Michael Colgrass was a serious composer, but he also knew how to make audiences “laugh out loud,” his wife says.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Toronto musician died at 87 on Tuesday after a battle with cancer, Ulla Colgrass said.

She said the American-born music writer and educator wouldn’t want people to mourn his loss, but rather connect with the joy he tried to spread through his music.

“People always think, oh, composing is very serious business,” said Ulla Colgrass, a music journalist. “He would write music that was outright funny sometimes.”

Born in Brookfield, Ill., on April 22, 1932, Colgrass fell in love with music upon discovering Chicago’s jazz scene as a child.

He enrolled in University of Illinois as a percussion student, but was about to drop out after finding the curriculum paled in comparison to his gigs at night, his wife recalled. A teacher told him if he was so unsatisfied with the school’s repertoire, he should write music of his own.

Having got his start as a Chicago jazz drummer, Colgrass won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1978 for Deja Vu, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic.

After graduating, he moved to New York to become a freelance composer, supporting himself by playing percussion for audiences on Broadway and in clubs with Dizzy Gillespie. Colgrass was well known for his compositions for wind ensembles, and wrote music for orchestras in Toronto, Ottawa, Boston, Washington and San Francisco.

Ulla Colgrass said her husband blended his jazz and classical influences to hone a distinctive “whimsical” style. He also developed a system to teach children to write music through graphics, which he shared at schools in Toronto and Nova Scotia.

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But even as his star rose on the international stage, Colgrass never achieved the same recognition in Canada as he did south of the border, Ulla Colgrass said.

“The joke is that in the U.S., he’s Superman. In Canada, he’s Clark Kent,” she laughed.

Colgrass detailed his arrival in Toronto in his 2010 autobiography Michael Colgrass: Adventures of an American Composer. (The title, wrote Star freelance columnist William Litter in 2016, was apparently the choice of the publisher, not Colgrass who, though American by birth and background, resided in Toronto for the past 40-odd years and regarded himself as an adopted Canadian.)

His border crossing took place in 1970. As he tells it, “Crime was at its apex at the time in New York and (wife) Ulla and I were wondering where to live. We both like cities and happened to see a 60 Minutes special on Toronto, with its low crime rate, multiculturalism and plenty of parks. We liked what we saw.

“Maureen Forrester (the great Canadian contralto) became my sponsor. Our son Neal’s class at school was like the UN, which we really liked, and I began to get commissions from the CBC, the Toronto Symphony and the National Arts Centre Orchestra. So we stayed.”

A passionate music teacher, Colgrass would spend hours with young students, regardless of whether they could pay for the sessions, Ulla Colgrass said.

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“To him, they were as important as a rehearsal with the Boston Symphony,” she said. “He wanted them to develop their own voice.”

Colgrass is survived by his wife and their son, Neal.

“Listen to his music, and wish him a good trip, wherever he is,” said Ulla Colgrass.