SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING, 2019
VOLUME SEVEN NUMBER ONE
WADADA LEO SMITH
Featuring the Musics and aesthetic Visions of:
CINDY BLACKMAN
(March 23-29)
RUTH BROWN
(March 30-April 5)
JOHN LEWIS
(April 6-12)
JULIUS EASTMAN
(April 13-19)
PUBLIC ENEMY
(April 20-26)
WALLACE RONEY
(April 27-May 3)
MODERN JAZZ QUARTET
(May 4-10)
DE LA SOUL
(May 11-17)
KATHLEEN BATTLE
(May 18-24)
JULIA PERRY
(May 25-31)
HALE SMITH
(June 1-7)
BIG BOY CRUDUP
(June 9-15)MODERN JAZZ QUARTET
(1952-1997)
Artist Biography by Scott Yanow
Pianist John Lewis, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Kenny Clarke first came together as the rhythm section of the 1946 Dizzy Gillespie & His Orchestra
and they had occasional features that gave the overworked brass players
a well-deserved rest. They next came together in 1951, recording as the
Milt Jackson Quartet. In 1952, with Percy Heath taking Brown's place, the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ) became a permanent group. Other than Connie Kay succeeding Clarke in 1955, the band's personnel was set. In the early days Jackson and Lewis both were equally responsible for the group's musical direction but the pianist eventually took over as musical director. The MJQ has long displayed John Lewis'
musical vision, making jazz seem respectable by occasionally
interacting with classical ensembles and playing concerts at prestigious
venues, but always leaving plenty of space for bluesy and swinging
improvising. Their repertoire, in addition to including veteran bop and
swing pieces, introduced such originals as Lewis' "Django" and Jackson's
"Bags' Groove." The group recorded for Prestige (1952-55), Atlantic
(1956-74), Verve (1957), United Artists (1959) and Apple (1967-69) and,
in addition to the many quartet outings, they welcomed such guests as Jimmy Giuffre, Sonny Rollins, the Beaux Arts String Quartet, a symphony orchestra conducted by Gunther Schuller, singer Diahann Carroll (on one piece), Laurindo Almeida, a big band and the Swingle Singers. Although the musicians all had opportunities to pursue individual projects, in 1974 Milt Jackson,
tired of the constant touring and the limitations set on his
improvising and he quit the group, causing the MJQ to have a final tour
and break up. In 1981 Jackson relented and the Modern Jazz Quartet (which has recorded further albums for Pablo and Atlantic) became active again although on a more part-time basis. Connie Kay's health began to fade in the early '90s (Mickey Roker often filled in for him) and after his death in 2001, Albert "Tootie" Heath became his replacement.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/modernjazzquartet
The Modern Jazz Quartet was a major jazz institution, a band that, counting a seven-year “vacation,” lasted 43 years. During a time when jazz musicians were stereotyped as unreliable, rarely sober and erratic, the MJQ played at concert halls while wearing tuxedos. They are not known to have ever been late, missed a gig, or disappointed an audience.
The Modern Jazz Quartet’s evolution began in the Dizzy Gillespie big band of 1946. Due to the complexity of the charts and the strain that it caused in the trumpet section, Gillespie featured his rhythm section on an occasional number. Vibraphonist Milt Jackson (1923-1999), pianist John Lewis (1920-2001), bassist Ray Brown (1926-2002) and drummer Kenny Clarke (1914-1985) made for a very self-sufficient group and they discovered that they had a great deal of musical chemistry. That was not too surprising considering that Jackson was the new pacesetter among vibraphonists, Lewis offered a sparse and bluesy but boppish alternative to Bud Powell, Brown was a major new bass soloist, and Clarke had revolutionized the drums.
A few years passed and in 1951 the Milt Jackson Quartet was formed with those four players. Brown soon left to join Oscar Peterson and was succeeded by Percy Heath (1923-2005), the oldest of the Heath brothers who had also worked with Dizzy Gillespie and the other bop greats. The MJQ made their recording debut in 1952 for the Prestige label and their first successes were for that label.
In 1955 the Modern Jazz Quartet had their one personnel change. Kenny Clarke, feeling restricted by the format, departed and was replaced by Connie Kay (1927-1994). Kay, who had played with Lester Young, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker, was perfect for the role as drummer with the MJQ. His emphasis on creating quiet sounds while keeping time fit Lewis’s conception perfectly.
The MJQ spent the majority of its existence recording for the Atlantic label and it was one of the most successful jazz groups of the 1950s and ’60s. By 1974, however, Milt Jackson was itching to expand on his own solo career and he quit the group. Since replacing Jackson was unthinkable, the MJQ called it quits after a final round of sold-out concerts. Each of the musicians remained active, with Percy Heath joining his siblings in the Heath Brothers, Connie Kay working with Benny Goodman, John Lewis heading his own combos, and Milt Jackson recording constantly with all-stars on the Pablo label.
After seven years, in 1981 Milt Jackson finally gave in, rejoining the reunited Modern Jazz Quartet. The group signed with Pablo and continued where they left off, recording “Reunion at Budokan,” “Together Again at Montreux Jazz,” “Echoes,” and “Topsy: This One’s For Basie” during 1981-1985.
Although the musicians had continued growing, the MJQ sound was unchanged while gradually moving forward. The group had further successes and underwent constant touring until Connie Kay’s health began to fail. He was replaced initially by Mickey Roker and passed away in 1994. After Albert “Tootie” Heath had a short stint in Kay’s spot, the Modern Jazz Quartet quietly passed into history in 1995.
https://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-accidental-birth-of-modern-jazz.html
Jackson and Lewis originally shared the role of musical director but Lewis eventually took over the entire responsibility of this position. He was to remain the central force in defining the MJQ’s voice, while Milt Jackson blossomed as its star soloist.
In their middle years the group often played with classical musicians, but its repertoire consisted mainly of bop and Swing era standards. Among the original compositions from the band's book are "Django" by Lewis (a tribute to the Belgian gypsy jazz guitar player Django Reinhardt), "Afternoon In Paris," also by Lewis and "Bags' Groove" by Jackson (Bags was his nickname).
The group was first signed by Prestige and later in the 1950s with Atlantic. In the late 1960s, in between their two periods with Atlantic, they signed with Apple, the Beatles label (the sole jazz group on the label), and released two albums—Under the Jasmine Tree (1967) and Space (1969).
Jackson left the group in 1974 partly because he liked a freer flowing style of playing and partly because he was tired of playing for little money (compared to rock and roll stars). As there could be no Modern Jazz Quartet without the two principals Lewis and Jackson, the group disbanded. In 1981 the MJQ reorganized to play festivals and later on a permanent six months per year basis. The MJQ's last recording was issued in 1993. Heath, the last surviving member, died in 2005.
The chamber music approach was quite naturally practiced by small ensembles, sometimes part of a larger orchestra. In the late 1930s and 1940s, Benny Goodman’s Trio, Quartet And Sextet provided the perhaps best example of small formations combining swing and classic elegance. Interestingly, Goodman’s Quartet included vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, the greatest representative of that instrument along with Milt Jackson. Artie Shaw’s competing Gramercy Five included a harpsichord and sometimes recorded with strings. Bassist John Kirby led a similar small combo around the same time. The Dave Brubeck Quartet is among the MJQ’s contemporary formations that bear some similarity in style.
The advent of the relaxed cool jazz style in the 1960s in response to the exuberant intensity of hard-bop provided a further element that would be essential to the evolution of the MJQ’s unique style.
The Modern Jazz Quartet would have its own short-lived successor and competitor, the Prestige Jazz Quartet. The latter never rivaled its model in fame.
It is often said that Milt Jackson eventually came to miss the more spontaneous environment he had enjoyed in his early years and which he found again after leaving the MJQ, but it is undeniably within the very specific parameters of that formation that his lyrical playing flourished and reached its peak. Behind his thrilling improvisations, pianist John Lewis maintained a steady pace while adding to the excitement. Lewis interjected brief, repeated patterns of single notes with a crisp touch that equaled that of Count Basie. Lewis was a minimalist, for whom less was more, and he provided the perfect anchor for Milt Jackson’s solo flights. Connie Kay was a discreet and refined as Jo Jones had been with the Basie band and Percy Heath, one of the great bassists of modern jazz, completed the ensemble.
The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:
The most important thing about the wealth of recordings unearthed from the archives of Südwestrundfunk ("Southwest Broadcasting") currently being systematically released by Jazzhaus, is the insight it gives us into the way jazz was making a significant place for itself in the world beyond the United States' borders. With the end of World War II, Europe was awash with most all of the great names in American jazz touring with their music, and their reception was very warm. The nearly 3,000 hours of previously unreleased music in the station's vaults are testimony to the popularity of the American genre in Germany, and the rest of Europe as well.
While in a hoard that large, there are bound to be some clunkers, but by and large when you are talking about names like Zoot Sims, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie, the chances are good they will be few and far between. And when you have a knowledgeable cadre of enthusiasts available to cull the best of the material, the chances are even better than good
However, a counter argument can be made, one that very well may have been shouted down during the ‘60s: The MJQ pursued a foundational agenda every bit as important as any jazz artist’s, if not more so. Notions of all art being political notwithstanding, its goal was essentially cultural – the recognition of jazz as legitimate music. Certainly, there were political ramifications to this issue, as the “legit” rap against jazz was essentially one of disqualification, like a literacy test at the polls. Rather than rail against these barriers, the MJQ simply passed through them, wearing tuxedoes.
As the politics of jazz simmered in the late ‘50s and into the ‘60s, the standing critique that the MJQ marginalized jazz’s African-American essence to emphasize European sources hardened, threatening the MJQ with irrelevancy. The case that the MJQ was out of step with the times in brief: Charles Mingus recorded “Fables of Faubus” approximately three months before the MJQ recorded pianist John Lewis’ “Django” at the Music Inn; Coltrane recorded “Alabama” two months after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, while it took the MJQ an additional month to record Lewis’ “In a Crowd,” originally penned for Eripando Visconti’s film, A Milanese Story.
The MJQ succeeded in becoming an institution of sorts, but not a dynasty; with no heirs, their trademarked synthesis of jazz and classical music now has little to no direct bearing on the state of the art, chamber jazz having become a wide-ranging sub-genre. Despite the MJQ’s fame and longevity, their repertoire has not been championed. Perhaps the most cutting irony of the MJQ’s legacy is that their strategy for institutional access and legitimatization has been most consequentially pursued by Wynton Marsalis, who promoted jazz’s African-Americentric narrative with exclusionary zeal.
A Clemens Kalischer photograph reprinted in the booklet for Mosaic’s The Atlantic Studio Recordings Of The Modern Jazz Quartet 1956-64 says much about the MJQ, even though the shot is not of the group. Taken at a 1959 Lenox School of Music faculty party at the Music Inn, the shot shows Milt Jackson playing piano instead of vibes, back to the camera, while Jimmy Giuffre sits in a chair, playing clarinet with his eyes closed. Giuffre is grooving; his relaxed countenance stands – or in this case almost slouches – in stark contrast to the propriety MJQ projected in much of the music included in the 7-CD collection.
The box set is cause to retest the standard, somewhat dichotomous narrative that the MJQ was a cooperative, even though their creative dynamic was all but exclusively between the Bach-inspired Apollonian Lewis and the Bacchic bebopper Jackson. The idea that the MJQ was a cooperative took a beating as early as Joe Goldberg’s Jazz Masters of the 50’s (1965; MacMillan); unintentionally, given Goldberg’s pro-musician bona fides. Bassist Percy Heath kept the tuxes pressed; drummer Connie Kay booked the transportation and hotels; when Lewis assumed announcing duties in addition to carrying the books, Jackson had nothing to do but show for the gig. Furthermore, after bop innovator Kenny Clarke left in February 1955, Lewis “began coaching young Connie Kay … who was willing to adapt himself to Lewis’ ideas.”
Although Jackson did not voice his dissent publicly, word spread privately among his colleagues about his unease with Lewis’ emphasis on counterpoint, particularly when the vibes pioneer soloed. “Milt hated it. Hated it,” box set annotator Doug Ramsey quotes Jimmy Heath. “He wanted John to accompany him, not play contrapuntal lines against what he was playing. That distracts … But it worked.” Whatever tug of ideas may have occurred between Jackson and Lewis in the MJQ’s first years, Lewis’ visionary dominance was well established with “Versailles,” the opening track for the MJQ’s first Atlantic album, Fontessa. Combining nimble, effervescent swing and well-crafted, minimally filigreed counterpoint, “Versailles” is a prime example of the cinematic quality of Lewis’ writing, as he creates an appealingly fresh, sun-bathed atmosphere. More importantly, the interaction between Jackson and Lewis has a sublime virtuosic effortlessness.
By the second session for Fontessa in February ‘56, Jackson’s “Bluesology” was already proliferating as a blowing vehicle. On the ‘49 septet version issued by Savoy, Jackson’s chiseled blues lines benefit from pianist Walter Bishop’s conventional comping and Roy Haynes' groove-mining drumming. Jackson’s blues sensibility is also well reflected by the aptly named “Soulful,” a track he recorded for Savoy in January ‘56 (and compiled with “Bluesology” on the CD, Meet Milt Jackson), less than three weeks before a rejected, now lost take on “Bluesology” was waxed at the first Fontessa session; with a quintet including Clarke and tenorist Lucky Thompson, Jackson cogently taps the blues root of modern jazz. The MJQ’s version of “Bluesology” is far afield from these sides; with a more convivial bounce and Lewis’ Basie-like economy leavening the pianist’s counter lines, it’s a decidedly sunnier reading that can be tallied as one for Jackson’s side of the MJQ equation.
However, Fontessa, which also included strong Jackson solos on “Willow Weep for Me” and “Woody ‘N You,” is arguably the vibist’s high-water mark during the MJQ’s Atlantic years; the ‘57 eponymous, third album for the label, notable for the inclusion of Jackson’s signature composition, “Bags’ Groove,” and his sprinting “Baden-Baden” coming close. But, by then, the MJQ’s sound had become increasingly formatted, even seeping into the latter album’s take on “A Night in Tunisia,” the flag-waver Lewis, Jackson and Heath first played together in Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. The performance is a clear instance of how Lewis shaped the MJQ’s sound through a subordinated role for percussion. Clarke would have dropped a bomb or two every chorus.
Something of the same could be construed about Heath’s role in the group compared to original bassist, Ray Brown, who wielded his chops more freely. Once a busy freelancer, Heath began to limit his session work outside the MJQ; The Magnificent Thad Jones (Blue Note), recorded in July 1956, a little more than a month before The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn, is one of the very few he made during this period. His solo on “Thedia” – described as “a happily placid unison theme” by annotator Leonard Feather – is noteworthy for how Heath created crisp forward motion primarily through melody; the difference between this solo and the bulk he recorded with MJQ being that he’s actually being nudged by the date’s drummer, Max Roach.
The fairest basis to gauge an ensemble is their performance in optimum conditions. The Music Inn in Massachusetts – the site of the fabled Lenox School of Jazz that counted Ornette Coleman among its students and the MJQ’s summer home beginning in the mid ‘50s – meets that threshold. Not only did the MJQ record two volumes including performances with guest artists at the rambling resort, but tracks included on One Never Knows (No Sun in Venice) and Pyramid, as well as the ‘57 tracks with Giuffre’s trio with guitarist Jim Hall and bassist Ralph Pena included on Third Stream Music. Respectively, Giuffre and Sonny Rollins joined the MJQ on the first and second volumes of Music Inn performances, an intriguing contrast as Giuffre shared Lewis’ penchant for jazz’s “subtle aspects,” while Rollins was – and remains – the master of the sweeping gesture. It’s telling that the MJQ takes it up a notch when Rollins solos on “Bags’ Groove;” their shifts of rhythmic feel prompt the tenor colossus to broaden his tone and stretch long notes with gusto one moment, and play with sly finesse the next. The quintet’s take on “A Night in Tunisia” out-capers the earlier version. Rollins’ riff-based phrases and use of quavering notes to punctuate longer lines that echo the proto-bop of Coleman Hawkins – Rollins’ final squall has to be a unique outburst in the MJQ’s discography.
