If everybody gets their 15 minutes of fame, then Dave Brubeck - who died this week aged 91 - owes some folks. In a prolific career that has seen the jazz pianist record, by his own count, more than 100 albums, that would come to at least 4,000 minutes of recorded music alone, he told the Catholic News Service in this 1996 interview.
One of his latest recordings is To Hope! A Celebration: A Mass in the Revised Roman Ritual. But the composition resulted in more than just more minutes of fame for Brubeck.
It is what brought him into the Catholic Church. He wrote it in 1980 and finally got to record it in 1995.
Brubeck was also featured on Bending Towards the Light ... A Jazz Nativity, a live recording of the annual Christmas jazz pageant performed at Lincoln Centre in New York. He also sat in on an album by fellow jazz pianist Marian McPartland.
And despite this output, there's stuff that Brubeck hasn't recorded -- never mind what alternate takes may be in different record company archives.
First among the unrecorded works is the piece he wrote for Pope John Paul II's Mass at Candlestick Park in San Francisco during the pope's 1987 visit to the United States.
Brubeck talked to CNS about his career, what has shaped his perspective and about his decision to become a Catholic while working on To Hope.
"I was never converted. I wasn't anything. My mother baptized my two brothers Presbyterians, but she forgot to do it for me,'' he said.
Brubeck was commissioned to do the composition by Our Sunday Visitor, a national Catholic weekly newspaper.
``I told them I didn't want to do it, that I wasn't a Catholic and I didn't know anything about the Mass,'' Brubeck said.
FULL STORY Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck takes five to talk about music (CNS)