrics and librettos, were classical works.

As a composer, Mr. Brubeck used jazz to address religious themes and
to bridge social and political divides. His cantata “The Gates of
Justice,” from 1969, dealt with blacks and Jews in America; another
cantata, “Truth Is Fallen” (1972), lamented the killing of student protesters at Kent State University in 1970, with a score including
orchestra, electric guitars and police sirens. He played during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting in 1988 and he composed entrance music
for Pope John Paul II’s visit to Candlestick Park in San Francisco in
1987.

Another Quartet

In 1968 he formed a quartet with the baritone saxophonist Gerry
Mulligan, and later he began working with his musician sons Darius (a
pianist), Chris (a bassist), Dan (a drummer) and Matthew (a cellist).
He performed and recorded with them often, most definitively on “In
Their Own Sweet Way” (Telarc, 1997). The classic Brubeck quartet
regrouped only once, in 1976, for a 25th-anniversary tour.

Mr. Brubeck’s son Michael died in 2009. In addition to his other sons
and his daughter, Mr. Brubeck is survived by his wife; 10
grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Mr. Brubeck resumed working with a quartet in the late 1970s — finally settling into a long-term touring group featuring the saxophonist
Bobby Militello — and thereafter never stopped writing, touring and performing his hits. To the end he was a major draw at festivals.

In 1999 Mr. Brubeck was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment
for the Arts. Ten years later he received a Kennedy Center Honor for
his contribution to American culture. He gave his archives to his alma
mater.

Despite health problems, Mr. Brubeck was still working as recently as
2011. In November 2010, just a month after undergoing heart surgery
and receiving a pacemaker, he performed at the Blue Note in Manhattan.
Nate Chinen of The Times, noting that Mr. Brubeck had already
“softened his pianism, replacing the old hammer-and-anvil attack with something almost airy,” wrote that his playing at the Blue Note “was
the picture of judicious clarity, its well-placed chordal accents
suggesting a riffing horn section.”

Mr. Brubeck once explained succinctly what jazz meant to him. “One of
the reasons I believe in jazz,” he said, “is that the oneness of man
can come through the rhythm of your heart. It’s the same anyplace 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.” Correction: December 5, 2012

An earlier version of this obituary erroneously attributed a
distinction to Mr. Brubeck. He was the second jazz musician to be
featured on the cover of Time magazine, not the first. That version
also misstated the name of a song at one point. It is “Take Five,” not “Time Out.” (“Time Out” is the name of the album on which “Take Five”
first appeared.) It also said that “Take Five” was the first jazz
single to sell a million copies, instead it was the album “Time Out”
that sold over a million copies.

Correction: December 11, 2012

An obituary on Thursday about the jazz pianist and composer Dave
Brubeck referred incorrectly to his military service during World War
II. He enlisted in the Army; he was not drafted.

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