HARTFORD, Conn. — Jazz composer and pianist Dave Brubeck, whose pioneering style in pieces such as “Take Five” caught listeners’ ears with exotic, challenging rhythms, has died. He was 91.

Brubeck, who lived in Wilton, died Wednesday morning at Norwalk Hospital of heart failure after being stricken while on his way to a cardiology appointment with his son Darius, said his manager Russell Gloyd. Brubeck would have turned 92 today.

Brubeck had a career that spanned almost all American jazz since World War II. He formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951 and was the first modern jazz musician to be pictured on the cover of Time magazine — on Nov. 8, 1954 — and he helped define the swinging, smoky rhythms of 1950s and ’60s club jazz.

George Wein, a jazz pianist and founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, had known Brubeck since he first worked in Wein’s club in Boston in 1952.

“No one else played like Dave Brubeck,” he said. “No one had the approach to the music that he did. That approach communicated.”

Brubeck “represented the best that we can have in jazz,” he added. “The quality of his persona helped every other jazz musician.”

The seminal album “Time Out,” released by the quartet in 1959, was the first million-selling jazz LP, and is still among the best-selling jazz albums of all time. It opens with “Blue Rondo a la Turk” in 9/8 time — nine beats to the measure instead of the customary two, three or four beats.

A whirlwind of piano and saxophone based loosely on a Mozart piece, “Blue Rondo” eventually intercuts between Brubeck’s piano and a more traditional 4/4 jazz rhythm.

The album also features “Take Five” — in 5/4 time — which became the group’s signature theme and even made the Billboard singles chart in 1961. It was composed by Brubeck’s longtime saxophonist, the late Paul Desmond.

“When you start out with goals — mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically — you never exhaust that,” Brubeck said in 1995. “I started doing that in the 1940s. It’s still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements.”

After service in World War II and study at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., Brubeck formed an octet including Desmond on alto sax and Dave van Kreidt on tenor, Cal Tjader on drums and Bill Smith on clarinet. The group played Brubeck originals and standards by other composers, including some early experimentation in unusual time signatures. The groundbreaking album “Dave Brubeck Octet” was recorded in 1946.

The group evolved into the quartet, and 10 years later, Joe Morello on drums and Eugene Wright on bass joined with Brubeck and Desmond to produce “Time Out.”

In later years, Brubeck composed music for operas, ballet, even a contemporary mass.

In 1988, he played for Mikhail Gorbachev, at a dinner in Moscow that then-President Ronald Reagan hosted for the Soviet leader.

“I can’t understand Russian, but I can understand body language,” said Brubeck, after seeing Gorbachev tapping his foot.

“That’s the beauty of music,” he said in 1992. “You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn’t make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz.”

In 2006, the University of Notre Dame gave Brubeck its Laetare Medal, awarded each year to a Catholic “whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the church and enriched the heritage of humanity.”

At the age of 88, in 2009, Brubeck was still touring, in spite of a viral infection that threatened his heart, including a stop at that September’s Detroit Jazz Festival — his final appearance in metro Detroit. (He was initially scheduled for the jazz festival in 2011, but bowed out because of health issues.)

In 1996, he won a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys and was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient in 2009.

Brubeck said the Kennedy Center award would have delighted his late mother, Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck, a classical pianist who was initially disappointed by her youngest son’s interest in jazz. (He added that she had lived long enough to come to appreciate his music.)

Numerous jazz musicians were to participate in a birthday concert in Brubeck’s honor that had been scheduled for today in Waterbury. The show will go on as a tribute concert. Darius, an acclaimed pianist, was among those to perform, along with saxophonist Richie Cannata.

“What he brought was a new meter to jazz,” Cannata said. “I was probably in high school or elementary school when I first heard that 5/4 feel. I said, ‘Wow, what is that?’ I was totally influenced. It made me stand up and pay attention to another whole feel of music.”

Brubeck and his wife, Iola, had five sons and a daughter.

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