FOR COOL MINDED MARTIANS

Dave Brubeck died today.  "Take Five", from his Time Out LP was an unexpected hit when it was released in 1959, which was unusual for any jazz song, and even more unusual for a song in 5/4 time signature. If you don't know what that is, feel no shame. It was so unusual that the liner notes on the LP went to great lengths to describe what the hell weird time signatures were. The opening paragraph is ever so hep: "Should some cool-minded Martian come to earth and check on the state of our music, he might play through 10,000 jazz records before he found one that wasn't in common 4/4 time."  The LP was supposed to be an experiment in unusual time signatures and was only released on the condition that he release a more conventional LP first. No one expected it to be a hit, but cool is cool, and to a non-jazz person, Time Out was about as cool as it got. Hey, it was cool enough that it was the first jazz LP I ever bought.

~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~

Listen;
Dave Brubeck Quartet - Take Five mp3 at Side One Track One 
Dave Brubeck Quartet - Blue Rondo à la Turk mp3 at Village Dance Radio 
Visit: 
Dave Brubeck at Wikipedia 
Dave Brubeck - Time Out liner notes by Steve Race at On Liner Notes Note: Two pesky pop-ups, but worth the read. 
Meter (music) entry at Wikipedia
Time Out - LP entry at Wikipedia