Dave Brubeck Passes Away At 91

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Dave Brubeck passed away today. He was born on December 6, 1920. He would have been 92 years old, had he lived until tomorrow, his birthday. One of the greatest Jazz composers & piano players who ever lived. From 1951 - 1967 the Dave Brubeck Quartet performed some of the best Jazz ever played. The New York Times has posted his obituary. Dave Brubeck was my favorite jazz musician & composer of them all. My three favorite pieces by him are "Take Five" (listen), "Pick Up Sticks" (listen) and "Blue Rondo à la Turk" (listen). Brubeck was notable for experimenting with uncommon time signatures throughout his career, writing notable songs 6/4, 5/4, 7/4, 13/4 and 9/8 times. Here's the video The White House produced when he was a 2009 Kennedy Center Honoree. Brubeck was widely recognized due to his long career. From his Wikipedia entry:

On April 8, 2008, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice presented Brubeck with a "Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy" for offering an American "vision of hope, opportunity and freedom" through his music. "As a little girl I grew up on the sounds of Dave Brubeck because my dad was your biggest fan," said Rice. The State Department said in a statement that "as a pianist, composer, cultural emissary and educator, Dave Brubeck's life's work exemplifies the best of America's cultural diplomacy." At the ceremony Brubeck played a brief recital for the audience at the State Department. "I want to thank all of you because this honor is something that I never expected. Now I am going to play a cold piano with cold hands," Brubeck stated. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced on May 28, 2008 that Brubeck would be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. The induction ceremony occurred December 10, and he was inducted alongside eleven other legendary Californians. In September 2009, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced Brubeck as a Kennedy Center Honoree for exhibiting excellence in performance arts. The Kennedy Center Honors Gala took place on Sunday, December 6 (Brubeck's 89th birthday) and was broadcast nationwide on CBS on December 29 at 9:00 pm EST. On September 20, 2009, at Monterey Jazz Festival, Brubeck was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree (D.Mus. honoris causa) from Berklee College of Music. On May 16, 2010, Brubeck was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree (honoris causa) from The George Washington University in Washington, DC. The ceremony took place on the National Mall. On July 5, 2010, Brubeck was awarded the Miles-Davis Award at the Montreal International Jazz Festival. In 2010, Bruce Ricker and Clint Eastwood produced a documentary Dave Brubeck: In His Own Sweet Way about Brubeck for Turner Classic Movies (TCM) to commemorate his 90th birthday in December 2010. Brubeck has become a supporter of the Jazz Foundation of America in their mission to save the homes and the lives of elderly jazz and blues musicians, including musicians that survived Hurricane Katrina. Brubeck supported the Jazz Foundation by performing in their annual benefit concert "A Great Night in Harlem" in 2006. Awards - Connecticut Arts Award (1987) - National Medal of Arts, National Endowment for the Arts (1994) - DownBeat Hall of Fame (1994) - Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1996) - Doctorate honoris causa University of Fribourg, Switzerland (2004) - Laetare Medal (University of Notre Dame) (2006) - BBC Jazz Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) - Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy (2008) - Inducted into California Hall of Fame (2008) - Kennedy Centre Honour (2009) - George Washington University Honorary Degree (2010)[31] - Honorary Fellow of Westminster Choir College, Princeton, New Jersey (2011) And for those of you who've been living under a rock, Take Five:

Those Are Air Bubbles

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D.B. Grady writing for the Atlantic:

When engineers working on the very first iPod completed the prototype, they presented their work to Steve Jobs for his approval. Jobs played with the device, scrutinized it, weighed it in his hands, and promptly rejected it. It was too big. The engineers explained that they had to reinvent inventing to create the iPod, and that it was simply impossible to make it any smaller. Jobs was quiet for a moment. Finally he stood, walked over to an aquarium, and dropped the iPod in the tank. After it touched bottom, bubbles floated to the top. "Those are air bubbles," he snapped. "That means there's space in there. Make it smaller."

Great Steve Jobs Quote from 1995

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Courtesy of John Siracusa:

Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You'd actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that 'I haven't built one of those but I could. There's one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I've built two other Heathkits so I could build that. Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.

Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot

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Touching story and thoughts from John Gruber:

After the WWDC keynote four months ago, I saw Steve, up close. He looked old. Not old in a way that could be measured in years or even decades, but impossibly old. Not tired, but weary; not ill or unwell, but rather, somehow, ancient. But not his eyes. His eyes were young and bright, their weapons-grade intensity intact. His sweater was well-worn, his jeans frayed at the cuffs. But the thing that struck me were his shoes, those famous gray New Balance 991s. They too were well-worn. But also this: fresh bright green grass stains all over the heels. Those grass stains filled my mind with questions. How did he get them? When? They looked fresh, two, three days old, at the most. Apple keynote preparation is notoriously and unsurprisingly intense. But not so intense, those stains suggested, as to consume the entirety of Jobs’s days. There is no grass in Moscone West.