Life of a maverick …

… Dave Brubeck's biography, reviewed by Russell Davies - The TLS. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 To jazz listeners and critics for whom bop had become the approved and obvious pathway to the future, that put him on the outside of a large and forbidding fence, the border of those badlands where only non-swinging, pseudo-classical music thrived. Curiously, it was Charles Mingus – bop-literate but not defined by that vocabulary – who pointed out the injustice of that banishment in an “Open Letter to Miles Davis” for Downbeat magazine. “He feels a certain pulse and plays a certain pulse which gives him pleasure and a sense of exaltation because he’s sincerely doing something the way he, Dave Brubeck, feels like doing it.” As for not swinging, Mingus pointed out, Brubeck “had the whole house patting its feet and even clapping its hands” at the Newport Jazz Festival.