I had dinner on Sunday with a friend of mine who is the daughter of a guitarist who played quite a bit with the late Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and my favorite jazz musician ever. She’d recently been interviewed by Doug Ramsey, who is at work on a biography of Desmond, so we got to chatting about his life and music. Then we strolled around the corner to a Japanese restaurant, and just as we were sitting down, we noticed that the background music was “Le Souk,” the last track on the first side of the Brubeck Quartet’s Jazz Goes to College, the very first jazz album I ever heard. (My father owned a battered copy which I found in his record cabinet some 35 years ago, thereby changing my life beyond recognition…but that’s another story for another day.)
We both heard it at exactly the same moment. Then my friend looked at me, grinned, and said, “Paul’s here.”