When a Saint goes Marching In …

Whenever I really want to practice my jazz chops, I just pull out my music that’s note for note Dave Brubeck.  Blue Ronda Al La Turk really gives the old digits a stretch.  He was a jazz giant with massive hands that spun fantastic grooves. His Take 5 was one of the first things I played in my high school jazz band. That means I’ve been playing that piece for decades now and I still haven’t grown tired of it. I still get requests for it too when I gig around the quarter.  You can tell the classically trained jazz pianists by how much Brubeck they can play note for note. He was a pianist and a composer with many dimensions and an infectious style. No jazz library is complete without him.

Brubeck has died at the age of 91.

Jazz composer and pianist Dave Brubeck, whose pioneering style in pieces such as Take Five caught listeners’ ears with exotic, challenging rhythms, has died. He was 91.

Brubeck died Wednesday morning of heart failure after being stricken while on his way to a cardiology appointment with his son Darius, said his manager Russell Gloyd. Brubeck would have turned 92 on Thursday.

Brubeck had a career that spanned almost all American jazz since World War II. He formed The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951 and was the first modern jazz musician to be pictured on the cover of Time magazine — on Nov. 8, 1954 — and he helped define the swinging, smoky rhythms of 1950s and ‘60s club jazz.

George Wein, a jazz pianist and founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, had known Brubeck since he first worked in Wein’s club in Boston in 1952.

“No one else played like Dave Brubeck,” he said. “No one had the approach to the music that he did. That approach communicated.”

Brubeck “represented the best that we can have in jazz,” he added. “The quality of his persona helped every other jazz musician.”

Dave Brubeck was a living legend.

The musician, whose recordings included Take Five and Blue Rondo a la Turk, was once designated a “living legend” by the US Library of Congress.

He died on Wednesday morning in hospital in Connecticut, his manager Russell Gloyd told the Chicago Tribune newspaper.

The musician, who toured with the likes of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald would have turned 92 on Thursday.

Mr Gloyd said Brubeck died of heart failure after being stricken while on his way to a cardiology appointment with his son Darius.

Neil Portnow from The Recording Academy called Brubeck “an iconic jazz and classical pianist” and “a great legend”.

He said the musician “showed that jazz could be artistically challenging yet accessible to large audiences”.

So, tonight, I will raise a glass to one of my greatest influences and will play the Steinway until it echos down Poland Avenue with all the Brubeck these aging fingers can muster.