Dave Brubeck dies of heart failure

You don’t have to be a jazz aficionado to recognize “Take Five,” the smoky instrumental by the Dave Brubeck Quartet that instantly evokes swinging bachelor pads, hi-fi systems and cool nightclubs of the 1950s and ’60s.

“The gait was usually a fast walk, maybe a trot,” he said. “And I would sing against that constant gait of the horse. ... There was nothing to do but think, and I’d improvise melodies and rhythms.”

Brubeck combined classical influences and his own innovations on the seminal album “Time Out,” released in 1959 by his classic quartet that included alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, drummer Joe Morello and bassist Eugene Wright.

It was the first jazz album to deliberately explore time signatures outside of the standard 4/4 beat or 3/4 waltz time. It was also the first million-selling jazz LP and is still among the best-selling jazz albums of all time.

Columbia executives blocked its release for nearly a year — until label President Goddard Lieberson intervened.

“They said, ‘We never put out music that people can’t dance to, and they can’t dance to these rhythms that you’re playing,’” Brubeck recalled in 2010. He also wanted a painting by Joan Miro on the cover, something else the record company had never done.

“I insisted that we go with something new,” he said. “And to their surprise, it became the biggest jazz recording they ever made.”

The album opens with “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” a piece inspired by Turkish street musicians Brubeck heard on a 1958 State Department tour. The piece was in 9/8 time — nine beats to the measure instead of the customary two, three or four beats — and blended folk rhythms with jazz and a Mozart piece.

The album also featured “Take Five,” the cool and catchy odd-metered tune that became the Brubeck quartet’s theme. The tune was derived from a pattern that Morello liked to play backstage. Brubeck asked Desmond to write a two-part melody over the rhythm, and Brubeck patched the pieces together.

“It was a song that people could relate to, and it influenced the future of the music,” said George Wein, a jazz pianist and founder of the Newport Jazz Festival.

Brubeck always felt that his successful jazz career led fans to overlook the second career he launched as a jazz-inspired classical orchestral and choral composer in 1967 after disbanding his original quartet.

Brubeck’s experience in World War II led him to look beyond jazz to compose oratorios, cantatas and other extended works touching on themes involving religion, civil rights and peace.

“I knew I wanted to write on religious themes when I was a GI in World War II,” Brubeck said, recalling how he was trapped behind German lines in the Battle of the Bulge and nearly killed. “I saw and experienced so much violence that I thought I could express my outrage best with music.”

Brubeck’s interest in classical music was inspired by his mother, Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck, a classical pianist, who was initially disappointed by her youngest son’s interest in jazz. She later came to appreciate his music.

Born in Concord, Calif., on Dec. 6. 1920, Brubeck took piano lessons with his mother as a child. Then his father moved the family to a cattle ranch in the foothills of the Sierras. As a teenager, he played in local dance bands on weekends.

When he enrolled at the College of the Pacific in 1938, Brubeck had intended to major in veterinary medicine and return to ranching. But while working his way through college by playing piano in nightclubs, he became smitten with jazz and changed his major to music. In 1942, he married Iola Whitlock, a fellow student who became his lifelong partner, librettist, and sometime manager.

Brubeck joined the Army as an infantry man, but ended up leading the semi-official Wolf Pack band attached to Gen. George S. Patton’s army. They played popular standards as well as some of his first original jazz tunes, including “We Crossed the Rhine,” based on the rhythm of trucks hitting the metal pontoon bridges as the entered Germany.

His band, which was one of the first integrated units in the then-segregated Army, reopened the Opera House in Nuremberg, the site of mass rallies organized by the Nazis, who had banned jazz.

Years later, the addition of Wright to Brubeck’s quartet made the group one of the nation’s best-known integrated music acts. A longtime champion of civil rights, Brubeck cancelled lucrative gigs at Southern universities and on television’s Bell Telephone Hour when the organizers insisted that he replace Wright. He refused to play in South Africa under apartheid.