The Cross-Eyed Cowpoke At Carnegie Hall

That's one of his time signatures above the barn door.

In his own words: "As far as the polyrhythms are concerned a lot of that came from riding. When you’re on a ranch like that, you’re alone a lot and you’re sent for miles and miles on horseback. You either go crazy, or you start thinking. When I was riding around those hills, the sense of space and the sounds a horse’s hooves made affected me. Someone once asked me how it worked and the easiest way to explain is just for me to beat out those rhythms. You could be bored unless you have an imagination. So I'd always be thinking musically when I had jobs to pump water or ride horseback. I'd lie there under the gasoline motor that was vibrating and I'm singing rhythms against that."

Taught some pianny by his Mom, he's fudging music class at college when he meets Totally Smokin' Hot Babe Iola Whitlock [with one lucky dude, left - Ed.]. Sez she: "At the time we were married, Dave was in the army and he said to me ‘I don’t know what the future is going to be like at all, but I promise you one thing, you will never be bored.’ And he’s kept his promise.”

Spool forward to 1963, when I first hear his Greatests Hits, one of the handful of records in my parent's baffling collection, and he's gigging at the Carnegie Hall, fercrissakes. And here we hand over to Thom Jurek at the ever-unreliable Allmusic, who nails it, once and forever: "For all those who have a big axe to grind with Brubeck,  for all those who claim the band was only successful because they were predominantly white, or played pop-jazz, or catered to the exotica craze, or any of that, you are invited to have all of your preconceptions, tepid arguments, and false impressions hopelessly torn to shreds by one of the great live jazz albums of the 1960s."

Amen to that. I hate that "whitebread" dismissal. It's inverse racism. I hear more earthy authenticity in his playing than (say) Oscar Peterson's salon soirée swing. He makes supposedly difficult time signatures as natural as clopping hooves, or the arhythmic clatter of a water pump. He wrote some swell tunes, led great musicians, changed how we listen to music, and every note was a blast. I saw him late in his life, when he had to be helped across the stage. He was still having a blast.