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 del ...