Brubeck & Plato

Setting the Reading Mood

The Dave Brubeck Quartet (1967) • Wikipedia Commons

I love listening to music while I read. I’ve always done so, but recently, I’ve begun paring specific music with specific Great Books. The practice gets me in the right headspace for reading and also helps me to recall the books later on. I select an album or artist and listen to that exclusively while reading a particular book.

I’m currently reading Plato’s Republic and have settled on The Dave Brubeck Quartet as my musical accompaniment. I’m spending the entire month of September in The Republic, so my plan is to listen to as much of the Brubeck catalog as possible while reading.

Why Dave? I had a friend in high school who drove a Nissan Maxima with a 6-speaker Bose stereo system. At that time, Bose bestowed a CD of tracks to show off the system. One of the songs on that CD was Take Five by The Dave Brubeck Quartet. It sounded so good on that stereo.

In 2019, I took 52 weeks and listened to a different jazz artist each one of those weeks. One artist on that list was Brubeck. I instantly recalled Take Five and enjoyed listening to his other pieces.

For me, jazz reminds me of a period of deep intellectual curiosity in my life. During college at The University of Georgia, I spent countless evenings studying at the Jittery Joe’s coffee shop in Athens, GA. They always had jazz playing on the speakers. When I think of pursuing the intellectual life, I think of those evenings drinking coffee, reading, and listening to jazz.

Plato is hard for me. I’ve decided to read his complete works and I’m near the midpoint, but it usually takes me reading a particular dialogue three times before I begin to understand it. Prior to The Republic, I’ve been listening to Apple playlists called Relax, Focus, or Calm. I like them, but I wanted something different for The Republic.

Each morning, I wake up about an hour before my family, brew an absurd amount of coffee, turn on music on an old Bose Wave radio (that Maxima encounter at play), prepare my 0.38mm Muji pen, and open my book. As Dave Brubeck plays and the aroma of coffee invites me in, I’m taken back to the joy of reading and learning. The atmosphere tells my brain to get ready. It’s about to get exciting.

And it has been exciting. Despite the difficulty, I really enjoy Plato. The ah-ha moments more than make up for the frustration of not understanding during initial encounters. The more dialogues I read, the more I’m able to connect Plato’s ideas across his works and see how some dialogues actually answer his other dialogues.

My hope is that each time I hear Brubeck in the car, in a store, or in a coffee shop, I’ll think of The Republic and what I learned from Plato.