R.I.P. the legendary jazz musician Dave Brubeck, who died today. He was best known for the 1959 album ‘Time Out’,  the first jazz album to sell a million copies, and ‘Take Five’, the biggest-selling jazz single of all time.

After studying with French composer Darius Milhaud in the 1940s Brubeck formed a number of jazz groups before settling with a quartet in the 1950s which included alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, bassist Gene Wright and drummer Joe Morello.  In 1958 they toured India and the Middle East as part of an American State Department ‘good will’ program during the cold war. It was on this tour that they came across music that used different time signatures to the standard 4/4 time. Music written as a result of the tour featured on the 1959 album ‘Time Out’, including ‘Take Five’ written by Paul Desmond in 5/4 time and ‘Blue Rondo a la Turk’ written by Brubeck in 9/8.

Dave Brubeck was named a Jazz Master by the American National Endowment for the Arts in 1999 and in 2009 he received a Kennedy Center Honor for his contribution to American culture.

A sunny Slovenian autumn day at Lake Bled.

At the Gusti di Frontiera Festival in Gorizia, Italy. Four days of food, wine and music from all over Europe.

In the delightful hilltop village of Loubejac in south-west France for an open air production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.  A really enjoyable and professional performance from travelling theatre group ‘Antic Disposition’.

In Paris for the Prokofiev opera ‘Love for Three Oranges’ at Opera Bastille. A great production by Gilbert Deflo, with added action from circus performers – which made it really entertaining.

Amazing Impressionist and Post Impressionist collections at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The museum is housed in the former Gare d’Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900 on the left bank of the river Seine. The collection includes mainly French paintings and sculpture from the mid nineteenth century to World War I. It has the largest collection of Impressionist and Post Impressionist art in the world, with works by Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Van Gogh amongst others.

Fascinating day exploring the ethnographic collections at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris.

The museum holds a fantastic collection of indigenous art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. It has a total of over a quarter of a million objects, of which about 3,500 are on display at any one time. I was particularly impressed with the Oceanic collection with fetish figures and masks from Micronesia, Papua New Guinea and Australasia.

With James Joyce in Trieste. Joyce lived in Trieste for many of the years between 1904 – 1920, working for some of the time as an English teacher at the Berlitz language school. Whilst in Trieste he wrote most of the stories in ‘Dubliners,’ as well as ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.

Great weekend in Florence for a Bartok double bill. Sublime performances of both the ballet ‘The Miraculous Mandarin’ and the opera ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ at the Teatro Comunale.

This was a joint production with Japan’s ‘Saito Kinen Festival’ and the combination of the sometimes acrobatic dance techniques from the Noism Dance Company with Maggio Dance made this a real spectacle.