As satisfying as they are, the performances with Rollins are anomalies; those with Giuffre are far more germane to Lewis’ agenda and really speak to the history-changing upside of his approach. While Giuffre’s folksy bent may seem quite distant from Lewis’ classicism, the three quintet tracks show a considerable overlap in temperament. Despite their formal differences, Giuffre’s “Fun,” which darts between hoe-down tinges and pensive contours, and Lewis’ “A Fugue for Music Inn,” a quiet improvisational tour de force, exude an assured, elastic feel. While Giuffre’s influence on present-day chamber jazz far exceeds Lewis’ in some quarters, these performances – as well as an affecting reading of David Raksin’s “Serenade” that contains no improvisation – demonstrates how essential that common ground was to the sub-genre’s evolution.
Lewis’ most ambitious projects were collaborations with composer Gunther Schuller included on Third Stream Music (1957-60) and The Modern Jazz Quartet and Orchestra (‘60); few of these tracks have grown in stature over the decades, even Lewis’ “Da Capo” and Giuffre’s “Fine,” performed by a septet comprised of the MJQ and Giuffre’s trio on Third Stream Music. The former is a string of vignettes and segue-ways; a liltingly wistful theme stated by Jackson could have been developed into a satisfying stand-alone piece. However, Lewis doesn’t give the component parts sufficient breathing space, resulting in a cut-and-paste feel. Giuffre’s “Fine” typifies the “blues-based folk jazz” that permeated his groundbreaking Atlantic album, Jimmy Giuffre 3; but, the presence of the urbane MJQ is strangely dilutive.
Lewis’ compositions on Third Stream Music that feature – ahem – legitimate musicians are surprisingly fresh-sounding. Sure, there are a couple of wince-inducing moments, particularly the French horn motive bookending “Exposure,” which sounds as dated as incidental music for an episode of Star Trek. However, there are some threads connecting “Exposure” and “Sketch” that seem more brilliant now than ever, particularly the interludes on both where Lewis plunks out hesitant, yet plucky single-note lines with minimal support from Kay – something of a synapse between Basie and Mengelberg. “Sketch” also features some appealing, robust passages for the Beaux Arts String Quartet. His only contribution to The Modern Jazz Quartet and Orchestra is “England’s Carol,” a puzzling make-over of “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” a piece Lewis inexplicably returned to throughout the MJQ’s run.
The main events on both albums were Schuller compositions. The rap against “Conversation,” which appeared on Third Stream Music is that the jazz and classical elements merely co-exist. If indeed there is a lack of a grand synthesis, it simply conveys the contemporary perspective; such pieces, after all, marked only the beginning of an experimental movement based on dialogue. The first minutes of the piece alone places this critique in question, as Schuller’s writing for the Beaux Arts String Quartet – which far surpasses Lewis’ in terms of motivic development and nuanced orchestration – slowly brings the MJQ to the foreground in a supple manner. The bulk of the MJQ contribution is in the second half of the ten-minute piece; Jackson and Lewis solo cogently over slightly tart, mid-tempo changes, with edgy scored asides from the strings eventually signaling the conclusion of the piece.
“Conversation” is a far more persuasive piece than Schuller’s “Concertino for Jazz Quartet and Orchestra.” The opening movement is weighted towards jazz elements, some of which are endearing, like the brass and woodwind-propelled, Ellington-tinged groove; but the jazz touches, which trigger occasional, momentary associations with Gershwin and Bernstein, push more incisive orchestra scoring to the margins. The figures Schuller sends darting about Lewis and Jackson’s blues choruses in the second movement also have the kernel-like potential of yielding engaging music on their own if given space. Increasingly through the second and third movements, however, there’s an accumulation of orchestral materials that strain to be bluesy. Compounded by an early ‘60s stereo image where the relatively dry sound of the quartet is canopied by a cavernous orchestra sound, the music sounds painfully dated at times as a result, a problem Andre Hodeir’s “Around the Blues” surprisingly eludes, a rare instance where contrivance – in this case, a work where the orchestra literally performs around, not with, the quartet – registers as authentic. Schuller’s most enduring, vital contributions to the articulation of Third Stream remain “Abstraction” and “Variants on a Theme by Thelonious Monk (Criss-Cross),” included on John Lewis Presents Contemporary Music: Jazz Abstractions – Compositions by Gunther Schuller and Jim Hall (1960; Atlantic).
For the remaining four years covered by this collection, the MJQ stuck with the tried and true with a few notable exceptions: a yearning-free take on Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” for the ‘62 album of the same name; a bright, limber version of Bonfa’s “Carnival” for The Sheriff (‘63); and 1964’s Collaboration with Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida, who raises the temperature of the swing a couple of degrees on Lewis’ “Silver” and provides a credible sway for Jobim’s “One Note Samba” and Ferreira’s “Foi a Saudade.” The bulk of the collection’s last album – The Modern Jazz Quartet Plays George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess – was recorded during the Harlem riots of July 1964, a fortnight before the bodies of three freedom riders were dredged up in Mississippi. Further evidence of the MJQ being woefully out of step with the times? It ain’t necessarily so. The MJQ rode a different circuit to freedom. They understood that freedom is useless without dignity, another word for legitimacy. With the exception of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, no artists brought more dignity to jazz than the Modern Jazz Quartet. There isn’t a box set big enough to deal with that.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/mar/24/modern-jazz-quartet-john-lewis
They were diverse in talent and temperament. John Lewis, the quiet and determined westerner, who told sound stories with his linear and logical blues-based pianisms; Milt Jackson, the baggy eyed, Motor City vibraharp virtuoso; Percy Heath, the Philly bassist with deep, in-the-pocket basslines; Kenny Clarke, the bomb-dropping blacksmith of the beat from Pittsburgh; and Connie Kay, the New York groovemaster of West Indian descent who could throw down with bebop or Ruth Brown. Somehow those fiercely independent individuals coalesced as the Modern Jazz Quartet. Their syncopated science, telepathic interplay, and monastic commitment to swing, beautifully blended African-American jazz and blues with European classical compositional forms, particularly, the fugue. The group worked for 48 incredible years with one break, until Jackson's death in 1999. Only the 50-year reign of Duke Ellington's orchestra lasted longer.
The group grew out of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's big band in the 1940s. Lewis and Clarke (no, not the explorers), Jackson and bassist Ray Brown were the rhythm section for the orchestra, and when the horns needed a break from the lip-blistering arrangements, the foursome would perform short, ear-catching numbers that pleased the musicians and the audience. But it wasn't until 1952, when Heath replaced Brown, that the group morphed from the Milt Jackson Quartet to the Modern Jazz Quartet.
The change was crucial. Under Jackson's leadership, the group was essentially a "blowing" combo, content with playing spare bop and blues arrangements. When Lewis, armed with his advanced degree from the Manhattan School of Music, and his experiences as Gillespie's arranger, who had participated in the historic "birth of the cool" sessions, became the music director, he—contrary to what many still think—integrated formal music devices such as Bach-style fugues and Balkan folk idioms onto the existing jazz structures. It wasn't about making jazz respectable: it was about a group of African-American musicians taking elements of world music into their own jazz idiom to make great art.
And make great art they did! With the quiet dignity of their dress, and impeccable stage manners, the MJQ was one of jazz's great "crossover" groups, headlining in prestigious concert halls and classical festivals. Its early Prestige recordings, in the early to mid-1950s, mostly with Clarke on drums, put them on the map, with the first appearances of Lewis' greatest composition, "Django," and Jackson's "True Blues." The group's experiments with the jazz-meets-fugue were choppy at first, but the musicians got it together, largely because Clarke, who didn't like being hemmed in by Lewis' ideas, split for Paris. And in walked Kay, an athletic, light-limbed drummer who made his bones playing with pianist Randy Weston, and who was the house drummer for a fledgling R&B label named Atlantic Records. Atlantic was run by two Turkish brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, the latter signing the ensemble. He gave them a higher profile, and a bigger recording budget than they ever got at Prestige. And as they say, the rest is history, two decades of it, preserved on this magnificent box set.
Consisting of seven discs, containing 105 tracks of master, alternate and unreleased recordings from 15 albums, this set offers an evolutionary view of how the MJQ negotiated the conceptual, thematic and musical challenges of group improvisation, based on jazz and non-jazz sources, in an era soon to be dominated by the avant-garde, hard bop, soul, rock and pop.
Anchored by Heath's sure-footed basslines and Kay's spare-is-more drumming (check out the way Lewis added chimes, Asian percussion and exotic cymbals to Kay's drumkit, much in the same way Duke Ellington did with Sonny Greer), the source of MJQ's power lay in the eternal—and creative—tension between Lewis and Jackson: the former musically profiled as a "soft," Count Basie-style soloist, contrasted by the joyful noise of Jackson's shimmering, sanctified, bop-laced, upsouth vibes. But this description obscures the non-abstract truth of the deep blueseness of Lewis' Southwestern sound. It also overlooks perhaps the most profound truth about the group: it is precisely Lewis' cool, crystalline arrangements that provide the perfect contrast for Jackson's fiery improvisations. This is not to diss the vibe master. But a cursory hearing of Jackson's projects as a leader outside the MJQ milieu confirms that point. Though that tension would boil over (egged on by decades of the chant "let Milt blow") and cause the 1974 break-up, the success of the MJQ is unimaginable without it.
When the group released its first Atlantic LP, Fontessa, in 1956, it had finally gelled on the overall group with Kay in the mix. This recording contained standards that would stay in the MJQ book for years: the bouncy "Woody 'N You," the ballads "Angel Eyes," "Willow Weep for Me" and "Over the Rainbow," and the Jackson showstopper, "Bluesology." But its centerpiece was the 11-minute title track: A Lewis-penned work inspired by characters of the Italian Commedia del Arte; a music form where troubadours would sing in specific characters with lightly-sketched, improvisational settings. In Lewis' mind, that form fit nicely in the jazz-blues idiom, as evidenced by this multi-suite work, which heralded the type of conceptual projects the MJQ would later produce.
Released that same year, The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn was recorded in the auditorium of the Music Barn at the Lenox School of jazz, which Lewis co-founded. The clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre was the guest artist on the date. His cool clarinet tones fit perfectly with the MJQ sound on "Serenade," a pastoral Lewis piece composed with no improvisation, the mid-tempo "A Fugue for Music Inn," and peppery "Fun." "Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West " and "Sun Dance," Lewis' homage to the Hopi Indians," would soon exit the MJQ catalog, but "Variation No.1 On God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman" AKA "England's Carol," would be a crowd-pleaser for years to come. For its follow-up, The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn, Volume 2, (its first stereo recording), the foursome is joined by an old friend, tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who recorded with the group on the Prestige label in 1953. On Jackson's signature piece, "Bag's Groove," and on the Dizzy Gillespie hit "A Night in Tunisia," Rollins' pecking, but powerful phrases would display the full flower of what composer and frequent Lewis collaborator Gunther Schuller termed "thematic improvisation." (It should noted that for some reason, Rollins was recorded before a live audience on a separate date).
The Music Inn was also the recording studio for several MJQ LPs. Its eponymously-titled 1957 LP contains a medley of pop songs including "My Old Flame" and "Body and Soul;" a fine rendition of Lewis' "La Ronde: Drums:" a rare Connie Kay spotlight, where the contrast between his lickety-split velvet drumming and Clarke's heavier style couldn't be more clear; the first appearance of "Bag's Groove," and the lesser-known riff-like "Baden-Baden." "The Comedy" features actress-then-singer Diahann Carroll, who was married to the group's manager Monte Kay, and is a further exploration of the characters inspired by the Commedia dell Arte. On the enduring soundtrack One Never Knows (No Sun in Venice), directed by Roger Vadim, and set in Venice, Lewis composes several short musical sketches that illuminate and amplify the visual storyline, and retains the signature sound of the group, and contributes a few timeless compositions to the band book. "The Funky Golden Striker" is pulsed by a New Orleans, second line beat reminiscent of the Big Easy ditty "Snag It." "Cortege" is a solemn and syncopated number that melds the local Latin processions honoring the dead and the funeral dirges of New Orleans. "Three Windows" is an intricate triple fugue that was revisited two decades later in full orchestral form on a 1987 album bearing the same name.
The 1959 album Pyramid, widely regarded as the group's best studio date, is a brilliant summation of the cool, swinging clarity the foursome achieved to that point. Duke Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got that Swing) and the standard "How High The Moon," a Jackson showcase, highlight how the group can update and personalize material from other composers. But it is the originals that make this recording stand out. The title track, written by Ray Brown, with singer Mahalia Jackson in mind, is a rising and falling slow number that beautifully sits on the fence that separates gospel and the blues. Jackson's solo shows off his sanctified syncopations, but Lewis also displays his church cred with a moving solo rich with the type of soul-stirring pianisms heard in the sound of Bobby Timmons, Ramsey Lewis and Ray Bryant.
William Gottlieb/Library of Congress via Flickr
A lot of jazz people love The Modern Jazz Quartet, but maybe not all the time. Some of them just wait for the parts when vibraphonist Milt Jackson gets to swinging — that was also Jackson's favorite part.
Jackson rode the irresistible pulse and beautiful blend of bassist Percy Heath, often used as a third melodic voice, and drummer Connie Kay, who had his own bright colors that didn't clash with vibes. I've been listening to The Modern Jazz Quartet a lot lately — even more with the arrival of Mosaic Records' seven-CD box set of 13 and a half albums that the group made for Atlantic between 1956 and '64. As good as the swinging numbers are, I'm more drawn to what some call the band's pretentious side. Besides a whole lot of blues, John Lewis wrote the group baroque-style canons and fugues, where one imitative line shadows another. These Euro-Renaissance practices were alien to most jazz musicians, but had been developed way-back-when as guidelines for improvising. And three staggered lines made for a clear ensemble texture. The music had plenty of light.
John Lewis' music for the MJQ often had that kind of stately grace. But once the other players got used to his baroque methods, and playing in scripted or spontaneous counterpoint, they could really fly on the material.
The Modern Jazz Quartet had an original concept, exploiting two musical traditions in a very specific way. It may be the best exemplar of so-called "third-stream music" jointly inspired by jazz and classical. The MJQ's interplay was mostly impeccable, and for variety the band worked with guests including soft clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, loud saxophonist Sonny Rollins, guitarist Laurindo Almeida and the Beaux Arts string quartet.
Milt Jackson was never crazy about the Modern Jazz Quartet's high-art material or John Lewis playing counterpoint behind his solos; he'd have been happy just to play the blues, which he did extremely well. But the vibes, with all that doorbell chiming, could be hard to get down and dirty on, and Jackson's gloriously round tone could make a slow blues sound whistle clean.
Not everything The Modern Jazz Quartet recorded between 1956 and '64 is gold; there are a few limp ballads and bossa novas, a couple of meet-ups with orchestras where the quartet's tighter than the symphony, and times when Lewis' composer's piano is a little stiff. MJQ devotees will want Mosaic's The Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings of the Modern Jazz Quartet 1956-1964 partly for Doug Ramsey's detailed booklet essay; where some annotators barely roll out of bed, he did his research and interviewed participants and witnesses like a real reporter. But most of the albums included are already out, and curious listeners might better start with No Sun in Venice or Pyramid or Fontessa, at least until they get the bug for more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Jazz_Quartet
The Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ) was a jazz combo established in 1952 that played music influenced by classical, cool jazz, blues and bebop. For most of its history the Quartet consisted of John Lewis (piano), Milt Jackson (vibraphone), Percy Heath (double bass), and Connie Kay (drums). The group grew out of the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie's big band from 1946 to 1948, which consisted of Lewis and Jackson along with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Kenny Clarke. They recorded as the Milt Jackson Quartet in 1951 and Brown left the group, being replaced as bassist by Heath. During the early-to-mid-1950s they became the Modern Jazz Quartet, Lewis became the group's musical director, and they made several recordings with Prestige Records, including the original versions of their two best-known compositions, Lewis's "Django" and Jackson's Bags' Groove". Clarke left the group in 1955 and was replaced as drummer by Connie Kay, and in 1956 they moved to Atlantic Records and made their first tour to Europe.
