The 5/4ness of it all

Sir Patrick Moore and David Brubeck died today, at 92 and 89.  Both important to me when I was a kid.  Here's Sir Patrick's notice:

After a short spell in hospital last week, it was determined that no further treatment would benefit him, and it was his wish to spend his last days in his own home, Farthings, where he today passed on, in the company of close friends and carers and his cat Ptolemy.

I like the quiet dignity of that, with its edge of  dry humor in the namings.  I met him in Washington, D.C., when I was in high school, when he made an appearance at a meeting of the British Interplanetary Society.  (I was undoubtedly the only nerd at B-CC H.S. who wore the rocketship pin of that august body.)  A quiet and friendly man,  I think a little embarrassed at the fuss being made over him.  We talked a little about telescopes – or I tried to talk.  He might have been the first famous person I ever met whom I met on a basis of shared personal interests. We both had Newtonian reflecting telescopes, not so common then.

I never met Brubeck, but I listened to him a lot.  Records, of course, but also at a schoolkids' concert at Constitution Hall.  I wore the grooves off Take Five, though my fixation was with his quartet's sax man Paul Desmond – and after I turned 18 I sought his groups out in crowded bars in Washington and New York. 

When Brubeck got a medal in Washington a couple of years ago, President Obama said, "You can’t understand America without understanding jazz, and you can’t understand jazz without understanding Dave Brubeck." and I think he did know what he was talking about.  If you can't hear a 5/4 beat and smile, there's something you don't know about America in the past century.

And just now, Diana Kraal started singing to that beat on NPR behind me.  Holy cow, as they say in India.

Joe