I’ve never been a jazz person. I listen to some jazz but I find most modern jazz to be “musician’s music”…music that is played primarily to demonstrate an individual musician’s chops. Inevitably, this boils down to a musican showing how fast he or she can play. Instrumental wanking for personal fulfillment is not my idea of the purpose of music.

But I love Dave Brubeck, and I specifically love “Time Out.” Now, I will grant you that this is like Wimpy saying he loves hamburgers. Any real jazz fan will tell you that this doesn’t represent any real musical taste, because everyone loves “Time Out,” but this is the album that pulled me –and millions of others — into listening to at least a little bit of other jazz.

I bought it when I was in my 20s, at a time when my musical tastes were changing and I was devouring albums by the dozens, but this one didn’t get my usual play-it-a-few-times-and-store-it-away treatment. I still have it in my digital collection and usually keep it on one of my portable players.

It has its share of difficult playing. The time signatures are unusual, with waltzes (in jazz?) and of course, the 5/4 time that made “Take Five” one of the most famous jazz songs of all time. And there are some sneaky-difficult passages…not difficult as in “fast,” but difficult as in “challenging.”

Underneath it all lies irresistible melody after melody. Modern jazz fans claim that the music’s triumph is in its ability to deconstruct a melody and put it back together. To me, though, jazz simply deconstructs, leaving behind a pile of rubble. I’m of the Chuck Berry school: “I’ve got no kick against modern jazz/unless they try to play it too darn fast/and lose the beauty of the melody/until it sounds just like a symphony.”

“Time Out” is older than me, and I’m not young. In fact, it just reached the 50th anniversary of its release. NPR has a bit on that.