Under Lewis's direction, they carved their own niche by specializing in elegant, restrained music that used sophisticated counterpoint inspired by baroque music, yet nonetheless retained a strong blues feel. Noted for their elegant presentation, they were one of the first small jazz combos to perform in concert halls rather than nightclubs. They were initially active into the 1970s until Jackson quit in 1974 due to frustration with their finances and touring schedule, but reformed in 1981. They made their last released recordings in 1992 and 1993, by which time Kay had been having health issues and Mickey Roker had been his replacement drummer while Kay was unavailable. After Kay's death in 1994, the group operated on a semi-active basis, with Percy Heath's brother Albert Heath on drums until disbanding permanently in 1997.
In 1956, the Modern Jazz Quartet moved to Atlantic Records, which was switching from singles to LPs and began focusing on jazz under the guidance of Nesuhi Ertegun, who signed the group to the company and worked with them as a producer. In that year, they recorded the album Fontessa and had their first formal collaboration with an invited guest, clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, recorded as The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn.[1][9] In October of that year the Quartet took their first trip to Europe, where they recorded for South German Radio (SDR), performed on a month-long Birdland All-Star tour with Bud Powell, Miles Davis, and Lester Young, and had a two-week residency at Club Saint-Germain in Paris.[12]
The next year they came back to Europe on their own, performing 88
concerts in four months in Germany, France, and the British Isles,
receiving rave reviews. In 1957, they also recorded a self-titled studio album, the live album The Modern Jazz Quartet and the Oscar Peterson Trio at the Opera House, and Lewis's first film soundtrack, for No Sun in Venice.[1][9] The group recorded The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn Volume 2 with Sonny Rollins in 1958 and 1959 saw Lewis's creation of the soundtrack for the film Odds Against Tomorrow, originally recorded with an orchestra and released in an arrangement for the Quartet as Music from Odds Against Tomorrow (1960).[1][9] In 1960, they released Pyramid and European Concert, and contributed to the third stream movement with Third Stream Music (with Jimmy Giuffre 3) and The Modern Jazz Quartet & Orchestra.[1][9] In 1962 they released The Comedy, containing a suite by Lewis inspired by characters from Commedia dell'arte, and Lonely Woman, whose title track was one of the first recorded covers of a composition by free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman.[1][9][13] They followed up with The Sheriff and Collaboration with guitarist Laurindo Almeida (1964), along with The Modern Jazz Quartet Plays George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and Jazz Dialogue with the All Star Jazz Band (1965).[9] They released a collaboration with the Swingle Singers, Place Vendôme (1966), and three live albums, Concert in Japan '66 (in Japan only), Blues at Carnegie Hall (1966), and Live at the Lighthouse (1967).[1][9]
They then moved from Atlantic to Apple Records, for which they released Under the Jasmin Tree (1968) and Space (1969). Lewis, who produced these albums, recalled: "Monte Kay was a friend of the president of the Beatles' company, and he felt we weren't getting the attention we should have, so we went there and had two good records."[1][9] Returning to Atlantic, they released Plastic Dreams (1971) and The Legendary Profile (1972). In 1973 they recorded the last studio albums before their hiatus, In Memoriam with an orchestra and Blues on Bach, both of which were released the next year).[1][9]
In July 1974, Jackson quit the group, later citing frustration with their finances as his primary reason. He was also unhappy with the group's touring schedule, which by then had become year-round rather than the previous arrangement in which they had vacations during the northern hemisphere summer. Jackson had previously used the downtime to play and record music that was not in the style of the Modern Jazz Quartet, but felt saddled in the group after they also began playing at summer jazz festivals in 1969 or 1970.[2] The jazz magazine DownBeat compared their breakup to "the abrupt disintegration of Mt. Rushmore".[14] In November 1974 they performed a farewell concert at Avery Fisher Hall, later released as a series of two albums and then as a complete package, The Complete Last Concert (1988).[1][9] They had occasional reunion concerts, never going more than eighteen months without playing together, before reuniting in 1981 for a tour of Japan, recorded as Reunion at Budokan 1981 for Pablo Records.[1][9] They recorded three more albums for Pablo, Together Again: Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival '82 (1982), Echoes (1984), and Topsy: This One's for Basie (1985), before returning to Atlantic, recording Three Windows (1987, with the New York Chamber Symphony) and For Ellington (1988).[1][9]
Kay had a stroke in 1992 and during his recovery was replaced by drummer Mickey Roker, who performed on some tracks on the group's last released recording, MJQ & Friends: A 40th Anniversary Celebration (recorded 1992–1993, released1994).[15][16][17][18] Kay died in November 1994, after which the group operated on a semi-active basis; the 1995 album Dedicated to Connie, a recording of a 1960 concert in Slovenia, was released in his memory.[4][19][20] In February 1995, Albert Heath, Percy Heath's brother, became the quartet's percussionist. Percy Heath had become tired of touring by 1997 and the group permanently disbanded in that year after a final recording date.[21][22][23] In October 1999, Jackson died,[24] followed by Lewis in March 2001[25] and Heath in April 2005.[21]
Giddins, Gary (1998). "Modern Jazz Quartet (The First Forty Years)". Visions of Jazz: The First Century. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 376–402. ISBN 978-0-19-513241-0.
Bordowitz, Hank (1992). "MJQ celebrates 40 years". American Visions. Vol. 7 no. 1. pp. 26–30.
"Bop Baroque The Blues". DownBeat. Vol. 59 no. 1. 1992. pp. 24–27.
Holley, Eugene (April 2000). "Farewell to the quartet". DownBeat. Vol. 67 no. 4. pp. 38–42.
Zwerin, Mike (November 19, 2003). "MJQ and a fountain of youth". The New York Times. Retrieved November 11, 2018.
"Milt Jackson Discography". Jazz Discography Project. Retrieved November 11, 2018.
"Wizard of the Vibes – Milt Jackson". AllMusic. Retrieved November 11, 2018.
Gioia, Ted (2012). The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire. New York City: Oxford University Press. p. 27–28. ISBN 978-0-19-993739-4.
"The Modern Jazz Quartet Discography". Jazz Discography Project. Retrieved November 12, 2018.
"1953: An Exceptional Encounter". AllMusic. Retrieved November 11, 2018.
Kernfeld, Barry (1999). "Clarke, Kenny". American National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1802594.
Coady, Christopher (2016). John Lewis and the Challenge of 'Real' Black Music. University of Michigan Press. pp. 134–135. ISBN 9780472122264.
"Lonely Woman – The Modern Jazz Quartet". AllMusic. Retrieved November 23, 2018.
Levin, Eric (June 27, 1983). "The Modern Jazz Quartet". People. Retrieved November 27, 2018.
"A 40th Anniversary Celebration – The Modern Jazz Quartet". AllMusic. November 24, 2018.
"MJQ & friends : a 40th anniversary celebration". WorldCat. Retrieved November 24, 2018.
Watrous, Peter (December 3, 1994). "Connie Kay, 67, Drummer, Dies; A Specialist of Sounds and Styles". The New York Times. Retrieved November 24, 2018.
Chinen, Nate (May 22, 2017). "Mickey Roker, Dynamic Hard-Bop Drummer and Philly Jazz Institution, Dies at 84". WBGO. Retrieved September 30, 2018.
"Dedicated to Connie – The Modern Jazz Quartet". AllMusic. Retrieved November 24, 2018.
"Dedicated to Connie (Musical CD, 1995)". WorldCat. Retrieved November 25, 2018.
Voce, Steve (April 30, 2005). "Percy Heath". The Independent. Retrieved November 27, 2018.
Bouchard, Fred (June 2001). "John Lewis: 1920–2001". DownBeat. Vol. 68 no. 6. p. 22.
Owens, Thomas (January 20, 2002). "Modern Jazz Quartet (jazz)". In Root, Deane L. (ed.). Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.J305700.
Ratliff, Ben (October 11, 1999). "Milt Jackson, 76, Jazz Vibraphonist, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved November 24, 2018.
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https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/modernjazzquartet
Modern Jazz Quartet
The Modern Jazz Quartet was a major jazz institution, a band that, counting a seven-year “vacation,” lasted 43 years. During a time when jazz musicians were stereotyped as unreliable, rarely sober and erratic, the MJQ played at concert halls while wearing tuxedos. They are not known to have ever been late, missed a gig, or disappointed an audience.
The Modern Jazz Quartet’s evolution began in the Dizzy Gillespie big band of 1946. Due to the complexity of the charts and the strain that it caused in the trumpet section, Gillespie featured his rhythm section on an occasional number. Vibraphonist Milt Jackson (1923-1999), pianist John Lewis (1920-2001), bassist Ray Brown (1926-2002) and drummer Kenny Clarke (1914-1985) made for a very self-sufficient group and they discovered that they had a great deal of musical chemistry. That was not too surprising considering that Jackson was the new pacesetter among vibraphonists, Lewis offered a sparse and bluesy but boppish alternative to Bud Powell, Brown was a major new bass soloist, and Clarke had revolutionized the drums.
A few years passed and in 1951 the Milt Jackson Quartet was formed with those four players. Brown soon left to join Oscar Peterson and was succeeded by Percy Heath (1923-2005), the oldest of the Heath brothers who had also worked with Dizzy Gillespie and the other bop greats. The MJQ made their recording debut in 1952 for the Prestige label and their first successes were for that label.
In 1955 the Modern Jazz Quartet had their one personnel change. Kenny Clarke, feeling restricted by the format, departed and was replaced by Connie Kay (1927-1994). Kay, who had played with Lester Young, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker, was perfect for the role as drummer with the MJQ. His emphasis on creating quiet sounds while keeping time fit Lewis’s conception perfectly.
The MJQ spent the majority of its existence recording for the Atlantic label and it was one of the most successful jazz groups of the 1950s and ’60s. By 1974, however, Milt Jackson was itching to expand on his own solo career and he quit the group. Since replacing Jackson was unthinkable, the MJQ called it quits after a final round of sold-out concerts. Each of the musicians remained active, with Percy Heath joining his siblings in the Heath Brothers, Connie Kay working with Benny Goodman, John Lewis heading his own combos, and Milt Jackson recording constantly with all-stars on the Pablo label.
After seven years, in 1981 Milt Jackson finally gave in, rejoining the reunited Modern Jazz Quartet. The group signed with Pablo and continued where they left off, recording “Reunion at Budokan,” “Together Again at Montreux Jazz,” “Echoes,” and “Topsy: This One’s For Basie” during 1981-1985.
Although the musicians had continued growing, the MJQ sound was unchanged while gradually moving forward. The group had further successes and underwent constant touring until Connie Kay’s health began to fail. He was replaced initially by Mickey Roker and passed away in 1994. After Albert “Tootie” Heath had a short stint in Kay’s spot, the Modern Jazz Quartet quietly passed into history in 1995.
https://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-accidental-birth-of-modern-jazz.html
Saturday, March 19, 2016
The Accidental Birth of the Modern Jazz Quartet
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Louis Armstrong played trumpet, but he also sang - frequently. Another trumpeter, Arturo Sandoval, plays piano during his sets. Many big bands turned to vocalists backed primarily by the sax section at various points during a concert. Brass section in big bands became Latin Jazz rhythm sections for a few tunes during the course of a set. The rhythm section in a Jazz combo might all-of-a-sudden become a feature for the piano player heading up a piano-bass-drums trio.
Why these deviations and departures?
Because playing a brass instrument, especially a trumpet can be an exhausting proposition tune-after-tune, set-after-set, night-after-night.
They gotta rest their chops or their face muscles and lips [embouchure] will simply go limp on them or worse still, “get blown [rupture].”
Enter the coming into existence of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
You can get an understanding of its “accidental birth” from Mike Hennessey’s recounting of how the group first came into existence. These excerpts are drawn from Chapter 10 The Battle of the MJQ in his splendid biography of Klook: The Story of Kenny Clark.
“If the brass section of the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band had not had to cope with such a lip-bruising library, it is conceivable that the Modern Jazz Quartet might not have existed. The group started life as a quartet within the Gillespie band, featured to give the brass a break - John Lewis (piano), Milt Jackson (vibes), Ray Brown (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums).
When the Gillespie band broke up, the combo continued as the Milt Jackson Quartet, with Percy Heath replacing Ray Brown after the latter's marriage to Ella Fitzgerald and departure to the West Coast. Then, in 1952, it became the Modern Jazz Quartet, making its recording debut for Prestige in December of that year. Today, scores of records and a few farewell tours later, the MJQ continues to be a major jazz force, largely because its musical director, John Lewis, systematically converted what was a freewheeling, extrovert, loose-limbed bebop combo into a formalized jazz chamber ensemble whose discreet, charming, well-mannered music had an appeal which went far beyond the community of hard-core jazz enthusiasts.
And therein lay the source of much tension and contention, Both Kenny Clarke and Milt Jackson recognized that by allowing Lewis to take control of the musical identity and direction of the quartet, its chances of commercial success would be enhanced; but the price they might have to pay was the sacrifice of some of their cherished musical principles.
It was soon after his return to New York from Paris in April 1951 that Kenny Clarke had teamed up with Milt Jackson again. Dizzy Gillespie founded his short-lived Dee Gee record label in this year. Kenny had made four tracks for the label, just before leaving Paris, with trumpeter Dick Collins, Jean-Claude Fohrenbach (tenor), Andre Persiany (piano) and Pierre Michelot (bass), of which only the appositely titled 'Klook Returns' was issued.
As soon as Kenny arrived in New York he got word that Dizzy Gillespie was in the studios recording some sides with a small group that included J.J. Johnson, Budd Johnson, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath and Art Blakey. It was the session that produced The Champ'. 'I headed straight for the studio,’ Kenny said later, 'walked right in and everybody fell out. "You mean you're back?" they shouted. And they gave me a big welcome home.'
On 8 August 1951, Charlie Parker, now at the peak of his career, put together a quintet to record some sides for Norman Granz's Verve label. Klook was on this date, together with Red Rodney, John Lewis and Ray Brown, and it proved to be a vintage recording. Red Rodney recalled, 'It was the only date I ever did with Klook and it was a great experience for me. We did some memorable sides - "Swedish Schnapps", "Blues for Alice" and "Loverman" - and it was one of the most stimulating record sessions I have ever been involved in.'
Kenny Clarke, as it happened, was very nearly not involved in it himself. He told me,
At this particular time in New York I needed money badly and Bird knew it. Originally another drummer was supposed to do the session, but Bird told me, 'Bring your drums, Klook. I don't know what drummer they've got on the date - but he won't be when you get there.' I did the date - and it was a great session. We really cooked.
About two weeks after this date the Milt Jackson Quartet made its recording debut for the Dee Gee label with John Lewis on piano and Ray Brown on bass. Later Milt and Kenny took a quartet into Minton's Playhouse, with Percy Heath on bass. As John Lewis was studying at the Manhattan School of Music, Kenny hired Gildo Mahones, a twenty-two-year-old New Yorker, on piano. Sometimes Horace Silver or Jimmy Foreman subbed for Mahones, and Lou Donaldson played with the group for a while. Donaldson was also a guest soloist on the second date of the Milt Jackson Quartet in April 1952 -this time for Blue Note. By this time, however, John Lewis had already discussed the idea of forming a co-operative band with Klook, Milt and Percy and calling it the Modern Jazz Quartet.
