During college in 1940, while working as a summer cowhand on the family’s Northern California cattle ranch, Dave Brubeck asked his father’s permission to take a job playing jazz at a San Francisco night club. Confounded by the idea, his father shook his head and replied, “I can’t understand why you would want to spend time in a dark and noisy and smoky place, when you could be out here with me in the fresh air with beautiful country all around you.”

By 1954, after many appearances in dark, smoky clubs as well as brightly-lit concert halls all around the U.S.A., 34-year-old jazz pianist Dave Brubeck was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Modern jazz, a movement he had helped to spearhead, was the craze of the nation, and Brubeck was the face of this new “cool” music. He had come a long way from his father’s cattle ranch.

Now 88, Dave Brubeck has remained for many music fans the major icon of the modern jazz movement. He composes and plays passionately with his quartet, who will perform Sunday, August 2, at a major jazz bash brunch, a celebration and fundraiser in Edgartown for the Vineyard YMCA.

In a peppy yet relaxed telephone voice from his home in Connecticut, Dave speaks with fervor about his current creative projects, several of which are secret but will roll out soon into production. Though set back for several months this spring with an illness, he announces gleefully, “I’ve gotten great reports from my doctors, and now I’m back and full of energy.” He has played three gigs in years past on the Vineyard (at the Hot Tin Roof) and is anxious to appear again for Vineyard jazz fans.

Though his father was not musical and had “no appreciation for jazz,” Dave’s mother was a classically trained musician who played several hours every day, mostly from the classical repertory. She gave piano lessons in their home on the ranch and also instructed her children. As a boy, Dave was full of melodies, but he had difficulty learning how to read music from the printed page. Instinctively his ear copied the chord sequences in the Chopin Etudes or Bach Preludes he heard his mother play, and he found he could bypass note reading and reproduce the music directly on the keyboard by using his ear and his hands.

When he matriculated to the College of the Pacific with plans to become a veterinarian and follow through on his father’s hope for him to take over the ranch, Dave was soon persuaded by the head of the zoology department to change to a musical curriculum. Professor Arnold explained, “Brubeck, your mind’s not here. It’s across the lawn in the conservatory. Please go there. Stop wasting my time and yours.”

Admired at the conservatory for his vast and imaginative talent, Brubeck was nonetheless nearly expelled when it was discovered that he still could not read music very well. His graduation was approved only after he promised never to teach music.

Drafted into the military after commencement in 1942, Dave served in George Patton’s Third Army. He volunteered to play piano at Red Cross functions and soon established The Wolfpack, one of the first integrated bands in the American armed forces.

After the war, Dave returned to musical studies at Mills College, where he came under the influence of the eminent French composer Darius Milhaud. Milhaud did not encourage a classical piano career for the gifted Brubeck, but he urged Dave to pursue studies of orchestration and the fugue form, skills he has used throughout his amazing career.

In 1952 he formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet, featuring Paul Desmond on saxophone. The group began a long and vigorous tenure at San Fransisco’s Black Hawk nightclub, where word soon spread that the Brubeck Quartet was pioneering into new musical realms, a clear divergence from the big band swing sound. Dave recalls no out-and-out musical epiphanies, but he knew he and his boys were on the right track when some of the big band leaders of the day came to the Black Hawk to hear his new music and said it sounded interesting.

A series of college tours brought the Brubeck sound out of jazz clubs and into large college concert halls, where university students embraced the new contemporary jazz and bought truckloads of  33 RPM albums with titles, such as Jazz at Oberlin (1953), Jazz at College of the Pacific (1953) and his first major label success, Columbia Records’ Jazz Goes to College (1954). The 1954 Time cover and article detailed the career of a young man whose musical visions had helped change jazz forever.

In 1959 the album Time Out appeared, and jazz has never been the same since. With daring new time signatures Take Five (4/5), Blue Rondo a la Turk (9/8), Three To Get Ready (3/4 and 4/4), and Pickup Sticks (6/4), Time Out astonished listeners and went platinum in no time.

When asked what prompted him to move into such unexplored territory in jazz, Dave says, “I always admired Duke Ellington, especially what he did on Cottontail, and Art Tatum, pushing the harmonic picture new places. I looked at other guys who were going outside the box.”

Time Out, now celebrating it’s 50th anniversary year, has taken many jazz musicians with it outside the box, and the album has remained a major benchmark in the canon of Western musical achievement. How does it feel to have your work acknowledged solidly as classic art? “It feels great!” Dave exclaims. “And I love it that many younger musicians are playing my music and taking inspiration from it.”

In particular, Maestro Brubeck admires the 24-year-old jazz pianist Taylor Eigsti, who, he feels, is pushing the new frontiers of jazz to delightful effects. “He’s the most amazing talent I’ve ever come across.”

The formidable corpus of The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s albums continued to expand from Time Out and its immediate follow-up albums, Time Further Out (1961), Time in Outer Space (1962 — dedicated to John Glenn), Time Changes (1963) and Time In (1965).

In 1967, Dave disbanded the group and went on to explore larger compositions, including The Light in the Wilderness (1968), an oratorio on the teachings of Jesus, Gates of Justice (1969), inspired by the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a cantata The Truth is Fallen (1971), honoring the victims of the Kent State and Jackson State killings.

Dave is very humble in acknowledging his own uncompromising posture on civil rights in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, particularly when he defended his African American colleagues during concert tours and cancelled appearances if all were not treated equally.

“I did as much as anybody could do — just stand up for equality,” he says with self-effacing simplicity.

And now that an African American is in the White House, Dave commends jazz musicians for their historic role in breaking barriers, one by one, gig by gig, to pave the way for more equal rights in America.

In the early 1970s, Dave formed a group with three of his sons — Darius on keyboards, Dan on drums, and Chris on electric bass or bass trombone — known as Two Generations of Brubeck. They toured and recorded very successfully. In 1976 the original quartet joined for a 25th anniversary concert, a year before the death of Paul Desmond.

Since then, the Dave Brubeck Quartet has reformed and continues to record and travel, visiting 80 cities a year. In 2006 the Monterey Jazz Festival commissioned Brubeck’s Cannery Row Suite, a jazz opera drawn from John Steinbeck’s novel and with libretto by Dave’s wife Iola, who has also been his personal secretary, manager and lyricist since 1942.

In addition to the National Medal of Arts (1994), induction into the DownBeat Hall of Fame (1994), a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1996), an honorary doctorate from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland (2004), and numerous other awards, Dave received the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy in 2008.

Though Brubeck’s initial quest for musical inspirations led him from God’s country — his father’s sprawling Northern California cattle ranch — into the dark city nightclubs of San Francisco and many other dicey urban venues, Dave found what he was looking for when he left his father’s ranch and has brought it over the decades to hundreds of millions of fans. Clearly, his sometimes whimsical artistic imagination has always been supported by the rock-solid integrity of his conscience. Dave Brubeck has always taken the high road. Fortunately for Islanders, our visitors, and the YMCA, this weekend that road leads to Edgartown and a fabulous seaside concert.

Thanks, Mr. Brubeck. It was a privilege talking to you. Now may we ask you to take it from the top?

The Dave Brubeck Quartet performs at the second annual Sunday Brunch and All That Jazz on Sunday, August 2 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Edgartown home of Jim and Susan Swartz. Tickets are $350. The event is a benefit for the YMCA. Call 508-696-7171 extension 71 for tickets or purchase through ticketsmv.com.