Dave Brubeck has passed beyond time signatures and time itself, ending his earthly sojourn last Wednesday a day shy of his 92nd birthday. My old college buddy Monterey Tom writes,
I don't think that you have to be either a Jazz aficionado or a musician to note Brubeck's importance in both the music world itself and in the broader culture of the 50's and 60's. His compositions, and those of his alto sax player Paul Desmond, inspired other musicians to experiment with non-traditional time signatures and tonal structures. Ironically, by performing often in college auditoria instead of night clubs and by clearly connecting his music to classical music, he put a coat-and-tie respectability to Jazz and thereby made huge numbers of young Americans aware of both the broader worlds of Jazz and modern art in general. His music was often as charming and soothing as chamber music, as joyous as that of the 1930's swingers, and as intriguing as that of the supposedly more serious innovators of the 20th Century.
Tom is much more the jazz aficionado than me, but we were both and still are Kerouac aficionados. Here is a 30 second reading, "Dave Brubeck," from Kerouac's Poetry for the Beat Generation. That's Steve Allen on piano.
The title of Take Five alludes to its 5/4 time signature. It was from the 1959 album Time Out. Wikipedia: "While "Take Five" was not the first jazz composition to use the quintuple meter, it was one of the first in the United States to achieve mainstream significance, reaching #25 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #5 on Billboard's Easy Listening chart in 1961, two years after its initial release." I remember hearing it in '61 from my brother-in-law Ken's car radio somewhere in the Mojave desert. Old Ken liked it. Who could not like it?
Also very accessible is Blue Rondo à la Turk in 9/8 and 4/4 time, also from Time Out. Based on a melody Brubeck heard in the streets of Istanbul.
Brubeck composed sacred music and became a Roman Catholic in 1980.