Dave Brubeck, American

I have been thinking about the passing of jazz great Dave Brubeck for the past couple days, and I want to say a little more about how he truly lived an American life.  Here is Brubeck from an interview in 2005:

Brubeck believed that jazz presented the best face of America to the world. 

"Jazz is about freedom within discipline," he said in a 2005 interview with The Associated Press. "Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States. 

"Many people don't understand how disciplined you have to be to play jazz. ... And that is really the idea of democracy — freedom within the Constitution or discipline. You don't just get out there and do anything you want."

Brubeck understood with the American Founders that freedom is not the same thing as license.  Jazz, a uniquely American form of music, still had to be composed and played within a certain defined structure.  The same thing goes for the People who came together to create the Constitution.

The Founders based the United States on the coeval principles of equality and liberty, but liberty understood rightly did not mean the "right to do wrong," as Lincoln would later call Stephen Douglas's idea that a majority can rightfully vote for slavery.  As Leo Strauss commented, the People who formed the Constitution were not a band of thieves.  The People were still beholden to working within the moral universe, the universe of the "laws of Nature and of Nature's God."  In this understanding, politics revolved around debate about the means to achieve already fixed ends; the People did not, however, have the right to debate about the ends themselves.

It is important to note that in his life Brubeck never had any drug or alcohol problems and was married to his wife Iola for more than 70 years.  Contrary to the supposed lessons dating back to the 1960s, Brubeck showed that an artist wasn't simply someone who rebelled against the current traditions or more of the culture.  They didn't simply create something ex nihilo.  Brubeck's joining of the Catholic Church in 1980 was an outward signal that he understood these things in a much more advanced way than did many of his contemporaries.