A star in time
Geoffrey Smith remembers a brilliant musician whose rhythmic and tonal free-wheeling helped him become the epitome of 1950s and ’60s cool
Brubeck was an unselfconscious trailblazer who did what he had to to get where he was going
When I think of Dave Brubeck in his centenary year, the first image that comes to mind is not that of a jazz institution laden with honours, the grand old man of modernism who led the most popular jazz group of the 1950s, or the patron saint of legions of buskers belting out ‘Take Five’. Instead, I think of London’s Royal Festival Hall in 1992, where the pianist had just finished a rapturously received concert that almost didn’t happen. Two days before, he’d had to cancel a Glasgow concert when his heart began fibrillating, requiring hospital treatment and putting the London event in doubt, as well as cancelling our Radio 3 interview. But Brubeck insisted on