It was as the Modern Jazz Quartet that they made four sides for the Prestige label in December 1952. But the MJQ remained purely a recording group until late in 1954 when John Lewis completed his music studies. Sonny Rollins and trumpeter Jesse Drakes also worked with the group at different times, Rollins recording with them in October 1953. And in the summer of 1954 the MJQ, with Horace Silver on piano, played the first Newport Jazz Festival.
Response to the Modern Jazz Quartet albums was encouraging, and with Lewis now available to tour, it was decided to take the group on the road. Milt Jackson recalls the first public performance being at a club called the Chantilly on West 4th Street in Greenwich Village - but the first major booking was at Birdland on the East side of Broadway between 52nd and 53rd Streets. Reviewing the quartet's performance, writer Nat Hentoff observed, 'If the success of the Modern Jazz Quartet depended only on the support of jazz musicians, this could be the most in-demand unit in the country.’
After a highly successful three weeks at Birdland, the MJQ played two weeks at the High Hat in Boston, three weeks at the Black Hawk in San Francisco and followed with dates at Sardi's in Los Angeles, Town Hall and Carnegie Hall New York, Symphony Hall Philadelphia - and a return four-week engagement at Birdland. Public and critical reaction was tremendously positive. But Kenny Clarke was already beginning to have reservations about his involvement with the group.
By the time we got back to Birdland for the second time, the style of music had completely changed. We had become a chamber group. But I wanted to play music my way. John told me that his way was the best way to make money and I replied that, sure, I was interested in making money, but I was becoming afraid that I wouldn't be able to play the drums my way again after four or five years of playing eighteenth-century drawing-room jazz.
John wanted to be responsible for all of the music, and when I told him that Bags [Milt Jackson] and I were composers, too, he said that he was musical director and that was the way it had to be.
Milt Jackson and Percy Heath, Klook always contended, were also unhappy about the musical direction, but they were perhaps concerned not to forgo the financial security that the success of the MJQ seemed to guarantee.
A further cause for disagreement developed on the day when John Lewis announced that there would be a fifth and equal member of the co-operative: Monte Kay, who would be managing the MJQ. Said Kenny, 'I told John that no manager deserved to get twenty per cent of a band's income. But he said the deal had been done. I was very unhappy about this.’
The motivation for Kenny's decision to quit the MJQ early in 1955, at a time when the group was really winning a high level of public approbation, was probably compounded of a number of elements. And, as was not unusual, he offered different explanations at different times.
He told Helen Oakley Dance that after his disagreement with Lewis over the introduction of Monte Kay into the co-operative, he believed that Lewis mentioned the matter to John Hammond, one of whose children was receiving piano lessons from Lewis at the time.
I think Hammond's response was that, since I seemed to be a troublemaker, it would be best if they got rid of me. Anyway, there was a strange atmosphere when I came to work the next evening. The next day the band was leaving for Washington for a date in the Howard Theater. I went home and thought about it - and I decided not to go. I felt that if John was prepared to fire me on the advice of an outsider, then I really didn't want to go on working with the quartet. So I quit.
In an interview with Crescendo's Les Tomkins, published in August 1968, Kenny said that when John Lewis first outlined his policy for the group to follow, he agreed with some of his ideas - but not all.
I eventually left, not because I felt restricted, but because I couldn't accept the overall conception. It should have leaned more towards folklore than to classical music; it would probably have been more agreeable to the public that way, too. I think jazz forms are more suitable to improvise on than classical forms. Happily, they've succeeded commercially. But I have no regrets about leaving them. None at all. Probably, if I'd stayed they wouldn't have been a success!
John Lewis told me that his understanding of Kenny Clarke's reason for leaving the MJQ was that he wanted to return to Paris.
He was going back to Paris and that was it. He had an opportunity over there and he took it. He always did things like that. I remember in 1937 he was supposed to go with Fletcher Henderson - but instead he took the job with Edgar Hayes, who was not in the same league as Henderson. But I guess he wanted to go to Europe, so that's what he did. Certainly he didn't leave because of the music. He was happy with the music.
Milt Jackson, on the other hand, says that Kenny left the MJQ 'because he was unhappy about the way musicians were treated in New York'. He said Kenny had happy recollections of Europe and wanted to return. (Milt himself left the group for a spell in the mid-fifties because 'even though we were successful musically, and were making a major contribution, it wasn't as financially rewarding as it should have been'. He had another break from the quartet in 1974 when, according to notes left by Kenny, he told him, 'After twenty years I finally got out. The only thing I have against you is that you didn't take me with you when you left.'
In an interview with French writer Francois Postif, Kenny said he left the MJQ 'because John Lewis thought of nothing but making money. He wanted to become commercial and pander to the public. I didn't agree.' And he told the International Herald Tribune's Mike Zwerin that he didn't regret 'leaving the gold mine just before it panned out. Not for one minute. I've thought about that; someone said, "Klook, you should have stayed here and made all that money." But money's only good when you need it.'
In most interviews about the MJQ, Kenny refrained from raising the more disputatious matters that he referred to in the conversation with Helen Oakley Dance. And he told her, true to his general tendency to sidestep controversy for the sake of tranquillity, 'When people ask me why I left, I always say, well, it just wasn't the way I like to play.'
In a December 1963 Down Beat interview Kenny told Burt Korall: 'As for John, his music is a bit too bland and pretentious for me. I fell asleep the last time I heard the MJQ in person.’
On another occasion Kenny recalled an incident at an MJQ rehearsal which, for him, must have been the ultimate heresy. John interrupted the tune they were doing and said to Klook, 'Hey, Kenny, this is not supposed to swing.’ And Kenny replied with a mirthless chuckle, 'Yeah? What's it supposed to do then?'
Bassist Red Mitchell also recalls an incident towards the end of Kenny Clarke's time with the MJQ which would seem to confirm the view that the conflict between Klook and John Lewis over the musical direction the quartet was taking was more than a touch acrimonious.
I was walking on Broadway one day, heading downtown towards the Alvin Hotel which was just across the street from Birdland. As I got to about half a block away from the hotel I heard voices raised in a heated argument. There, on the corner, were Milt Jackson, Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke - and I caught Kenny shouting at the top of his voice, 'Well, let that motherfucker get his own band!'
I'm quite certain that Kenny objected strongly to what John Lewis was doing to the MJQ. And it seems ironic to me that, in the end, Kenny went to France to pursue playing jazz the American way, while John Lewis stayed in the States and Europeanized the music of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
My own view is that the primary cause of Kenny's leaving the MJQ was his increasing dissatisfaction with the musical path that Lewis was following - a factor which, for Kenny, far outweighed any consideration of enhanced financial rewards.
However, I am quite sure that Kenny totally misread the attitude of John Lewis when he believed that he was preparing to fire him. Neither was it the case that Klook left the MJQ because he wanted to return to Paris. He didn't leave New York until some eighteen months after parting from the quartet. The most likely explanation is that he found the Lewis repertoire restricting and not in accord with his musical ideals, and he genuinely didn't want to become trapped by the MJQ's commercial success and the obligations that that would impose. It was yet another escape act for Kenny, and I am absolutely certain that, as he told Zwerin, he never regretted it for one moment.
He told me once,
I stuck it for a while and everybody tried to convince me how much it would mean to me financially - but I tried to think a little ahead, and I realized that it would all add up to being the same. I knew I could get more satisfaction and enjoyment from playing my way.
Among the papers Kenny left behind is an interview transcript with a handwritten note on the bottom, which reads:
I always knew the MJQ would make it because the musicians are sincere and talented, plus John Lewis had a formula for success and a businesslike attitude. Seeing their success, I'm not sorry I left. I'm completely happy with the way things have turned out because I like doing the things I do.
It was signed, 'Kenny "Klook" Clarke, drummer, Paris, France, 1968.’
The Modern Jazz Quartet
Touring Europe in the late ’50s, the Modern
Jazz Quartet arrived at a London concert hall to find a small,
wan-sounding piano onstage. Dismayed at having to play yet another
“muffin,” pianist John Lewis looked around and spotted a Steinway
concert grand in a dark corner, its lid locked. When he asked to play
it, the stage manager refused, adding: “That’s for proper music.”
Resigned, Lewis made do. “After the concert,” recalls Milt Jackson, the
quartet’s vibraharpist, “the man apologized to John. He said he’d never
heard jazz sound like that before.”
Until the Modern Jazz Quartet came along 31 years ago, no one had heard jazz sound quite “like that” before. Reacting to the excesses of the bebop era, the MJQ seemingly accomplished the impossible. It put an end to the endless solo and, while injecting jazz with new structure, including classical forms, maintained spontaneity by devising a unique way of improvising collectively. With its unorthodox instrumentation—piano, vibes, bass and drums—the MJQ shimmered, dazzling itself and its audience with a lyrical, elegant, lucid music that was undeniably “proper.”
But if impressing skeptical British stage managers had been its goal and calling, the MJQ would not still be wrestling with the issues of money and status that attended its birth, its breakup in 1974 and its return to touring this year. Nor would jazz fans be flocking to the quartet’s appearances at the Kool Jazz Festivals this summer, including a Carnegie Hall concert at the flagship New York festival next week.
For all its classicism, the group’s integrity lies in its devotion to jazz basics. As Lewis defines it, “Rhythmically, jazz has nothing to do with Africa, or with Latin America. It has to do with some special and very delicate things that developed here, and which people should be busy trying to protect and preserve: swing, the blues and the element of surprise.”
Since emerging from the ranks of the Dizzy Gillespie big band after World War II, the quartet has changed personnel only twice, and not at all since 1955. The roll call now, as then, consists of Lewis, 63, on piano; Jackson, 60, on vibes; Percy Heath, 60, on bass; and Connie Kay, 57, on drums. Such constancy is rare enough in big bands, but in small combos it is almost unprecedented.
Lewis provides much of the glue with his compositions, which are as challenging to play as they are affecting to hear. While striving, he says, “to balance all four instruments as in a string quartet,” he writes and arranges highly personalized pieces designed to feature each member of the band. Sacha’s March, named for Lewis’ son (who will be a freshman at Harvard in the fall; he also has a daughter, Nina, 15), is a charming and tender piece centered around Kay’s drums.
Playing in the MJQ is never dull. As Kay says, “We change stuff around all the time. Sometimes it isn’t even on paper. Some strange dude could come along and play what’s written, and he’d be wrong because it’s not done that way anymore.”
Lewis is a gentle taskmaster. He speaks softly, with a shy, hesitant tone, his words filtered through a constant smile. But the message—perfection—gets through. The MJQ has always been one of the most rehearsed bands in jazz. In the late ’50s, when the quartet summered at Lenox, Mass., where Lewis helped establish the School of Jazz, the quartet rehearsed three hours daily, and Heath recalls “looking out wistfully at those sunlit trees. Oh, boy, it was torture.”
If the rehearsal process isn’t totally democratic, it is highly participatory. After all, each of the musicians is an acknowledged virtuoso (“They all play their ass off, that’s all I know,” says Kay), and they often suggest their own solutions to questions of nuance. The virtuoso factor also molds the group’s sound. As Heath explains, “Anything John gives him, Jackson will interpret as Jackson. And I think John relies on that.”
To the casual listener, the most prominent element in the MJQ’s tapestry is Jackson’s vibraharp, with its force, its reverberating warmth and its ornate, effortless flight. Subtler, but as important, is Lewis’ piano, gently insistent, thoughtfully affectionate.
Heath and Kay are needle and thread, brightly sewing up the fabric, strengthening it, occasionally emerging from the seams to become the fabric itself. Both men get an unusually rich and resilient sound from their instruments. Heath plays a glorious 18th-century bass he found in Berlin in 1956 after a tip from a friend. He calls it “Rogeri,” after its maker. Kay’s drum kit is anti-newfangled: calfskin heads rather than plastic, a thick soft felt bass-drum beater instead of a hard wooden one. Kay painstakingly tunes his drums each time he plays them. “Unless a guy knows how to caress the skins, he should forget the drum solo, as far as I’m concerned,” he says. “Most of them are a bunch of noise.”
Jackson is equally proud of his vintage friend, a 1937 Deagan. He owns newer vibes but says none sound as good. “Most instruments used in jazz are of European origin,” he adds. “Mine is one of the few from America. It was invented the year I was born, 1923.” Only pianist Lewis must cast his fate to the winds. “He has to face a stranger every time,” says Heath sympathetically. While Kay tunes, and Heath warms up Rogeri at length, and Jackson merely samples his Deagan, Lewis is often bent over a new keyboard, frowningly removing grunge with a damp towel.
In performance, visual contrasts and balances abound. Lewis purses his lips with determination at every turn of phrase. His solidly built body barely moves, seeming to compress with the force of his concentration. Kay, sitting tall and erect amidst his black pearl drums, also appears stationary, but as tranquil as a Buddha. When he “swings” the band, his head snicks left and right metronomically, and the corners of his mouth upturn under the ever-present dark glasses he wears to protect his light-sensitive eyes.
Heath and Jackson move. Heath, tall and buoyant and ardently attentive, bends his knees and dances cheek to cheek with his bass. He sweats profusely, not from the lights, he insists, but from the “sheer excitement” of touching Rogeri. Jackson is a sparrow, ever cocking his head. Between phrases, he may look bored, distracted. When he plays, legs straight, trim trunk angled forward over the vibes, his arms blur and his eyebrows flip up in astonishment. “There’s the ,” impressionthe French critic André Hodeir once wrote, “that Milt is listening to himself play with an ear that is not at all complacent but that is, in a certain sense, charmed.”
Jackson is that rarity, a natural. Growing up in Detroit, with little or no instruction, he sang gospel and became fluent on drums, piano, guitar, violin and xylophone. One of his earliest musical memories is of strumming his father’s guitar to the rhythm his mother made tenderizing beef with a hammer. Kay grew up in Manhattan, listening to Cab Calloway broadcasts and drumming along on a hassock “until finally the straw came out.” In Philadelphia, young Heath played violin and sang in a family quartet. Prejudice or segregation impinged on them all, but Lewis, growing up in Albuquerque, N.Mex., where people of Indian or Spanish descent were the scorned minority, saw less than the others. As Heath says, “His roots are different from the average black in America.”
After World War II all four men gravitated to where the action was—New York, hotbed of bebop. To allow his brass players to rest their chops around mid-show, Dizzy Gillespie would present the rhythm section of his big band on its own. In 1946, that was Lewis, Jackson, Ray Brown on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums. Audiences dug them, and they each other, so much that in 1951, after several intervening gigs, they made a record as the Milt Jackson Quartet. But “since none of us could afford to hire the others,” as Lewis explains, “we decided to all hire each other.” Brown left, replaced by Heath, and they settled on a suitably collective name.
In the disreputable nightclub atmosphere of the ’40s, the image of jazz suffered, and the MJQ wished, as Jackson says, “to elevate the level of respect.” Following its first recording in 1952, the quartet decided to shun nightclubs in favor of concert halls. They arranged their instruments in an arc that emphasized none more than another, and the musicians made their entrances together, two from each side of the stage. They wore tuxedos so that, as Lewis explains, “people didn’t have to waste time trying to see what everybody looked like. You could just listen to the music.”
Lewis, who had earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from the Manhattan School of Music, became the group’s musical director and guiding spirit. He began employing fugue (Concorde, Vendome), diminution and recapitulation (Django) and other classical devices. He wrote suites inspired by the Renaissance commedia dell’arte (Fontessa, and later The Comedy). But despite the group’s American origins, most of the early cheering came from across the Atlantic. “The quartet’s gift of painting orchestral colors with a deliberately restricted instrumental palette is masterly,” raved the English critic Francis Newton. “And they never stop playing jazz.”
