To put Dave Brubeck in a box was an unwise thing to do. He'd just jump right out again, big, broad and strong, with those horn-rimmed glasses and that crazy, slightly cross-eyed smile. Call him cool, and he'd tell you that many of his jazz arrangements were so hot, they sizzled. Lump him with players of white west-coast jazz, and he'd object that he felt more black than white. Suggest he was influenced by the pelting, intellectual strain of bebop that took over jazz in the 1940s, and he would say nope, he didn't listen to it; he only ever wanted to do his own thing. Call him the usher of a new jazz age, put him on the cover of Time magazine, where he landed in 1954, and he was crestfallen. Duke Ellington deserved all that, he said, but not him.
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