Dave Brubeck

I did the thing today I sometimes do that baffles my editors. One of them emailed about Dave Brubeck’s death and asked whether I’d like to write about him. I’m the jazz guy, after all, to the extent we have one, and Brubeck was the rare jazz musician everyone loved. But I passed. I have never been a fan of Brubeck’s piano playing. (I’ll get back to that.) I thought that in his later years he didn’t surround himself with impressive or even consistently coherent bands. I reviewed him twice for The Gazette in Montreal, not kindly. I was intrigued to be reminded that he had the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan in his band for a bit in the 1970s. That must have been tense: Mulligan usually insisted on the refinement and closely-calibrated group dynamics I don’t associate with late-period Brubeck.

Fans celebrate the life of legendary jazz pianist