Soon the cheering spread. At home, composer-critic Gunther Schuller declared that the MJQ had achieved a level of interplay “almost nonexistent in jazz since the great days of the Ellington band.” But some, like Miles Davis, didn’t dig. “The way they bring ‘dignity’ to jazz in their formal clothes and the way they bow,” he once said, “is like Ray Robinson bringing dignity to boxing by fighting in a tuxedo.” The MJQ’s own drummer, Kenny Clarke, quit in 1955, calling Lewis’ music “too bland and pretentious for my taste.” Kay, a promising drummer who had worked with the distinguished tenor saxophonist Lester Young, replaced him.
As time went by the MJQ won over its detractors and achieved a lasting eminence. To do so, they toured. And toured. In 1957 they played 88 European concerts in four months. They lived on the road for three, four, even five months at a time. When they were caught in a Mexican earthquake in 1973, Heath fearlessly ran back into their evacuated hotel to make sure Rogeri was safe. An insurrection broke out around them in Argentina in 1962. Their last five concerts were canceled, and they were advised to stay in their hotel. Kay ventured out anyway to keep a dinner date. “I didn’t worry about getting stopped,” he says with a smile, holding up one long arm. “They could see I wasn’t Argentine.”
Meanwhile the four men’s wives were raising their children without them. Not until the ’60s did the group finally begin taking a summer vacation. Today Kay says ruefully of his sons, Connie Jr., now 26, and Noel, now 21, “I missed all the years when I could have taken them around.” (Heath has three sons, Percy III, 32, Jason, 27, and Stuart, 22.) Time on the road grew more grueling, a cumulative headache of late flights, lost bags, cramped taxis, short beds and indifferent promoters.
The MJQ had become one of the highest-paid groups in jazz, and the four were all living comfortably. But as rock stars became increasingly popular and commanded unheard-of fees, the $4,000 to $5,000 that the group could earn for concerts began to seem thin gruel indeed. Moreover, the men had been paying through the nose to fly first-class, enjoy better hotels and restaurants, and dress in custom-made outfits from H. Huntsman & Sons on London’s Savile Row.
Finally, in 1974, after some 30 records and 22 years with the group, Jackson decided to call the whole thing off. The others wanted to continue, but Jackson had become embittered and was convinced he could do better on his own. “People came to me and said we had to be four very rich cats,” he says. “And why not? We looked like it, we sounded like it, and maybe in some people’s minds we even acted like it. But where was it?”
“Milt is being shortsighted,” Lewis told the New York Times the day before the group’s emotional farewell concert in New York. “The rock stars he is talking about are in show business. They’re entertainers. We are musicians.”
The jazz world agreed—and mourned. Down Beat compared the breakup to “the abrupt disintegration of Mt. Rushmore.” In the ensuing diaspora, each man fared differently. Lewis thrived, becoming a professor of music at New York’s City College and exploiting “the opportunity to investigate the piano as I never did before.” He also launched his own sextet, featuring flute, violin and guitar. Heath and younger brothers Jimmy, on sax, and Al, on drums, established the Heath Brothers band. Percy earned far less than in MJQ days, but he continued to grow musically. Kay toiled. He free-lanced with Paul Desmond and others, and became the house drummer at a New York nightclub, a job that only increased his distaste for such places.
Jackson, who had started a swinging, blues-oriented group of his own during the MJQ’s summer breaks, now ventured out as a “single” as well, touring alone, picking up local rhythm sections—a jazz crapshoot. He eventually made more money than with the MJQ, but “There were nights,” he admits, “when I wanted to strangle all three cats right on the bandstand.”
Over the years the resentments against Jackson softened, but, except for several 1976 concerts, the group remained a memory until a financially tempting offer got them together again in Japan and briefly in the U.S. in 1981. Those concerts were followed by gigs in the U.S. in 1982.
This year, at long last, the MJQ is back on the road. Thanks largely to the efforts of Ray Brown, their new manager and old associate, they’re earning from $10,000 to $20,000 a night in concert, and about the same for the rare week in a club. (Miles Davis is one of the few who command more.) Bassist Brown, 56, himself a member of the jazz pantheon, is point man for a crusade the MJQ has more or less always been conducting. He travels with them, insisting on things like limousines, well-tuned pianos and distortion-free sound systems. “I still hear, ‘This is for serious music, that’s good enough for jazz,’ ” he says. “I’m reversing that.”
Though the improved payday convinced them to revive their hallowed marquee, it was no end in itself. Their music has never been more touching. The secret is not sterling technique, though that is a quality the group virtually embodies. Rather, it is something Jackson touched on in 1975 while lecturing to advanced students and faculty at Boston’s Berkeley School of Music. Arguing that no one could ever be taught to duplicate his remarkable sound, he came to his impassioned point: “If it ain’t here,” he said, tapping his chest with one strong finger, “it ain’t nowhere.”
https://www.wtju.net/jazz-100-hour-55-modern-jazz-quartet-1960s/
As the Modern Jazz Quartet, members of which were once Dizzy
Gillespie’s rhythm section in the 1940s, moved into the 1960s, they
continued to swing in their own quiet way, even as their music director,
pianist John Lewis, explored the third stream, a synthesis of jazz and
classical music. Having been founded in 1952, the MJQ was active as a
unit until 1974, then reunited periodically for another twenty years,
until drummer Connie Kay’s death in 1994.
“The standard evaluation of the MJQ has stressed the division in approach between Lewis and Jackson … and Jackson occasionally seemed to fuel that impression. In his later years, however, he reacted angrily to any suggestion of antipathy within the band, blaming the media for seeking scandal or – his own word – dissension where none existed. He has acknowledged he did not see eye to eye with Lewis on certain matters, including the latter’s championing of Ornette Coleman, and was occasionally frustrated at his role (especially in the context of some of the experiments with symphony orchestras, which left him ‘with nothing much to play’). At the same time, he made the point that ‘the MJQ has been together for forty years, and there’s no way a group can be that successful for all that time if we didn’t get along’. Jackson also acknowledged that when all was said and done, they all did better as the MJQ than they did on their own.” – Kenny Mathieson
MJQ – Fontessa.
“The MJQ … began a sequence of important recordings in January and February of 1956 with Fontessa, built around the now customary mixture of classically-influenced pieces ([such as] ‘Versailles’, one of the most successful of Lewis’s jazz fugues…) harder-hitting jazz and blues tunes (‘Woody ‘n’ You’, Jackson’s ‘Bluesology’), and ballads.” – Kenny Mathieson
“Lewis’s first exploration of characters from the commedia dell’arte was [the LP] Fontessa, an appropriately chill and stately record that can seem a little enigmatic, even off-putting. The themes of commedia are remarkably appropriate to a group who have always presented themselves in sharply etched silhouette, playing a music that is deceptively smooth and untroubled but which harbours considerable jazz feeling.” – Brian Morton & Richard Cook
John Lewis and his Orchestra – Third Stream Explorations
The LP “Golden Striker indulges [John Lewis’s] baroque leanings with a set of tunes arranged for piano and a large brass ensemble: the tone-colours are delightful, and ‘Piazza Navona’ and the reworked ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ are gravely beautiful. It’s not a much admired set, often dismissed because a good deal of the music is through-composed and therefore ‘not jazz’. It’s certainly a thoughtful set and a resolutely undramatic one.” – Brian Morton & Richard Cook
(Melvin Broiles, Bernie Glow, Alan Kiger, Joe Wilder-tp, David Baker, Dick Hixson-tb, Ray Alonge, John Barrows, Al Richman, Gunther Schuller-frh, Harvey Phillips-tu, John Lewis-p, George Duvivier-b, Connie Kay-d). From The Golden Striker. 2/15/1960
(Melvin Broiles, Bernie Glow, Alan Kiger, Joe Wilder-tp, David Baker, Dick Hixson-tb, Ray Alonge, John Barrows, Al Richman, Gunther Schuller-frh, Harvey Phillips-tu, John Lewis-p, George Duvivier-b, Connie Kay-d). From The Golden Striker. 2/12/1960
MJQ Live – Dedicated to Connie.
“After [drummer Connie] Kay’s death in December 1994, the MJQ issued a [recording of a] 1960 concert from Yugoslavia in his memory. As John Lewis discovered when he auditioned these old tapes, it was one of the truly great MJQ performances. Jackson’s playing is almost transcendentally wonderful on ‘Bags’ Groove’ and ‘I Remember Clifford’…. Dedicated To Connie is a very special record and has always been our favourite of the bunch.” – Brian Morton & Richard Cook
(John Lewis-p, Milt Jackson-vib, Percy Heath-b, Connie Kay-d). From Dedicated to Connie. 5/27/1960
(John Lewis-p, Milt Jackson-vib, Percy Heath-b, Connie Kay-d). From Dedicated to Connie. 5/27/1960
Milt Jackson & Wes Montgomery – Bags Meets Wes.
“Jackson was firmly ensconced in the Modern Jazz Quartet by this time, but occasional blowing dates were something he obviously enjoyed, and his association with Riverside led to some more challenging situations. [Bags Meets Wes, a] December 1961 date put together [Jackson with guitarist Wes Montgomery] the two modern masters of their instruments in a setting that allowed them both free rein. That said, it’s a more considered record than some of this period and nothing is allowed to go on too long. ‘Stairway To The Stars’ is presented as a miniature and it seems just right at that. The quintet locks into an irresistible groove on the uptempo themes and it’s no surprise that the set-list is dominated by blues, with the opening ‘S.K.J.’ and ‘Sam Sack’ the most compelling of them.” – Brian Morton & Richard Cook
(Milt Jackson-vib, Wynton Kelly-p, Wes Montgomery-g, Sam Jones-b, Philly Joe Jones-d). From Bags Meets Wes. 12/18/1961
(Milt Jackson-vib, Wynton Kelly-p, Wes Montgomery-g, Sam Jones-b, Philly Joe Jones-d). From Bags Meets Wes. 12/19/1961
The Modern Jazz Quartet was the longest lasting combo in jazz for
decades, earning well-deserved accolades for the consistency of their
performances and recordings over the years. John Lewis and Milt Jackson
also deserved considerable renown for their solo efforts as well.
While bebop was a revolutionary new music in the late 1930s and dominated jazz in the 1940s, by the 1960s it still had its adherents who were producing compelling music thirty years later. In the next hour of Jazz at 100, bebop from trumpeter Howard McGhee, saxophonists Charles McPherson and Sonny Stitt, and pianist Barry Harris.
Recordings.
Modern Jazz Quartet. Fontessa. Atlantic LP 1231.
John Lewis. The Golden Striker. Atlantic LP 1334.
Modern Jazz Quartet. Dedicated to Connie. Atlantic 8276
Milt Jackson & Wes Montgomery. Bags Meets Wes. Riverside RLP 407
Resources.
Mathieson, Kenny. 2012. Cookin’: Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, 1954-65. Edinburgh. Canongate Books. The Modern Jazz Quartet
Morton, Brian & Cook, Richard. 2011. Penguin Jazz Guide, the History of the Music in the 1001 Best Albums. New York, NY. Penguin Books.
John Lewis. The Golden Striker.
Modern Jazz Quartet. Dedicated to Connie
Milt Jackson & Wes Montgomery. Bags Meets Wes
Ratliff, Ben. 2002. The New York Times Essential Library of Jazz. New York. Times Books.
Chapter 41. Modern Jazz Quartet, Fontessa (1956)
Annotated playlists and streaming links for all the Jazz at 100 broadcasts: Jazz at 100
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Modern_Jazz_Quartet
The Modern Jazz Quartet (also known as the MJQ) was established in 1952 by Milt Jackson (vibraphone), John Lewis (piano, musical director), Percy Heath (bass), and Kenny Clarke (drums). Connie Kay replaced Clarke in 1955.
The MJQ is the most perfect example of chamber music
jazz. Composed of eminent musicians with a history of achievements in
mainstream modern jazz, the group acquired an individuality of its own
early on and was able to maintain it over decades. Thanks to the strong
musical personality of its leader, pianist John Lewis, the extraordinary
improvisational skills of vibraphonist Milt Jackson, and the seamless
rhythmic support of bassist Percy Heath and drummer Connie Kay, the MJQ
combined the qualities of genuine jazz with the classicism of baroque music, providing a unique experience of cool, quiet swing that never lacked emotion and equally never lacked control.
Until the Modern Jazz Quartet came along 31 years ago, no one had heard jazz sound quite “like that” before. Reacting to the excesses of the bebop era, the MJQ seemingly accomplished the impossible. It put an end to the endless solo and, while injecting jazz with new structure, including classical forms, maintained spontaneity by devising a unique way of improvising collectively. With its unorthodox instrumentation—piano, vibes, bass and drums—the MJQ shimmered, dazzling itself and its audience with a lyrical, elegant, lucid music that was undeniably “proper.”
But if impressing skeptical British stage managers had been its goal and calling, the MJQ would not still be wrestling with the issues of money and status that attended its birth, its breakup in 1974 and its return to touring this year. Nor would jazz fans be flocking to the quartet’s appearances at the Kool Jazz Festivals this summer, including a Carnegie Hall concert at the flagship New York festival next week.
For all its classicism, the group’s integrity lies in its devotion to jazz basics. As Lewis defines it, “Rhythmically, jazz has nothing to do with Africa, or with Latin America. It has to do with some special and very delicate things that developed here, and which people should be busy trying to protect and preserve: swing, the blues and the element of surprise.”
Since emerging from the ranks of the Dizzy Gillespie big band after World War II, the quartet has changed personnel only twice, and not at all since 1955. The roll call now, as then, consists of Lewis, 63, on piano; Jackson, 60, on vibes; Percy Heath, 60, on bass; and Connie Kay, 57, on drums. Such constancy is rare enough in big bands, but in small combos it is almost unprecedented.
Lewis provides much of the glue with his compositions, which are as challenging to play as they are affecting to hear. While striving, he says, “to balance all four instruments as in a string quartet,” he writes and arranges highly personalized pieces designed to feature each member of the band. Sacha’s March, named for Lewis’ son (who will be a freshman at Harvard in the fall; he also has a daughter, Nina, 15), is a charming and tender piece centered around Kay’s drums.
Playing in the MJQ is never dull. As Kay says, “We change stuff around all the time. Sometimes it isn’t even on paper. Some strange dude could come along and play what’s written, and he’d be wrong because it’s not done that way anymore.”
Lewis is a gentle taskmaster. He speaks softly, with a shy, hesitant tone, his words filtered through a constant smile. But the message—perfection—gets through. The MJQ has always been one of the most rehearsed bands in jazz. In the late ’50s, when the quartet summered at Lenox, Mass., where Lewis helped establish the School of Jazz, the quartet rehearsed three hours daily, and Heath recalls “looking out wistfully at those sunlit trees. Oh, boy, it was torture.”
If the rehearsal process isn’t totally democratic, it is highly participatory. After all, each of the musicians is an acknowledged virtuoso (“They all play their ass off, that’s all I know,” says Kay), and they often suggest their own solutions to questions of nuance. The virtuoso factor also molds the group’s sound. As Heath explains, “Anything John gives him, Jackson will interpret as Jackson. And I think John relies on that.”
To the casual listener, the most prominent element in the MJQ’s tapestry is Jackson’s vibraharp, with its force, its reverberating warmth and its ornate, effortless flight. Subtler, but as important, is Lewis’ piano, gently insistent, thoughtfully affectionate.
Heath and Kay are needle and thread, brightly sewing up the fabric, strengthening it, occasionally emerging from the seams to become the fabric itself. Both men get an unusually rich and resilient sound from their instruments. Heath plays a glorious 18th-century bass he found in Berlin in 1956 after a tip from a friend. He calls it “Rogeri,” after its maker. Kay’s drum kit is anti-newfangled: calfskin heads rather than plastic, a thick soft felt bass-drum beater instead of a hard wooden one. Kay painstakingly tunes his drums each time he plays them. “Unless a guy knows how to caress the skins, he should forget the drum solo, as far as I’m concerned,” he says. “Most of them are a bunch of noise.”
