Paul Desmond, Alto Saxophonist
With Dave Brubeck Quartet, Dies

By JOHN S. WILSON

Paul Desmond, whose alto saxophone was as essential to the Dave Brubeck Quartet as Mr. Brubeck's piano, died early yesterday at his home at 77 West 55th Street,. He was 52 years old.

The sound of Mr. Desmond's alto saxophone -- light, airy and dancing around the melody -- provided a striking contrast to the heavy, assertive quality of Mr. Brubeck's piano during the 17 years that they played together in the quartet.

A tall, thin man with a high forehead and a quizzical air, Mr. Desmond would curl himself into the curve of the piano while Mr. Brubeck was playing. Mr. Desmond folded his hands over his saxophone, peered over his glasses and looked like a benign stork. When he took his turn as soloist, his improvisations were warmly melodic and yet harmonically advanced.

Once, when he was asked where he fitted between the vertical, or harmonic, approach and the horizontal, or melodic, style, he replied, "I guess you could call me diagonal."

"I Thought He Was Nuts"

He first met Mr. Brubeck in an Army band in 1944. "We played together half an hour," Mr. Desmond recalled. "I thought he was nuts. I couldn't understand his harmonic approach."

After the war, they met again, jamming at the Geary Cellar in San Francisco. This time the rapport was immediate. "Everything fell into place," Mr. Desmond said. "A lot of things we've done since, we did then, immediately -- a lot of the counterpoint things -- and it really impressed me."

Mr. Desmond was part of a short-lived octet that Mr. Brubeck formed in the late 40's and, after a brief foray to New York, returned to California to work in bands led by Jack Fina and Alvino Rey before joining a trio that Mr. Brubeck was leading in 1951.

Although the other two members of the group -- that bassist and the drummer -- changed from time to time over the years, Mr. Desmond remained with Mr. Brubeck until the pianist broke up the quartet in 1967.

Mr. Desmond was born Paul Emil Breitenfeld in San Francisco on Nov. 25, 1924, the son of an organist and arranger who had played for silent movies and vaudeville acts. He took the professional name Desmond from a telephone book.

His original instrument was the clarinet, on which, he once recalled, "I could play entire Artie Shaw choruses." He switched to alto saxophone in 1943, just before he went into the Army and a year before he met Mr. Brubeck.

His partnership with Mr. Brubeck was a remarkable relationship in which each fed ideas to the other as they improvised, exchanges in which they sometimes amused themselves by working quotations from popular songs into passages that they traded back and forth.

Although Mr. Desmond did not compose very many pieces for the Brubeck quartet, one of his numbers, "Take Five," became the quartet's best known and most successful selection. Mr. Desmond said that he got the idea for the tune in Reno, when he was standing in front of a one-dollar slot machine.

"The rhythm of the machine suggested it to me," he said, "and I really only wrote it to get back some of the money I'd lost in the machine. That has now been accomplished."

When the Brubeck quartet broke up in 1967, Mr. Desmond announced that he was going to take several years off from playing to write a book. Eight years later he was still working on the book.

"It's largely a fraud," he conceded. "That's my cover story. I had thought of writing a book before I began hanging out at Elaine's, and found that most of the heavy writers there had Walter Mitty dreams about being jazz players."

In the decade since the Brubeck quartet broke up, Mr. Desmond had played only occasional concerts and clubs and had made a few records. He was not anxious to get back into full-time playing.

"If you want to stay in one place," he pointed out, "you work three or four nights a week in a dumb club for $10 and a sandwich. Or you get guys willing to travel and live in airports and Holiday Inns. The quartet did that for almost 20 years. That's why we broke up."

Mr. Desmond left no immediate survivors. Funeral arrangements remain incomplete last evening.

[Notes: The obituary was accompanied by a one-column photo of Desmond credited to Columbia Records. The next day The New York Times ran a small item announcing that Desmond had asked to be cremated. There would be no funeral service, but a private memorial service was to be held several weeks later. The Times also reported that Desmond had died of cancer.]

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