ABSTRACT
On the occasion of pianist and composer Dave Brubeck’s death, Down Beat magazine attested that he ‘may have been the last jazz musician in the world whom everybody knew and liked’.1 If this statement elided the fact that Brubeck’s achievement and even his competence as a pianist had been the subject of passionate disagreement throughout the first two decades of his career, there was perhaps a larger truth touched upon, permitted by the italicisation of the word ‘everybody’. In contrast to the majority of his peers, Brubeck had not only conquered the mainstream with the 1959 hit single ‘Take Five’, he had also secured a lasting place in popular culture through that song’s persistent use on movie soundtracks and in advertising.2 Never mind that the piece had been written by the Brubeck Quartet’s saxophonist Paul Desmond. It was Brubeck who mainstream culture would remember.