Jackson is equally proud of his vintage friend, a 1937 Deagan. He owns newer vibes but says none sound as good. “Most instruments used in jazz are of European origin,” he adds. “Mine is one of the few from America. It was invented the year I was born, 1923.” Only pianist Lewis must cast his fate to the winds. “He has to face a stranger every time,” says Heath sympathetically. While Kay tunes, and Heath warms up Rogeri at length, and Jackson merely samples his Deagan, Lewis is often bent over a new keyboard, frowningly removing grunge with a damp towel.
In performance, visual contrasts and balances abound. Lewis purses his lips with determination at every turn of phrase. His solidly built body barely moves, seeming to compress with the force of his concentration. Kay, sitting tall and erect amidst his black pearl drums, also appears stationary, but as tranquil as a Buddha. When he “swings” the band, his head snicks left and right metronomically, and the corners of his mouth upturn under the ever-present dark glasses he wears to protect his light-sensitive eyes.
Heath and Jackson move. Heath, tall and buoyant and ardently attentive, bends his knees and dances cheek to cheek with his bass. He sweats profusely, not from the lights, he insists, but from the “sheer excitement” of touching Rogeri. Jackson is a sparrow, ever cocking his head. Between phrases, he may look bored, distracted. When he plays, legs straight, trim trunk angled forward over the vibes, his arms blur and his eyebrows flip up in astonishment. “There’s the ,” impressionthe French critic André Hodeir once wrote, “that Milt is listening to himself play with an ear that is not at all complacent but that is, in a certain sense, charmed.”
Jackson is that rarity, a natural. Growing up in Detroit, with little or no instruction, he sang gospel and became fluent on drums, piano, guitar, violin and xylophone. One of his earliest musical memories is of strumming his father’s guitar to the rhythm his mother made tenderizing beef with a hammer. Kay grew up in Manhattan, listening to Cab Calloway broadcasts and drumming along on a hassock “until finally the straw came out.” In Philadelphia, young Heath played violin and sang in a family quartet. Prejudice or segregation impinged on them all, but Lewis, growing up in Albuquerque, N.Mex., where people of Indian or Spanish descent were the scorned minority, saw less than the others. As Heath says, “His roots are different from the average black in America.”
After World War II all four men gravitated to where the action was—New York, hotbed of bebop. To allow his brass players to rest their chops around mid-show, Dizzy Gillespie would present the rhythm section of his big band on its own. In 1946, that was Lewis, Jackson, Ray Brown on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums. Audiences dug them, and they each other, so much that in 1951, after several intervening gigs, they made a record as the Milt Jackson Quartet. But “since none of us could afford to hire the others,” as Lewis explains, “we decided to all hire each other.” Brown left, replaced by Heath, and they settled on a suitably collective name.
In the disreputable nightclub atmosphere of the ’40s, the image of jazz suffered, and the MJQ wished, as Jackson says, “to elevate the level of respect.” Following its first recording in 1952, the quartet decided to shun nightclubs in favor of concert halls. They arranged their instruments in an arc that emphasized none more than another, and the musicians made their entrances together, two from each side of the stage. They wore tuxedos so that, as Lewis explains, “people didn’t have to waste time trying to see what everybody looked like. You could just listen to the music.”
Lewis, who had earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from the Manhattan School of Music, became the group’s musical director and guiding spirit. He began employing fugue (Concorde, Vendome), diminution and recapitulation (Django) and other classical devices. He wrote suites inspired by the Renaissance commedia dell’arte (Fontessa, and later The Comedy). But despite the group’s American origins, most of the early cheering came from across the Atlantic. “The quartet’s gift of painting orchestral colors with a deliberately restricted instrumental palette is masterly,” raved the English critic Francis Newton. “And they never stop playing jazz.”
Soon the cheering spread. At home, composer-critic Gunther Schuller declared that the MJQ had achieved a level of interplay “almost nonexistent in jazz since the great days of the Ellington band.” But some, like Miles Davis, didn’t dig. “The way they bring ‘dignity’ to jazz in their formal clothes and the way they bow,” he once said, “is like Ray Robinson bringing dignity to boxing by fighting in a tuxedo.” The MJQ’s own drummer, Kenny Clarke, quit in 1955, calling Lewis’ music “too bland and pretentious for my taste.” Kay, a promising drummer who had worked with the distinguished tenor saxophonist Lester Young, replaced him.
As time went by the MJQ won over its detractors and achieved a lasting eminence. To do so, they toured. And toured. In 1957 they played 88 European concerts in four months. They lived on the road for three, four, even five months at a time. When they were caught in a Mexican earthquake in 1973, Heath fearlessly ran back into their evacuated hotel to make sure Rogeri was safe. An insurrection broke out around them in Argentina in 1962. Their last five concerts were canceled, and they were advised to stay in their hotel. Kay ventured out anyway to keep a dinner date. “I didn’t worry about getting stopped,” he says with a smile, holding up one long arm. “They could see I wasn’t Argentine.”
Meanwhile the four men’s wives were raising their children without them. Not until the ’60s did the group finally begin taking a summer vacation. Today Kay says ruefully of his sons, Connie Jr., now 26, and Noel, now 21, “I missed all the years when I could have taken them around.” (Heath has three sons, Percy III, 32, Jason, 27, and Stuart, 22.) Time on the road grew more grueling, a cumulative headache of late flights, lost bags, cramped taxis, short beds and indifferent promoters.
The MJQ had become one of the highest-paid groups in jazz, and the four were all living comfortably. But as rock stars became increasingly popular and commanded unheard-of fees, the $4,000 to $5,000 that the group could earn for concerts began to seem thin gruel indeed. Moreover, the men had been paying through the nose to fly first-class, enjoy better hotels and restaurants, and dress in custom-made outfits from H. Huntsman & Sons on London’s Savile Row.
Finally, in 1974, after some 30 records and 22 years with the group, Jackson decided to call the whole thing off. The others wanted to continue, but Jackson had become embittered and was convinced he could do better on his own. “People came to me and said we had to be four very rich cats,” he says. “And why not? We looked like it, we sounded like it, and maybe in some people’s minds we even acted like it. But where was it?”
“Milt is being shortsighted,” Lewis told the New York Times the day before the group’s emotional farewell concert in New York. “The rock stars he is talking about are in show business. They’re entertainers. We are musicians.”
The jazz world agreed—and mourned. Down Beat compared the breakup to “the abrupt disintegration of Mt. Rushmore.” In the ensuing diaspora, each man fared differently. Lewis thrived, becoming a professor of music at New York’s City College and exploiting “the opportunity to investigate the piano as I never did before.” He also launched his own sextet, featuring flute, violin and guitar. Heath and younger brothers Jimmy, on sax, and Al, on drums, established the Heath Brothers band. Percy earned far less than in MJQ days, but he continued to grow musically. Kay toiled. He free-lanced with Paul Desmond and others, and became the house drummer at a New York nightclub, a job that only increased his distaste for such places.
Jackson, who had started a swinging, blues-oriented group of his own during the MJQ’s summer breaks, now ventured out as a “single” as well, touring alone, picking up local rhythm sections—a jazz crapshoot. He eventually made more money than with the MJQ, but “There were nights,” he admits, “when I wanted to strangle all three cats right on the bandstand.”
Over the years the resentments against Jackson softened, but, except for several 1976 concerts, the group remained a memory until a financially tempting offer got them together again in Japan and briefly in the U.S. in 1981. Those concerts were followed by gigs in the U.S. in 1982.
This year, at long last, the MJQ is back on the road. Thanks largely to the efforts of Ray Brown, their new manager and old associate, they’re earning from $10,000 to $20,000 a night in concert, and about the same for the rare week in a club. (Miles Davis is one of the few who command more.) Bassist Brown, 56, himself a member of the jazz pantheon, is point man for a crusade the MJQ has more or less always been conducting. He travels with them, insisting on things like limousines, well-tuned pianos and distortion-free sound systems. “I still hear, ‘This is for serious music, that’s good enough for jazz,’ ” he says. “I’m reversing that.”
Though the improved payday convinced them to revive their hallowed marquee, it was no end in itself. Their music has never been more touching. The secret is not sterling technique, though that is a quality the group virtually embodies. Rather, it is something Jackson touched on in 1975 while lecturing to advanced students and faculty at Boston’s Berkeley School of Music. Arguing that no one could ever be taught to duplicate his remarkable sound, he came to his impassioned point: “If it ain’t here,” he said, tapping his chest with one strong finger, “it ain’t nowhere.”
https://www.wtju.net/jazz-100-hour-55-modern-jazz-quartet-1960s/
Jazz at 100 Hour 55: The Modern Jazz Quartet in the 1960s
The Modern Jazz Quartet: Percy Heath – Connie Kay – John Lewis – Milt Jackson
“The standard evaluation of the MJQ has stressed the division in approach between Lewis and Jackson … and Jackson occasionally seemed to fuel that impression. In his later years, however, he reacted angrily to any suggestion of antipathy within the band, blaming the media for seeking scandal or – his own word – dissension where none existed. He has acknowledged he did not see eye to eye with Lewis on certain matters, including the latter’s championing of Ornette Coleman, and was occasionally frustrated at his role (especially in the context of some of the experiments with symphony orchestras, which left him ‘with nothing much to play’). At the same time, he made the point that ‘the MJQ has been together for forty years, and there’s no way a group can be that successful for all that time if we didn’t get along’. Jackson also acknowledged that when all was said and done, they all did better as the MJQ than they did on their own.” – Kenny Mathieson
MJQ – Fontessa.
“The MJQ … began a sequence of important recordings in January and February of 1956 with Fontessa, built around the now customary mixture of classically-influenced pieces ([such as] ‘Versailles’, one of the most successful of Lewis’s jazz fugues…) harder-hitting jazz and blues tunes (‘Woody ‘n’ You’, Jackson’s ‘Bluesology’), and ballads.” – Kenny Mathieson
“Lewis’s first exploration of characters from the commedia dell’arte was [the LP] Fontessa, an appropriately chill and stately record that can seem a little enigmatic, even off-putting. The themes of commedia are remarkably appropriate to a group who have always presented themselves in sharply etched silhouette, playing a music that is deceptively smooth and untroubled but which harbours considerable jazz feeling.” – Brian Morton & Richard Cook
Versailles. Modern Jazz Quartet
(John Lewis-p, Milt Jackson-vib, Percy Heath-b, Connie Kay-d). From Fontessa. 1/22/1956
(John Lewis-p, Milt Jackson-vib, Percy Heath-b, Connie Kay-d). From Fontessa. 1/22/1956
Woody’n You. Modern Jazz Quartet
(John Lewis-p, Milt Jackson-vib, Percy Heath-b, Connie Kay-d). From Fontessa. 1/22/1956
(John Lewis-p, Milt Jackson-vib, Percy Heath-b, Connie Kay-d). From Fontessa. 1/22/1956
Bluesology. Modern Jazz Quartet
(John Lewis-p, Milt Jackson-vib, Percy Heath-b, Connie Kay-d). From Fontessa. 2/14/1956
(John Lewis-p, Milt Jackson-vib, Percy Heath-b, Connie Kay-d). From Fontessa. 2/14/1956
The LP “Golden Striker indulges [John Lewis’s] baroque leanings with a set of tunes arranged for piano and a large brass ensemble: the tone-colours are delightful, and ‘Piazza Navona’ and the reworked ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ are gravely beautiful. It’s not a much admired set, often dismissed because a good deal of the music is through-composed and therefore ‘not jazz’. It’s certainly a thoughtful set and a resolutely undramatic one.” – Brian Morton & Richard Cook
Piazza Navona. John Lewis and his Orchestra
(Melvin Broiles, Bernie Glow, Alan Kiger, Joe Wilder-tp, David Baker, Dick Hixson-tb, Ray Alonge, John Barrows, Al Richman, Gunther Schuller-frh, Harvey Phillips-tu, John Lewis-p, George Duvivier-b, Connie Kay-d). From The Golden Striker. 2/15/1960
Odds Against Tomorrow. John Lewis and his Orchestra
(Melvin Broiles, Bernie Glow, Alan Kiger, Joe Wilder-tp, David Baker, Dick Hixson-tb, Ray Alonge, John Barrows, Al Richman, Gunther Schuller-frh, Harvey Phillips-tu, John Lewis-p, George Duvivier-b, Connie Kay-d). From The Golden Striker. 2/12/1960
“After [drummer Connie] Kay’s death in December 1994, the MJQ issued a [recording of a] 1960 concert from Yugoslavia in his memory. As John Lewis discovered when he auditioned these old tapes, it was one of the truly great MJQ performances. Jackson’s playing is almost transcendentally wonderful on ‘Bags’ Groove’ and ‘I Remember Clifford’…. Dedicated To Connie is a very special record and has always been our favourite of the bunch.” – Brian Morton & Richard Cook
Bags’ Groove. Modern Jazz Quartet
(John Lewis-p, Milt Jackson-vib, Percy Heath-b, Connie Kay-d). From Dedicated to Connie. 5/27/1960
I Remember Clifford. Modern Jazz Quartet
(John Lewis-p, Milt Jackson-vib, Percy Heath-b, Connie Kay-d). From Dedicated to Connie. 5/27/1960
“Jackson was firmly ensconced in the Modern Jazz Quartet by this time, but occasional blowing dates were something he obviously enjoyed, and his association with Riverside led to some more challenging situations. [Bags Meets Wes, a] December 1961 date put together [Jackson with guitarist Wes Montgomery] the two modern masters of their instruments in a setting that allowed them both free rein. That said, it’s a more considered record than some of this period and nothing is allowed to go on too long. ‘Stairway To The Stars’ is presented as a miniature and it seems just right at that. The quintet locks into an irresistible groove on the uptempo themes and it’s no surprise that the set-list is dominated by blues, with the opening ‘S.K.J.’ and ‘Sam Sack’ the most compelling of them.” – Brian Morton & Richard Cook
Stairway To The Stars. Milt Jackson – Wes Montgomery Quintet
(Milt Jackson-vib, Wynton Kelly-p, Wes Montgomery-g, Sam Jones-b, Philly Joe Jones-d). From Bags Meets Wes. 12/18/1961
S.K.J. Milt Jackson – Wes Montgomery Quintet
(Milt Jackson-vib, Wynton Kelly-p, Wes Montgomery-g, Sam Jones-b, Philly Joe Jones-d). From Bags Meets Wes. 12/19/1961
While bebop was a revolutionary new music in the late 1930s and dominated jazz in the 1940s, by the 1960s it still had its adherents who were producing compelling music thirty years later. In the next hour of Jazz at 100, bebop from trumpeter Howard McGhee, saxophonists Charles McPherson and Sonny Stitt, and pianist Barry Harris.
Recordings.
Modern Jazz Quartet. Fontessa. Atlantic LP 1231.
John Lewis. The Golden Striker. Atlantic LP 1334.
Modern Jazz Quartet. Dedicated to Connie. Atlantic 8276
Milt Jackson & Wes Montgomery. Bags Meets Wes. Riverside RLP 407
Resources.
Mathieson, Kenny. 2012. Cookin’: Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, 1954-65. Edinburgh. Canongate Books. The Modern Jazz Quartet
Morton, Brian & Cook, Richard. 2011. Penguin Jazz Guide, the History of the Music in the 1001 Best Albums. New York, NY. Penguin Books.
John Lewis. The Golden Striker.
Modern Jazz Quartet. Dedicated to Connie
Milt Jackson & Wes Montgomery. Bags Meets Wes
Ratliff, Ben. 2002. The New York Times Essential Library of Jazz. New York. Times Books.
