Dave Brubeck (born 1920), who is considered the most widely acclaimed jazz musician of his time period, has been described as everything from mystical to methodical.

According to Robert Rice of the New Yorker, the combo led by jazz pianist Dave Brubeck during the 1950s and 1960s was "the world's best-paid, most widely travelled, most highly publicized, and most popular small group." While Brubeck can be considered the world's most widely acclaimed musician of his period, he is also quite possibly its most criticized, having been described as everything from mystical to methodical. Stanley H. White wrote in Jazz Journal in 1958 that Brubeck's "ability to improvise fluently on almost any given theme, and his ability to swing with both drive and imagination make him a jazz musician of singular merit"; two years later Joe Goldberg declared in Jazz Review "that jazz is not [Brubeck's] natural form of expression, but...