Ambassador of Cool

After the war, Brubeck took graduate courses at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., from French composer Darius Milhaud, who encouraged his explorations of jazz voicings and polytonality, or music played in more than one key at a time.

Brubeck, who named his oldest son Darius, brought polytonality into jazz as a kind of intellectual experiment. He later added further complexities by introducing odd time signatures, such as the 5/4 of "Take Five" and the 9/8 of "Blue Rondo a la Turk."

In 1951, Brubeck formed a quartet with alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, whose sweet, lyrical tone was the opposite of the frenetic bebop style everyone else was copying. Desmond and Brubeck, who looked enough alike to be mistaken for brothers, had a rare musical compatibility. Each instinctively knew what musical path the other would take, and the result was a pleasing, yet challenging style of music that was utterly original. With Eugene Wright and Joe Morello, they stayed together as the most popular jazz group in the world through 1967, when Brubeck left to spend more time composing.

The quartet recordings, with polytonal tunes that sometimes went on for 10 minutes, weren't commercial in the least, and no one expected them to catch on with the public. When Brubeck recorded "Time Out," which didn't have a single tune in the standard 4/4 time of most jazz, Columbia Records executives tried to dissuade him from releasing it.

"You could hardly find a less likely formula for popularity than the one Brubeck followed early in his career," jazz historian Ted Gioia, the brother of NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, writes in an e-mail. "Despite all this, he managed to achieve a rare degree of fame and popularity. How did he pull this off? Mostly through the sheer brilliance and audacity of his musical vision."

Brubeck also hit on the novel formula, at the suggestion of his wife, of playing his music on college campuses. Jazz still carried the scent of the gutter in some circles, and there was something daring and liberating about performing it in the hallowed halls of academia.

Soon enough, though, as his records topped the jazz charts and "West Coast jazz" became a nationwide phenomenon, there came an inevitable backlash among musicians and critics. Brubeck didn't swing, they said. His playing was too stiff, his music was too fussy or else it was too bombastic, he sold too many records, he made too much money, he wasn't a bebopper, he wasn't from New York, he made the cover of Time before Duke Ellington. He was criticized, in some circles, for painting the historically black art of jazz with the pastel shades of California and classical music.

But since the early 1950s, Brubeck had been warmly received at black clubs and colleges throughout the South, and he routinely won popularity polls in black publications.

Brubeck is being honored this week for his work overseas, but he has helped open as many doors at home. In 1958, before leaving on the State Department trip, he was scheduled to make a tour of colleges in the South. He canceled 23 of 25 concerts when local officials refused to allow his bass player, Wright, the lone African American member of the quartet, to appear onstage with the rest of the group. Another time, Brubeck refused to play on a network television show when he realized Wright would not be shown on camera.

"I was aware in 1958 that we were being used in the Cold War propaganda battle," Brubeck has written in an unpublished autobiography, "and acutely aware of the irony that Eugene did not enjoy all the privileges that the rest of our group did in the U.S., particularly in the still segregated South."

Brubeck still recalls with an air of bemused rancor a tour he made in the Netherlands with Willie "The Lion" Smith, an early African American master of stride piano.

"Isn't it true," a Dutch journalist asked Smith, "that no white man can play jazz?"