Chapter 41. Modern Jazz Quartet, Fontessa (1956)
Annotated playlists and streaming links for all the Jazz at 100 broadcasts: Jazz at 100
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Modern_Jazz_Quartet
Modern Jazz Quartet
The Modern Jazz Quartet (also known as the MJQ) was established in 1952 by Milt Jackson (vibraphone), John Lewis (piano, musical director), Percy Heath (bass), and Kenny Clarke (drums). Connie Kay replaced Clarke in 1955.
Contents[hide] |
History
Jackson, Lewis, and Clarke had originally played together in a quartet while in the Dizzy Gillespie orchestra from 1946 to 1950. Together with Ray Brown they played during interludes designed to give the trumpeters time to recover from the challenging upper register trumpet parts. The same group recorded as the Milt Jackson Quartet in 1951.
Jackson and Lewis originally shared the role of musical director but Lewis eventually took over the entire responsibility of this position. He was to remain the central force in defining the MJQ’s voice, while Milt Jackson blossomed as its star soloist.
In their middle years the group often played with classical musicians, but its repertoire consisted mainly of bop and Swing era standards. Among the original compositions from the band's book are "Django" by Lewis (a tribute to the Belgian gypsy jazz guitar player Django Reinhardt), "Afternoon In Paris," also by Lewis and "Bags' Groove" by Jackson (Bags was his nickname).
The group was first signed by Prestige and later in the 1950s with Atlantic. In the late 1960s, in between their two periods with Atlantic, they signed with Apple, the Beatles label (the sole jazz group on the label), and released two albums—Under the Jasmine Tree (1967) and Space (1969).
Jackson left the group in 1974 partly because he liked a freer flowing style of playing and partly because he was tired of playing for little money (compared to rock and roll stars). As there could be no Modern Jazz Quartet without the two principals Lewis and Jackson, the group disbanded. In 1981 the MJQ reorganized to play festivals and later on a permanent six months per year basis. The MJQ's last recording was issued in 1993. Heath, the last surviving member, died in 2005.
Modern Jazz Quartet's style
Chamber music jazz: precedents
If the MJQ remains as a unique gem in jazz history, it is not without some precedents. Since the 1920s, there has always been a current of musicians trying to “make a Lady out of jazz” (Paul Whiteman). Sometimes, this happened at the cost of spontaneity and vitality, perhaps jazz’s most important elements. It then led to forgettable results. But restraint and sophistication could also go hand in hand with swing and creativity. Whiteman’s pianist Frank Signorelli and violinist Joe Venuti are early examples.
The chamber music approach was quite naturally practiced by small ensembles, sometimes part of a larger orchestra. In the late 1930s and 1940s, Benny Goodman’s Trio, Quartet And Sextet provided the perhaps best example of small formations combining swing and classic elegance. Interestingly, Goodman’s Quartet included vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, the greatest representative of that instrument along with Milt Jackson. Artie Shaw’s competing Gramercy Five included a harpsichord and sometimes recorded with strings. Bassist John Kirby led a similar small combo around the same time. The Dave Brubeck Quartet is among the MJQ’s contemporary formations that bear some similarity in style.
The advent of the relaxed cool jazz style in the 1960s in response to the exuberant intensity of hard-bop provided a further element that would be essential to the evolution of the MJQ’s unique style.
The Modern Jazz Quartet would have its own short-lived successor and competitor, the Prestige Jazz Quartet. The latter never rivaled its model in fame.
The Third Stream
Third Stream is an expression coined by composer Gunther Schuller to describe a form of music composed of a mixture between classic music and jazz. In 1957, the MJQ would produce an album with strings under that name.
The MJQ’s unique voice
The enigma of the MJQ's music-making was that each individual member could improvise with an exciting vibrancy but, as a whole, the group specialized in genteel baroque counterpoint. Their approach to jazz attracted promoters who sponsored 'jazz packet' concerts during the 1950s. One show would consist of several contrasting groups. The MJQ were ideal participants because no other group sounded like them. They provided a visual contrast as well, attired in black jackets and pinstriped trousers.
The group played blues as much as they did fugues, but the result was tantalizing when one considered the hard-swinging potential of each individual player. Their best-selling record, Django, typified their neo-classical approach to polyphony.The classic version
The MJQ gradually developed its distinctive style, gradually moving away from its bop origins. When drummer Connie Kay replaced Kenny Clarke, a bop pioneer and intensely rhythmic player, the group perhaps lost some dynamism but replaced it with the smooth, supple, understated energy that became its trademark. It is with Lewis, Jackson, Heath and Kay that the Quartet was most cohesive and produced many of its masterpieces. In the last few years (after 1994), Percy Heath’s brother Albert “Tootie” Heath replaced drummer Connie Kay who had passed away.
It is often said that Milt Jackson eventually came to miss the more spontaneous environment he had enjoyed in his early years and which he found again after leaving the MJQ, but it is undeniably within the very specific parameters of that formation that his lyrical playing flourished and reached its peak. Behind his thrilling improvisations, pianist John Lewis maintained a steady pace while adding to the excitement. Lewis interjected brief, repeated patterns of single notes with a crisp touch that equaled that of Count Basie. Lewis was a minimalist, for whom less was more, and he provided the perfect anchor for Milt Jackson’s solo flights. Connie Kay was a discreet and refined as Jo Jones had been with the Basie band and Percy Heath, one of the great bassists of modern jazz, completed the ensemble.
Partial discography
Some notable albums by the Modern Jazz Quartet:
- M.J.Q. (1952) Prestige Records.
- Concorde (1955) (first recording featuring Connie Kay on drums)
- Django (1956)
- Fontessa (1956) (first album on Atlantic Records)
- Pyramid (1959)
- Plastic Dreams (1971)
- The Complete Last Concert (1974)
Bibliography
- DeVeaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Roth Family Foundation Music in America Book). University of California Press; 1 edition, 1999. ISBN 978-0520216655.
- Feather, Leonard G. and Gitler, Ira. The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Seventies. Da Capo Press, 1987. ISBN 9780306802904.
- Harrison, M. “Looking back at the Modern Jazz Quartet.” In: Williams, Martin (ed.) Art of Jazz : Essays on the Development and Nature of Jazz, 1979. ISBN 9780306795565.
- Hennessey, Mike. Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press (Trd); Reprint edition, 1994.
- DVD: 20th Century Jazz Masters, 2003. Featuring the MJQ. ASIN: B0000A4GII.
External links
All links retrieved October 11, 2018.
Credits
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https://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/blogcritics/article/Music-Review-The-Modern-Jazz-Quartet-The-4917999.php
Music Review: The Modern Jazz Quartet - 'The Modern Jazz Quartet: Germany 1956-1958: Lost Tapes' [Remastered]
The most important thing about the wealth of recordings unearthed from the archives of Südwestrundfunk ("Southwest Broadcasting") currently being systematically released by Jazzhaus, is the insight it gives us into the way jazz was making a significant place for itself in the world beyond the United States' borders. With the end of World War II, Europe was awash with most all of the great names in American jazz touring with their music, and their reception was very warm. The nearly 3,000 hours of previously unreleased music in the station's vaults are testimony to the popularity of the American genre in Germany, and the rest of Europe as well.
While in a hoard that large, there are bound to be some clunkers, but by and large when you are talking about names like Zoot Sims, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie, the chances are good they will be few and far between. And when you have a knowledgeable cadre of enthusiasts available to cull the best of the material, the chances are even better than good
The latest release from Jazzhaus, The Modern Jazz Quartet: Germany 1956-1958: Lost Tapes,
is a case in point. Certainly any new work from the Modern Jazz Quartet
(MJQ) would be welcome under any circumstances, but here we have the
musicians early on as they develop and grow the aesthetic that will come
to define them. Formed in 1952 among members of the Dizzy Gillespie
band's rhythm section, pianist John Lewis,
in some respects the ensemble's visionary, had taken over as music
director, and was continuing to fine tune his ideas about chamber jazz.
It was also in 1952 that the Quartet's roster was set: Lewis on piano, Milt Jackson on vibes, Percy Heath on bass, and finally Connie Kay taking over on drums.
If the music on the Jazzhaus album is not quite
classic MJQ, it shows them on the road and nearly there. It opens with a
set of studio recordings from October 1956 which includes a Jackson
original, "Ralph's New Blues" followed by a surprising "God Rest Ye
Merry Gentlemen." There are two standards: an inventive "Willow Weep For
Me" and an uptempo "I'll Remember April." They are joined by the Harald
Banter Ensemble for Lewis's "Midsommer," and a performance which comes
off a bit dirge-like.
From a November session, the album adds a fine
version of Jackson's "Bluesology," complete with a bit of classical
fugue and Lewis's homage to Django Reinhardt,
"Django," probably the composition most identified with MJQ. Here they
work with Orchestra Kurt Edelhagen. The album also includes a solo
version of "Tenderly" from Jackson, as well as some elegant solo work
from him on Lewis's "Cortege." Other Lewis originals include "Sun Dance"
and "J.B. Blues" which concludes the album.
All in all, the set offers a good look into the
earlier work of a group that was on its way to becoming a major
institution in the world of modern jazz.
Page One
a column by
Bill Shoemaker
Bill Shoemaker
The Modern Jazz Quartet. Courtesy of Mosaic Records
If you scour the various histories
of jazz’s role in the Civil Rights Movement, you would be hard-pressed
to find any mention of The Modern Jazz Quartet. The times did not
inspire fiery screeds from the MJQ, but evocations of the Italian
Renaissance. There’s little to nothing in contemporary interviews with
its members that suggest any palpable reaction to specific events or
the struggle, generally, on their part. Evidence suggests that what you
saw and heard is what you got: Four buttoned-down men who created an
impeccably mannered music perfect for penthouse cocktail parties and
moody European films.
However, a counter argument can be made, one that very well may have been shouted down during the ‘60s: The MJQ pursued a foundational agenda every bit as important as any jazz artist’s, if not more so. Notions of all art being political notwithstanding, its goal was essentially cultural – the recognition of jazz as legitimate music. Certainly, there were political ramifications to this issue, as the “legit” rap against jazz was essentially one of disqualification, like a literacy test at the polls. Rather than rail against these barriers, the MJQ simply passed through them, wearing tuxedoes.
As the politics of jazz simmered in the late ‘50s and into the ‘60s, the standing critique that the MJQ marginalized jazz’s African-American essence to emphasize European sources hardened, threatening the MJQ with irrelevancy. The case that the MJQ was out of step with the times in brief: Charles Mingus recorded “Fables of Faubus” approximately three months before the MJQ recorded pianist John Lewis’ “Django” at the Music Inn; Coltrane recorded “Alabama” two months after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, while it took the MJQ an additional month to record Lewis’ “In a Crowd,” originally penned for Eripando Visconti’s film, A Milanese Story.
The MJQ succeeded in becoming an institution of sorts, but not a dynasty; with no heirs, their trademarked synthesis of jazz and classical music now has little to no direct bearing on the state of the art, chamber jazz having become a wide-ranging sub-genre. Despite the MJQ’s fame and longevity, their repertoire has not been championed. Perhaps the most cutting irony of the MJQ’s legacy is that their strategy for institutional access and legitimatization has been most consequentially pursued by Wynton Marsalis, who promoted jazz’s African-Americentric narrative with exclusionary zeal.
A Clemens Kalischer photograph reprinted in the booklet for Mosaic’s The Atlantic Studio Recordings Of The Modern Jazz Quartet 1956-64 says much about the MJQ, even though the shot is not of the group. Taken at a 1959 Lenox School of Music faculty party at the Music Inn, the shot shows Milt Jackson playing piano instead of vibes, back to the camera, while Jimmy Giuffre sits in a chair, playing clarinet with his eyes closed. Giuffre is grooving; his relaxed countenance stands – or in this case almost slouches – in stark contrast to the propriety MJQ projected in much of the music included in the 7-CD collection.
The box set is cause to retest the standard, somewhat dichotomous narrative that the MJQ was a cooperative, even though their creative dynamic was all but exclusively between the Bach-inspired Apollonian Lewis and the Bacchic bebopper Jackson. The idea that the MJQ was a cooperative took a beating as early as Joe Goldberg’s Jazz Masters of the 50’s (1965; MacMillan); unintentionally, given Goldberg’s pro-musician bona fides. Bassist Percy Heath kept the tuxes pressed; drummer Connie Kay booked the transportation and hotels; when Lewis assumed announcing duties in addition to carrying the books, Jackson had nothing to do but show for the gig. Furthermore, after bop innovator Kenny Clarke left in February 1955, Lewis “began coaching young Connie Kay … who was willing to adapt himself to Lewis’ ideas.”
Although Jackson did not voice his dissent publicly, word spread privately among his colleagues about his unease with Lewis’ emphasis on counterpoint, particularly when the vibes pioneer soloed. “Milt hated it. Hated it,” box set annotator Doug Ramsey quotes Jimmy Heath. “He wanted John to accompany him, not play contrapuntal lines against what he was playing. That distracts … But it worked.” Whatever tug of ideas may have occurred between Jackson and Lewis in the MJQ’s first years, Lewis’ visionary dominance was well established with “Versailles,” the opening track for the MJQ’s first Atlantic album, Fontessa. Combining nimble, effervescent swing and well-crafted, minimally filigreed counterpoint, “Versailles” is a prime example of the cinematic quality of Lewis’ writing, as he creates an appealingly fresh, sun-bathed atmosphere. More importantly, the interaction between Jackson and Lewis has a sublime virtuosic effortlessness.
By the second session for Fontessa in February ‘56, Jackson’s “Bluesology” was already proliferating as a blowing vehicle. On the ‘49 septet version issued by Savoy, Jackson’s chiseled blues lines benefit from pianist Walter Bishop’s conventional comping and Roy Haynes' groove-mining drumming. Jackson’s blues sensibility is also well reflected by the aptly named “Soulful,” a track he recorded for Savoy in January ‘56 (and compiled with “Bluesology” on the CD, Meet Milt Jackson), less than three weeks before a rejected, now lost take on “Bluesology” was waxed at the first Fontessa session; with a quintet including Clarke and tenorist Lucky Thompson, Jackson cogently taps the blues root of modern jazz. The MJQ’s version of “Bluesology” is far afield from these sides; with a more convivial bounce and Lewis’ Basie-like economy leavening the pianist’s counter lines, it’s a decidedly sunnier reading that can be tallied as one for Jackson’s side of the MJQ equation.
However, Fontessa, which also included strong Jackson solos on “Willow Weep for Me” and “Woody ‘N You,” is arguably the vibist’s high-water mark during the MJQ’s Atlantic years; the ‘57 eponymous, third album for the label, notable for the inclusion of Jackson’s signature composition, “Bags’ Groove,” and his sprinting “Baden-Baden” coming close. But, by then, the MJQ’s sound had become increasingly formatted, even seeping into the latter album’s take on “A Night in Tunisia,” the flag-waver Lewis, Jackson and Heath first played together in Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. The performance is a clear instance of how Lewis shaped the MJQ’s sound through a subordinated role for percussion. Clarke would have dropped a bomb or two every chorus.
Something of the same could be construed about Heath’s role in the group compared to original bassist, Ray Brown, who wielded his chops more freely. Once a busy freelancer, Heath began to limit his session work outside the MJQ; The Magnificent Thad Jones (Blue Note), recorded in July 1956, a little more than a month before The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn, is one of the very few he made during this period. His solo on “Thedia” – described as “a happily placid unison theme” by annotator Leonard Feather – is noteworthy for how Heath created crisp forward motion primarily through melody; the difference between this solo and the bulk he recorded with MJQ being that he’s actually being nudged by the date’s drummer, Max Roach.
