Last Updated on: 6th December 2012, 05:44 pm
I don’t know when it started, but from a pretty young age I had a thing for jazz. I wasn’t a super fan by any stretch, I just found it fascinating. How can these guys play what sounds like a half a million random notes that they’re making up as they go along, yet everybody knows exactly what to do when and it all makes perfect sense?
When I got a bit older and decided that maybe it might be a good idea to figure out who some of these people were, one of the first ones to grab my attention was Dave Brubeck. I’ve always loved pianos, even though a decade plus of trying proved to me that I have no business playing one. Plus saxophones pretty much rule in the right hands, and the combination of Brubeck’s piano and Paul Desmond’s sax is hard to beat.
Yesterday, Dave Brubeck died of heart failure. He was 91, and just a day shy of his 92nd birthday.
I’ll leave the stuff about his artful time signature manipulation to people more qualified to discuss that sort of thing, and just say that I’m sad to have lost my favourite jazz musician.
And now, here are some songs.
Dave Brubeck – Take The ‘A’ Train – 1966