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Paul Desmond Solo on Take Five (25 Great Sax Solos) sheet music, Noten, partitura, spartiti, 楽譜, 乐谱
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Born to a German father and an Irish mother, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond (November 25, 1924, San Francisco, California, United States – May 30, 1977, Manhattan, New York, United States) received his first notions of music from his father, who for some time had been playing the organ in a silent cinema to accompany the scenes of the films.
Later he acted as an arranger for dance orchestras. Desmond studied at San Francisco Polytechnic and State College, where she earned a degree in clarinet, an instrument that had always fascinated her. It was in 1950 when he decided to adopt the alto saxophone as his definitive instrument and with which he had his first dabbling with professional music within Jack Fina’s group.
Influenced by the maestro, Johnny Hodges and above all by the sound of Pete Brown”s saxophone, he went to the call, ten years later, of the pianist Dave Brubeck, with whom he remained for a whopping seventeen years and whom he had known since 1943. In that group, Paul Desmond was the most talented musician of all and contributed essentially to the success of the band with his characteristic melodic style, of great purity and full of vigor and sweetness at the same time. His contribution to Dave Brubeck”s great albums, especially in the extraordinary song: “Take Five” for Columbia recorded in 1962 with the album “Time Out” was extraordinary and from then on, Desmond was recognized as the alma mater of the Brubeck quartet.
Outside the context of Brubeck”s group, Paul Desmond recorded, not without some Brubeck”s displeasure, some extraordinary albums with baritone sax Gerry Mulligan and guitarist Jim Hall. He also recorded several albums to his name, mainly when the quartet disbanded. In the seventies, Paul Desmond almost disappeared from the jazz music scene due to his endemic attacks of laziness, his problems with alcohol. Also, due to the appearance of the first symptoms of the disease that would take his life: lung cancer.
In 1972, he reappeared briefly alongside Dave Brubeck at the Newport Jazz Festival. He decided to write his own autobiography but again laziness prevented him from going beyond the first chapter. In 1974 he settled in the famous “Half Note” in New York with his own quartet where night after night he delighted his many followers.
An underrated saxophonist until very recently, today critics recognize what he denied him in life: being one of the great jazz musicians of the entire West Coast of the United States and a master in the art of improvisation, his sound being recognizable from the first notes. Endowed with a fine sense of humour, (Desmond”s pseudonym, he looked it up in a telephone directory), he left all his money to the Red Cross, his Steinway piano to Bradley”s club and specified in his will that his body be cremated because, literally, he did not want to be a monument on the way to the airport.
In New York, the highways that lead to the various airports pass in front of several cemeteries.