In all his extensive discography, Dave Brubeck cited the albums Jazz at Oberlin and Jazz at the College of the Pacific as his favourites – “I think that's the most inventive I've heard Paul on record”, Brubeck told me in 2002. For my money, Jazz at Oberlin edges it, yet 2 March, 1953 was one of these nights when the portents did not look good: “Lloyd was very ill, and had a fever that night, Paul and I were okay, Crotty was… well, I don't think he was well either that night”, said Brubeck. Yet saxophonist and pianist rose to the occasion, their playing that night simply inspired – the better Desmond played, the better Brubeck played, and vice versa, and in all fairness, Crotty and Davis sensed something special was going on and lifted their playing too. Probably the best track on the album is ‘The Way You Look Tonight”, which uses the arrangement by Brubeck for his Octet (the Dave Brubeck Octet OJC-101), an ensemble that was far ahead of its time (1946-49) while Brubeck was studying at Mills College under Darius Milhaud. The ensemble included Desmond, although he was not studying at Mills, and both Desmond and Brubeck throw themselves into the contrapuntal complexities of the arrangement with relish, both soloing with enormous invention and creativity – Desmond, whose melodic logic remained untroubled by the brisk tempo, and Brubeck, whose solo emerges from a masterfully swinging episode to clamber up the knotty grapevine of rhythmic complexity, exemplify the creative duality that was at the core of making this album special. But it's Desmond who steals the show, as Brubeck selflessly acknowledges. It is the most inventive you'll hear this great American saxophonist on record – he's on fire. Be it the ballads ‘Stardust' and ‘These Foolish Things', the latter moving in and out of double time, or the uptempo ‘Perdido' with its Bach-like contrapuntal invention or 'How High The Moon', this is the art of jazz improvisation at its highest level, inspirational in its creativity yet effortless in its realisation.