63. It's a Raggy Waltz. The Dave Brubeck Quartet

Thanks to a CD buying trip in Winnipeg with L for starting my love affair with Dave Brubeck.
This is so cool; there's a part in it (almost six minutes in, I think) where he seems to be playing in one tempo and it turns into another tempo. Actually the liner notes include an interview with Dave Brubeck where he listens to the recording of the performance, and he says, "Frankly, I don't know what I'm doing here. At first I'm in 2/4 or maybe it's 4/4 within 3/4 and then I got into double time. I'm going to have to listen to this more carefully and figure out exactly what it is that I was doing here." At least now I don't feel so bad about not knowing what was going on. Liner notes from another CD I have (Dave Brubeck Jazz Collection, Columbia C2K 64160) say that Brubeck had a great ear as a child but bad eyesight, so when his mother taught him to play the piano, he pretended to be reading the music. In his senior year as a music major at College of the Pacific in California, they discovered that he couldn't read music. The dean told him that he wouldn't graduate, but the composition and counterpoint professors convinced the dean to allow it; the dean agreed as long as Brubeck promised never to teach music. The most famous Brubeck piece is Take Five (used to great effect in the soundtrack of the movie Pleasantville), but this live stuff is pretty exciting.