Paul Desmond, alto saxophonist, recently died of lung cancer at his apartment in New York City. He was 52 years old.

Born Paul Emil Breitenfeld, Desmond was such an important factor in the growth of what we now call modern jazz that to mention his feats would be superfluous. "Oh, had you told me he wrote Take Five I would have known who you were talking about," was how one non-jazz person put it. Yes, Desmond wrote Take Five, perhaps the hottest straight jazz recording ever. (It was the first to go gold and it still sells for others like George Benson.)

Paul was a member of the Dave Brubeck Quartet that made such an impact in the 1950s. His working title for an autobiography was How Many Of You Are There in The Quartet?, a favorite question of stewardesses in the quartet's many cross-country tours. That should give you an idea of Paul's dry sense of humor.

Paul was a very personal man. His interviews were few and mostly filled with wisecracks that were meant to please his interviewer and audience. He was as human a being as ever graced the concert stage.

On stage his flights were the antithesis of Brubeck's. Where Dave could often be heavy-handed, Desmond was light and airy.

"He was the true creative jazz musician," according to Brubeck. "He hated to play the melody and avoided it wherever possible." The last date the quartet played was February 4, 1977 at New York's Avery Fisher Hall. "Paul's legs could not stand a second encore," Dave said. "His hemoglobin count was too low and he shouldn't have been out of bed. But he came and played superbly, including duets with me. He had some trouble with the long phrases, but he played the concert."

One observer at the concert did note that Paul was taking two and sometimes three breaths to run a phrase that he usually did in one great gasp, but then that observer knew about the lung cancer that was rapidly destroying him. He began undergoing radiation treatments in May of last year when the tumor was first discovered. "He had swollen feet," his lawyer and friend Noel Silverman said. "He even joked about that. He felt that if he had an operation it would be worse than it he tried to treat it.

The details of his musical life have been documented by those more adroit at biography than this writer. Dave and Paul first met in California and their beginning experiments did not make it musically. Then in the late '40s an octet was formed. (Greater details can be found in Feather's Encyclopedias and in an interview with the quartet which appeared in db, March 25, 1976.) In that interview Paul stated his musical philosophy. "Dave let me create my own catastrophies in my own time. (I would) crawl out on a limb, set one line against another and try to match them, bring them closer together."

Paul's will forbade any memorial. Nothing was left to any music schools to fund any chair. He told Silverman, "There are enough bad saxophone players in the world already." That was not his true attitude of course. He was always helpful to anyone who approached him for advice. His proudest moment was not Take Five or even the beautiful ballad Wendy that he recently penned. He talked most of the beginning of the "duet phase," when he was aboard Ihe S. S. Rotterdam on a jazz cruise blowing for the Indonesian stewards and other shipboard help.

Paul's alto was left to Dave's son Michael who has had difficulty communicating with others, but who never encountered such with Desmond. His whole life was built around his friends and his music. Paul wanted no part of any kind of funeral service. His body was cremated with the ashes to be scattered over tho Big Sur country, close to his San Franciso birthplace.

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