Ambassador of Cool

He received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1996, and three years later he was named an NEA Jazz Master, the nation's highest official honor for a jazz musician. Last year, he was designated a "Living Legend of Jazz" at a Kennedy Center ceremony and brought the sellout audience to its feet with his duet performance of "These Foolish Things" with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. He's on the selection committee for the Kennedy Center Honors but, strangely, has never received one himself. Oh, and Clint Eastwood is producing a documentary about his life.

From a One-Room Shack

Tall, lean and standing ramrod-straight, Brubeck extends his huge right hand by way of greeting. Here at the winter condo he and his wife, Iola, rent on Sanibel Island, Fla., Brubeck has just finished a new composition inspired by the photographer Ansel Adams. The manuscript is still on the electronic keyboard in the neat but nondescript living room that looks out on the Gulf of Mexico.

On the coffee table sits a book of Adams's photographs of the California landscape, which Brubeck knew as a boy. He talks about other projects -- an opera based on John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row," recent revivals of his classical choral works, upcoming dates with his quartet -- and you quickly get the idea that Brubeck is the least retiring 87-year-old you'll ever meet.

He says that whenever someone mentions retirement, he recalls the words of his good friend Duke Ellington: "Retire to what?"

Then, as he laughs, a mile-wide smile etches its way across his well-lined face. His dark brown eyes, no longer framed by the thick horn rims that were his signature style of the 1950s and '60s, are alternately gentle, fierce and deeply wise. He has the look of the tanned, leather-faced rancher he might have become if he hadn't found music -- or Iola.

They have been married for 65 years, and she helped Brubeck believe in himself when no one else did. She has written lyrics for many of his songs, and she sits in the wings at every one of his concerts.

"We lived in a corrugated tin one-room shack with no windows," Brubeck says of the hard times that lasted well into his 30s. They bathed their children in a stream and subsisted on dented cans of food from discount stores. He and his quartet traveled the country in a station wagon with the bass strapped on top. "We were so broke, God almighty."

But Brubeck kept playing his music, and little by little the whole world took notice.

On the day the Berlin Wall was built, Aug. 13, 1961, a West Berlin radio station broadcast Dave Brubeck's music all day long. It played one tune again and again, "Brandenburg Gate," which Brubeck composed after seeing the landmark that is a symbol of peace in Berlin. He wrote it during his State Department tour in 1958.

Three years ago, Brubeck returned to Poland and was honored at a formal dinner. Afterward, about 10 people came forward and said they had followed him by bus and train during his State Department tour 47 years earlier.

"Mr. Brubeck, you come to Poland, you did not bring jazz," one of them told him. "You brought the Empire State Building, you brought the Grand Canyon, you brought America."

A Young Musical Cowboy

Make no mistake: Dave Brubeck is still very much a working musician. He gives about 80 concerts a year and retains much of the force of the two-fisted keyboard style of his youth. His most recent recording, "Indian Summer," a reflective solo recital released last year, has been hailed as among the best albums of his career.