Take five plus many more

Early this month jazz great Dave Brubeck was awarded the Ben Franklin Award by the the State Department for public diplomacy. Not a hallow trophy by any stretch, the award recognized two things: one, a living legend and two, the power jazz music strikes universally.

Mr Brubeck is an old man. Eighty-seven, to be exact. The above photograph was taken in 2007. Two years ago I had the 'once-in-a-lifetime' pleasure of hearing him play live at Carnegie Hall during his aptly titled tour, Take Five Plus Eighty. Bill Cosby opened the show and it was a pleasurable evening; especially watching Take Five, one of my favorite songs, being performed by the old man as lively as heard on the radio.

My reason for reiterating his senior citizenship is simple. Mr Brubeck is here among us and deserves the laurels whilst he can smell them. Am glad the State Department, which currently lacks the art of diplomacy, was wise enough to honour Mr Brubeck's contribution to democracy and music while he is still alive and kicking.

He said of former Soviet blocs, "If you got caught [listening to jazz] you lost your identification cards, you could never get a good job...never go to school...to the university, because you loved jazz. Why? Because freedom that they wanted to stop and jazz was that voice of freedom and it still is."

Mr Brubeck is correct about the freedom quality of jazz still resonating with young people. Even though the genre doesn't crack the Top 40 charts, as a jazz fan am continually surprised by the number of young foreigners who love the music. In fact, I've met more foreign peers than fellow Americans who enjoy jazz as much as they do hip-hop or rock-and-roll. Several of them come from former Communist countries or regimes with anti-American/Western sentiments.

Mr Brubeck's first State Department tour was in '58 at the request of President Eisenhower (Brubeck served in Patton's army in WWII) where he played freedom in such countries as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, among others. He toured again in Eastern Europe on behalf of the Department in '71. In presenting the award, Condoleezza Rice said, "Thank you for your patriotism and leadership in representing America by introducing the language, the sounds, and the spirit of jazz to new generations around the world."

Now if only the bitch could heed those very words.