Jazz composer, pianist Dave Brubeck dies

HARTFORD, Conn. (WTNH) -- Dave Brubeck, the legendary jazz artist with deep Connecticut roots died of heart failure at Norwalk Hospital just one day short of his 92nd birthday.

In a career that spanned more than six decades his genius was behind some of the world's most popular jazz music.

Brubeck was a musical genius, the composer and pianast behind jazz classics like 'Take Five'.

"He spoke the language of jazz," Jesse Hameen II of the Neighborhood Music School.

To fellow musicians like Jesse Hameen who heads up the jazz program at New Haven's Neighborhood Music school, Brubeck's greatness was in his un-canny ability to experiment with different 'time-signatures', harmonies and rythms.

"Exactly the way Take Five was recorded people loved it that way, but he was an innovator, he wasn't content to continue to perfom it the same way even at age 88 he tried to find new dimensions of Take Five and Blue Rondo a la Turk. He was still expeimenting in his 80's," Hameen said.

Brubeck's long and distinguished career earned him a Kennedy Center honor in 2009.

Pete Woodward, the chairman of the University of Hartford's Jazz program remembers Brubeck as "an icon, an incredible man, very humble, very gracious, a real popularizer." 

And according to Pete Woodard, a man ahead of his times, thanks to ground breaking compositions in the 1950's.

"The things he was doing really brought in European style compositions, techniques, counterpoints, polyrythms that foreshadowed what went on later with Chick Corea and Keth Jarrett," Woodard of the University of Hartford.

Beyond the music another music professor at the University of Hartford remembers Brubeck as a man who broke barriers.

"One of the first things of when I think of Dave Brubeck is that he was all about integration, he had an African American bassist in the 1950's and 1960 for that time it definitely stirred controversy," Matt Chasen of the University of Hartford said.