In addition to his work with Brubeck, he led several groups and collaborated with Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Jim Hall, and Ed Bickert.

After years of chain smoking and poor health, Desmond succumbed to lung cancer in 1977 after a tour with Brubeck.

[3] His grandfather Sigmund Breitenfeld, a medical doctor, was born on 17 November 1857,[4] in Česká Kamenice in Bohemia in 1857; he emigrated to the US in 1885.

[7] However, Fred Barton, songwriter/arranger and Desmond's cousin, found extensive genealogical proof that both the Breitenfeld and Löwy families were Bohemian Jews.

[8] Desmond's mother Shirley was emotionally unstable throughout his upbringing, and appears to have suffered from obsessive–compulsive disorder and other mental illnesses.

[3] Starting in 1933, Desmond spent nearly five years living with relatives in New Rochelle, New York due to his mother's mental health problems.

Desmond began playing the clarinet at age twelve, and continued throughout his time at San Francisco Polytechnic High School.

After high school, Desmond enrolled at San Francisco State College where he majored in English.

While in college, Desmond began playing the alto saxophone, after being influenced by the likes of Lester Young and Charlie Parker.

For several weeks, he led a small jazz combo at the Band Box in Redwood City that included Dave Brubeck.

Desmond once told Marian McPartland of National Public Radio's Piano Jazz that he was taken aback by the chord changes which Brubeck introduced during that 1944 audition.

The success of the quartet led to a Time magazine piece on them in 1954, with the famous cover featuring Brubeck's face.

In June 1969 Desmond appeared at the New Orleans Jazz Festival with Gerry Mulligan, with favorable reactions from critics and audience members.

Unlike Brubeck, Mulligan shared much in common with Desmond, such as similar interests and humor, and both men had no shortage of addictions in their lives.

After some time spent inactive, Desmond was asked to play the Half Note in New York City in 1971 by Hall.

In their private lives Dave Brubeck and his family were very close to Paul Desmond, though the two men possessed very different personalities.

Desmond was also described as a womanizer who was unable to form (and was uninterested in maintaining) steady relationships with women, though he had no shortage of female companions throughout his life.

Desmond enjoyed reading works by the thinkers of his generation like Timothy Leary and Jack Kerouac, also dabbling in some LSD usage.

Clarinetist Perry Robinson recalls in his autobiography that Desmond would sometimes need a vitamin B12 shot just to go on playing during his later career.

Desmond produced a light, melodic tone on the alto saxophone, trying to sound, he said, "like a dry martini."

With a style that was similar to that of Lee Konitz, one of his influences, he quickly became one of the best-known saxophonists from the West Coast's cool school of jazz.

[20] His gift for improvised counterpoint is perhaps most evident on his two albums with baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan (Mulligan-Desmond Quartet and Two of a Mind).

In his playing Desmond was also notable for his ability to produce extremely high notes, the altissimo register, on his saxophone.