"I still think, basically, it was a dubious idea at best," Desmond said, "but at that point we had three or four albums a year to get done, and we'd done all our tunes that we'd put together, and standards and originals of Dave 's and he said, 'Why don't we do this album and do all different time signatures?' And I said, 'Okay.' I was always argumentative. There are sheet music arrangements of "Take Five" for solo piano, brass band, chorus, accordion, guitar, flute choir, string orchestra, drum and percussion and-I swear-handbells. It would be all but impossible to know how many bands have performed the piece unlicensed and unauthorized. Only a country-by-country survey could confirm the number of authorized foreign versions. Nine-hundred-fifty-nine recorded versions have been licensed in the United States. The single record of the piece from the Dave Brubeck album Time Out was the first jazz instrumental to sell a million copies. It is ubiquitous in elevators, dentists offices and restaurants, and on internet and cable-system music channels. During halftime of a high school football game, I heard a band play it while marching in twenty-degree weather. It played the first eight bars of Paul Desmond's "Take Five.” I have heard 'Take Five" from the overhead speakers in a subway station in Mexico City, in the neighborhood Safeway while reaching for the Cheerios, at gas stations when I am filling the tank and from too many sidewalk saxophonists to count. The box did not play a Moravian folk song or a Dvorak melody. “In 1993, I was looking at tourist doodads in a little shop just off Betlemska’ in Prague when a woman behind me opened the lid of a small wooden music box.
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