Dave Brubeck was a music major who could not sight-read, a cattle rancher’s son who faked his way through his mother’s classical piano lessons by ear, and a graduate who was only allowed his degree after promising never to teach. This episode traces how that same student went on to record the first jazz album to sell over a million copies, land on the cover of Time magazine, and rewrite the way listeners experience musical time. From Concord and Ione, California, to Patton’s Third Army and the racially integrated Wolf Pack band, to graduate study under Darius Milhaud and a clash with Arnold Schoenberg, the early chapters explain where his stubborn, intuitive approach came from.

The conversation then follows the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s college-campus strategy, the landmark Jazz at Oberlin recording, the 1954 Time cover that Duke Ellington delivered to his hotel room, and Brubeck’s fierce defense of bassist Eugene Wright, including the cancellation of 22 Southern tour dates in 1960. A State Department tour through Poland, Turkey, India and Iraq brought back the odd-meter rhythms that became Time Out in 1959, an album Columbia only released after Brubeck agreed to record Gone with the Wind as insurance. Critics panned it; the public made Take Five the best-selling jazz single of all time. The episode closes with his 70-year marriage to Iola, The Real Ambassadors, his sacred works like The Gates of Justice, and a life that ran to one day shy of his 92nd birthday.

• Why counterpoint and harmony saved Brubeck’s college career when sight-reading could not
• How a Red Cross piano performance kept him off the front lines and led to the integrated Wolf Pack band
• The Time magazine cover, Duke Ellington, and the moment Brubeck said it should have been you
• Time Out, Take Five in 5/4, Blue Rondo a la Turk in 9/8, and the executives who thought it would flop
• Cantatas, Catholicism, six children, and an asteroid named 5079 Brubeck