]I really don't know what that means. How do you understand a beat? How can music make sense or not make sense? These are actually good questions. The second is pretty much the one Fozzie Bear asks at the beginning of The Muppets Peter and the Wolf, but that only adds to its creds as a good question. The way you understand a beat is exactly the way the kids on American Bandstand did..."I'll give it an 85, Dick -- it's got a good beat, you can dance to it." Or, if it doesn't have a good beat, which you understand by how well you can dance to it, you give it a 50. With jazz, it's a more complicated version of the same thing. You understand the beat viscerally, if not with your feet. The way the music is propelled forward (or sideways) makes rhythmic sense to you. The free jazz that Darling is a little overawed by makes a farther disconnect from the Dick Clark beat than bebop does, so the in the same way that the Bandstand kid may have to make a little aesthetic leap before he can feel the more complex beat of Max Roach -- but he may do it, in time -- Ron Darling knows that if he listens to enough of the late-period Coltrane, that even more abstract beat will start to make visceral sense to him. Darling comes across as an ace in this interview, Barra as an asshole.