Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, whose choice of novel rhythms, classical structures and brilliant sidemen made him a towering figure in modern jazz, has died at the age of 91.
Brubeck died of heart failure on Wednesday morning after he fell ill on his way to a regular medical exam at Norwalk Hospital, in Norwalk, Connecticut, a day short of his 92nd birthday, his manager said.
His Dave Brubeck Quartet put out one of the best selling jazz songs of all time, Take Five, composed by alto saxophonist Paul Desmond. Like many of the group's works, it had an unusual beat - 5/4 time as opposed to the usual 4/4.
"We play it differently every time we play it," Brubeck told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2005. "So I never get tired of playing it. That's the beauty of jazz."
Take Five was the first million-selling jazz single.
Dressed in a suit and horn-rimmed glasses and living a clean-cut lifestyle in the 1950s, Brubeck did not fit the stereotype of a hipster jazzman, and his music was not nearly as brooding as that coming from East Coast be-bop players.
Brubeck was born in Concord, California, on Dec. 6, 1920. His father was a rancher, and as a teenager, Brubeck was a skilled cowboy. But his mother, a music teacher who had five pianos in the house, ensured that he took up piano at age 5.
At the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California, he planned to be a veterinarian, but within a year, he was majoring in music and playing jazz in nightclubs. Brubeck later met the co-director of a weekly campus radio show, Iola Marie Whitlock, whom he married.
After graduation, Brubeck studied under French composer Darius Milhaud and played in a U.S. Army jazz band during the Second World War.
In the late 1940s, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where he headed an experimental jazz octet. He formed a trio in 1950 and the following year expanded to a quartet with Desmond, whom he had known since the war.
In February 1989, Brubeck underwent triple-bypass surgery but kept playing. Well into his 80s, he still put on some 80 shows a year, including performances at Victoria's Royal Theatre in 2002 and 2008.
