Another centenary to celebrate today, dear reader...
Mr Dave Brubeck [for it is he] was a pioneer of jazz, right at the pivotal moment when the music began to embrace "modernity" in the 1950s - yet thanks to his innate musicality, he avoided joining the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk in adopting the "free-form" bebop style that split the movement (in particular here in the UK) between "modern" and "trad" genres. As a consequence, he became equally popular with the public and the serious jazz aficionados, selling millions of LPs in the '50s and '60s.
He was also a steadfast supporter of the burgeoning civil rights movement. He toured ceaselessly with his mixed race quartet, and refused to ever perform before a segregated audience. He even walked off a live television broadcast when he realised the director was trying to prevent the quartet’s African-American bassist Eugene Wright from appearing on screen.
His legacy lives on with a catalogue of innovative, and eternally memorable, numbers - and here, truly fitting the bill of "Sunday Music", are just three of them...
The coolest of the cool cats.
David Warren Brubeck (6th December 1920 – 5th December 2012)
