Dave Brubeck is good for your brain

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 17:37:00 +0000

Jazz legend Dave Brubeck died December 5, just one day before his 92nd birthday. The pianist and composer was an innovator, especially when it came to combining rhythms and meters in new ways. "He sort of tired of the traditional patterns of jazz," says Patrick Langham, a saxophonist and faculty member of the Brubeck Institute at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif.

Time Out, the hit 1959 album by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, was one of the first popular jazz works to explore meters beyond the traditional 4/4 and 3/4. (The first number, which is the top number of the time signature in sheet music, represents the number of beats in the measure, and the second number represents the note value that receives one beat. 4/4 means that there are four beats and a quarter note lasts for one beat, yielding four quarter notes in each measure.) "Take Five" and "Blue Rondo a la Turk," two of Brubeck's most popular works, are both on Time Out.

Salon.com > Evelyn Lamb

Dave Brubeck is good for your brain