[Dixielandjazz] Brubeck reading music

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Dave Brubeck said he had problems at music academy because he couldn't read music.  This is on a documentary film about him made a few years ago. He was allowed to continue because he could actually read music and orchestrations he had himself written. It might have been Darius Milhaud who spoke up for him. 
I don't myself try to compose, I trained as a classical singer and suffer from a form of musical dyslexia.  Put a score in front of me and I can do nothing, unless I know in advance what it sounds like. I can then see the corrections and why this note in my memory needs to be adjusted.  
I'm not dyslexic with regard to words and letters, I work on reference book entries and as a text editor! I can however sympathise deeply with dyslexics due to my own experience with musical notation.  Somegody affected amazement that I could pick up complex melodic lines by ear, but it's actually hard for me to credit people mastering complex scores. And there are people who can pick up and play harmonisations on the piano, and transcribe no bother! My one friend who did this most amazingly was a surgeon. I can sing bop harmonies like a horn-player, I have a spatial feeling for them, they make sense to me. This is no claim to merit, there are people who can do all that and read and can't deliver a decent chorus-length solo. 
I believe there have been studies in non-reading. 
The interesting thing about the famous non-reader Pavarotti is that he had an idiomatic awareness of some music probably at odds with the discipline of notation. Of course he did need teachers to tell him not to try singing some music, to concentrate on doing what probably nobody else could -- unless they learned from him.  This of course is one thing he has in common with the fathers of jazz. 

       
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