The fairest basis to gauge an ensemble is their performance in optimum conditions. The Music Inn in Massachusetts – the site of the fabled Lenox School of Jazz that counted Ornette Coleman among its students and the MJQ’s summer home beginning in the mid ‘50s – meets that threshold. Not only did the MJQ record two volumes including performances with guest artists at the rambling resort, but tracks included on One Never Knows (No Sun in Venice) and Pyramid, as well as the ‘57 tracks with Giuffre’s trio with guitarist Jim Hall and bassist Ralph Pena included on Third Stream Music. Respectively, Giuffre and Sonny Rollins joined the MJQ on the first and second volumes of Music Inn performances, an intriguing contrast as Giuffre shared Lewis’ penchant for jazz’s “subtle aspects,” while Rollins was – and remains – the master of the sweeping gesture. It’s telling that the MJQ takes it up a notch when Rollins solos on “Bags’ Groove;” their shifts of rhythmic feel prompt the tenor colossus to broaden his tone and stretch long notes with gusto one moment, and play with sly finesse the next. The quintet’s take on “A Night in Tunisia” out-capers the earlier version. Rollins’ riff-based phrases and use of quavering notes to punctuate longer lines that echo the proto-bop of Coleman Hawkins – Rollins’ final squall has to be a unique outburst in the MJQ’s discography.
As satisfying as they are, the performances with Rollins are anomalies; those with Giuffre are far more germane to Lewis’ agenda and really speak to the history-changing upside of his approach. While Giuffre’s folksy bent may seem quite distant from Lewis’ classicism, the three quintet tracks show a considerable overlap in temperament. Despite their formal differences, Giuffre’s “Fun,” which darts between hoe-down tinges and pensive contours, and Lewis’ “A Fugue for Music Inn,” a quiet improvisational tour de force, exude an assured, elastic feel. While Giuffre’s influence on present-day chamber jazz far exceeds Lewis’ in some quarters, these performances – as well as an affecting reading of David Raksin’s “Serenade” that contains no improvisation – demonstrates how essential that common ground was to the sub-genre’s evolution.
Lewis’ most ambitious projects were collaborations with composer Gunther Schuller included on Third Stream Music (1957-60) and The Modern Jazz Quartet and Orchestra (‘60); few of these tracks have grown in stature over the decades, even Lewis’ “Da Capo” and Giuffre’s “Fine,” performed by a septet comprised of the MJQ and Giuffre’s trio on Third Stream Music. The former is a string of vignettes and segue-ways; a liltingly wistful theme stated by Jackson could have been developed into a satisfying stand-alone piece. However, Lewis doesn’t give the component parts sufficient breathing space, resulting in a cut-and-paste feel. Giuffre’s “Fine” typifies the “blues-based folk jazz” that permeated his groundbreaking Atlantic album, Jimmy Giuffre 3; but, the presence of the urbane MJQ is strangely dilutive.
Lewis’ compositions on Third Stream Music that feature – ahem – legitimate musicians are surprisingly fresh-sounding. Sure, there are a couple of wince-inducing moments, particularly the French horn motive bookending “Exposure,” which sounds as dated as incidental music for an episode of Star Trek. However, there are some threads connecting “Exposure” and “Sketch” that seem more brilliant now than ever, particularly the interludes on both where Lewis plunks out hesitant, yet plucky single-note lines with minimal support from Kay – something of a synapse between Basie and Mengelberg. “Sketch” also features some appealing, robust passages for the Beaux Arts String Quartet. His only contribution to The Modern Jazz Quartet and Orchestra is “England’s Carol,” a puzzling make-over of “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” a piece Lewis inexplicably returned to throughout the MJQ’s run.
The main events on both albums were Schuller compositions. The rap against “Conversation,” which appeared on Third Stream Music is that the jazz and classical elements merely co-exist. If indeed there is a lack of a grand synthesis, it simply conveys the contemporary perspective; such pieces, after all, marked only the beginning of an experimental movement based on dialogue. The first minutes of the piece alone places this critique in question, as Schuller’s writing for the Beaux Arts String Quartet – which far surpasses Lewis’ in terms of motivic development and nuanced orchestration – slowly brings the MJQ to the foreground in a supple manner. The bulk of the MJQ contribution is in the second half of the ten-minute piece; Jackson and Lewis solo cogently over slightly tart, mid-tempo changes, with edgy scored asides from the strings eventually signaling the conclusion of the piece.
“Conversation” is a far more persuasive piece than Schuller’s “Concertino for Jazz Quartet and Orchestra.” The opening movement is weighted towards jazz elements, some of which are endearing, like the brass and woodwind-propelled, Ellington-tinged groove; but the jazz touches, which trigger occasional, momentary associations with Gershwin and Bernstein, push more incisive orchestra scoring to the margins. The figures Schuller sends darting about Lewis and Jackson’s blues choruses in the second movement also have the kernel-like potential of yielding engaging music on their own if given space. Increasingly through the second and third movements, however, there’s an accumulation of orchestral materials that strain to be bluesy. Compounded by an early ‘60s stereo image where the relatively dry sound of the quartet is canopied by a cavernous orchestra sound, the music sounds painfully dated at times as a result, a problem Andre Hodeir’s “Around the Blues” surprisingly eludes, a rare instance where contrivance – in this case, a work where the orchestra literally performs around, not with, the quartet – registers as authentic. Schuller’s most enduring, vital contributions to the articulation of Third Stream remain “Abstraction” and “Variants on a Theme by Thelonious Monk (Criss-Cross),” included on John Lewis Presents Contemporary Music: Jazz Abstractions – Compositions by Gunther Schuller and Jim Hall (1960; Atlantic).
For the remaining four years covered by this collection, the MJQ stuck with the tried and true with a few notable exceptions: a yearning-free take on Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” for the ‘62 album of the same name; a bright, limber version of Bonfa’s “Carnival” for The Sheriff (‘63); and 1964’s Collaboration with Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida, who raises the temperature of the swing a couple of degrees on Lewis’ “Silver” and provides a credible sway for Jobim’s “One Note Samba” and Ferreira’s “Foi a Saudade.” The bulk of the collection’s last album – The Modern Jazz Quartet Plays George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess – was recorded during the Harlem riots of July 1964, a fortnight before the bodies of three freedom riders were dredged up in Mississippi. Further evidence of the MJQ being woefully out of step with the times? It ain’t necessarily so. The MJQ rode a different circuit to freedom. They understood that freedom is useless without dignity, another word for legitimacy. With the exception of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, no artists brought more dignity to jazz than the Modern Jazz Quartet. There isn’t a box set big enough to deal with that.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/mar/24/modern-jazz-quartet-john-lewis
50 great moments in jazz: The Modern Jazz Quartet and John Lewis's Django
One of the rare bands to be loved beyond the jazz cognoscenti, this
chamber ensemble gave the genre a respect previously afforded to
classical musicians
When Illinois-born pianist John Lewis composed the haunting theme
Django in the early 50s, he gave jazz one of its most enduring
compositions. The piece, dedicated to his friend Django Reinhardt,
the Belgian gypsy guitar genius, combined Lewis's fascination with both
Bach and the blues – and, in the process, it defined the sound of the
Modern Jazz Quartet, a group that was laidback long before anybody
coined the term.
Formed from the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie's late-40s big band, the quartet discovered their cool, chamber-music sound in the early 50s, travelled the world for the next 20 years, came back by public demand in the 80s and continued to perform until their last recording in 1993.
Fans both inside and outside the jazz loop – the Modern Jazz Quartet were one of the rare bands to be loved beyond the cognoscenti – simply referred to them as "the MJQ". Determined to bring jazz the respect afforded to classical musicians, the band wore tuxedos, played concert halls rather than nightclubs, and delivered recitals rather than jams. For all their classical associations, the MJQ vibrated with the spirit of jazz – particularly in earlier years, before its successful mix became a formula.
The band's core comprised pianist Lewis and vibraphone virtuoso Milt Jackson. They made a fascinating contrast, and developed a distinctive musical chemistry. Lewis, who was steeped in classical music, enjoyed threading the characteristic phrasing and swing of jazz through structures like rondos and fugues – he anticipated today's cross-genre explorations by decades. Jackson, an improviser of far more bite and power than was usual for a player of his delicately chiming instrument, was more overtly rooted in bebop's intricately long-lined melodies, and the phrasing of the blues.
Lewis's softly struck chords behind sinewy double-bass lines (originally Ray Brown, and eventually Percy Heath) and the patter and murmur of the drums (originally Kenny Clarke, then Connie Kay) made an MJQ piece identifiable from the first bar. It was a chamber ensemble sound that emphasised bebop's shapely themes and baroque-related harmonies, but played down its emotional heat. As a result, the band seduced listeners who would otherwise have been discomfited by jazz, and its albums dominated the charts in the 50s and early 60s.
Some critics felt that the group deployed the mannerisms and gestures of classical music and jazz without getting to the emotional core of either, but at their best the MJQ exhibited traditional jazz virtues: unusual melodic conception, soulfulness, swing, and the blues. John Lewis went on to compose scores for films, ballets, symphony orchestras, stage plays and TV, and he significantly advanced the cause of the third stream music of the late 50s and early 60s. But the eloquence of Django, a piece still played by jazz musicians everywhere, is both his own epitaph and that of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Formed from the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie's late-40s big band, the quartet discovered their cool, chamber-music sound in the early 50s, travelled the world for the next 20 years, came back by public demand in the 80s and continued to perform until their last recording in 1993.
Fans both inside and outside the jazz loop – the Modern Jazz Quartet were one of the rare bands to be loved beyond the cognoscenti – simply referred to them as "the MJQ". Determined to bring jazz the respect afforded to classical musicians, the band wore tuxedos, played concert halls rather than nightclubs, and delivered recitals rather than jams. For all their classical associations, the MJQ vibrated with the spirit of jazz – particularly in earlier years, before its successful mix became a formula.
The band's core comprised pianist Lewis and vibraphone virtuoso Milt Jackson. They made a fascinating contrast, and developed a distinctive musical chemistry. Lewis, who was steeped in classical music, enjoyed threading the characteristic phrasing and swing of jazz through structures like rondos and fugues – he anticipated today's cross-genre explorations by decades. Jackson, an improviser of far more bite and power than was usual for a player of his delicately chiming instrument, was more overtly rooted in bebop's intricately long-lined melodies, and the phrasing of the blues.
Lewis's softly struck chords behind sinewy double-bass lines (originally Ray Brown, and eventually Percy Heath) and the patter and murmur of the drums (originally Kenny Clarke, then Connie Kay) made an MJQ piece identifiable from the first bar. It was a chamber ensemble sound that emphasised bebop's shapely themes and baroque-related harmonies, but played down its emotional heat. As a result, the band seduced listeners who would otherwise have been discomfited by jazz, and its albums dominated the charts in the 50s and early 60s.
Some critics felt that the group deployed the mannerisms and gestures of classical music and jazz without getting to the emotional core of either, but at their best the MJQ exhibited traditional jazz virtues: unusual melodic conception, soulfulness, swing, and the blues. John Lewis went on to compose scores for films, ballets, symphony orchestras, stage plays and TV, and he significantly advanced the cause of the third stream music of the late 50s and early 60s. But the eloquence of Django, a piece still played by jazz musicians everywhere, is both his own epitaph and that of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Modern Jazz Quartet: Modern Jazz Quartet: The Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings 1956-64
by
The Modern Jazz Quartet
The Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings of The Modern Jazz Quartet 1956-64
Mosaic Records
2011
The Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings of The Modern Jazz Quartet 1956-64
Mosaic Records
2011
They were diverse in talent and temperament. John Lewis, the quiet and determined westerner, who told sound stories with his linear and logical blues-based pianisms; Milt Jackson, the baggy eyed, Motor City vibraharp virtuoso; Percy Heath, the Philly bassist with deep, in-the-pocket basslines; Kenny Clarke, the bomb-dropping blacksmith of the beat from Pittsburgh; and Connie Kay, the New York groovemaster of West Indian descent who could throw down with bebop or Ruth Brown. Somehow those fiercely independent individuals coalesced as the Modern Jazz Quartet. Their syncopated science, telepathic interplay, and monastic commitment to swing, beautifully blended African-American jazz and blues with European classical compositional forms, particularly, the fugue. The group worked for 48 incredible years with one break, until Jackson's death in 1999. Only the 50-year reign of Duke Ellington's orchestra lasted longer.
The group grew out of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's big band in the 1940s. Lewis and Clarke (no, not the explorers), Jackson and bassist Ray Brown were the rhythm section for the orchestra, and when the horns needed a break from the lip-blistering arrangements, the foursome would perform short, ear-catching numbers that pleased the musicians and the audience. But it wasn't until 1952, when Heath replaced Brown, that the group morphed from the Milt Jackson Quartet to the Modern Jazz Quartet.
The change was crucial. Under Jackson's leadership, the group was essentially a "blowing" combo, content with playing spare bop and blues arrangements. When Lewis, armed with his advanced degree from the Manhattan School of Music, and his experiences as Gillespie's arranger, who had participated in the historic "birth of the cool" sessions, became the music director, he—contrary to what many still think—integrated formal music devices such as Bach-style fugues and Balkan folk idioms onto the existing jazz structures. It wasn't about making jazz respectable: it was about a group of African-American musicians taking elements of world music into their own jazz idiom to make great art.
And make great art they did! With the quiet dignity of their dress, and impeccable stage manners, the MJQ was one of jazz's great "crossover" groups, headlining in prestigious concert halls and classical festivals. Its early Prestige recordings, in the early to mid-1950s, mostly with Clarke on drums, put them on the map, with the first appearances of Lewis' greatest composition, "Django," and Jackson's "True Blues." The group's experiments with the jazz-meets-fugue were choppy at first, but the musicians got it together, largely because Clarke, who didn't like being hemmed in by Lewis' ideas, split for Paris. And in walked Kay, an athletic, light-limbed drummer who made his bones playing with pianist Randy Weston, and who was the house drummer for a fledgling R&B label named Atlantic Records. Atlantic was run by two Turkish brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, the latter signing the ensemble. He gave them a higher profile, and a bigger recording budget than they ever got at Prestige. And as they say, the rest is history, two decades of it, preserved on this magnificent box set.
Consisting of seven discs, containing 105 tracks of master, alternate and unreleased recordings from 15 albums, this set offers an evolutionary view of how the MJQ negotiated the conceptual, thematic and musical challenges of group improvisation, based on jazz and non-jazz sources, in an era soon to be dominated by the avant-garde, hard bop, soul, rock and pop.
Anchored by Heath's sure-footed basslines and Kay's spare-is-more drumming (check out the way Lewis added chimes, Asian percussion and exotic cymbals to Kay's drumkit, much in the same way Duke Ellington did with Sonny Greer), the source of MJQ's power lay in the eternal—and creative—tension between Lewis and Jackson: the former musically profiled as a "soft," Count Basie-style soloist, contrasted by the joyful noise of Jackson's shimmering, sanctified, bop-laced, upsouth vibes. But this description obscures the non-abstract truth of the deep blueseness of Lewis' Southwestern sound. It also overlooks perhaps the most profound truth about the group: it is precisely Lewis' cool, crystalline arrangements that provide the perfect contrast for Jackson's fiery improvisations. This is not to diss the vibe master. But a cursory hearing of Jackson's projects as a leader outside the MJQ milieu confirms that point. Though that tension would boil over (egged on by decades of the chant "let Milt blow") and cause the 1974 break-up, the success of the MJQ is unimaginable without it.
When the group released its first Atlantic LP, Fontessa, in 1956, it had finally gelled on the overall group with Kay in the mix. This recording contained standards that would stay in the MJQ book for years: the bouncy "Woody 'N You," the ballads "Angel Eyes," "Willow Weep for Me" and "Over the Rainbow," and the Jackson showstopper, "Bluesology." But its centerpiece was the 11-minute title track: A Lewis-penned work inspired by characters of the Italian Commedia del Arte; a music form where troubadours would sing in specific characters with lightly-sketched, improvisational settings. In Lewis' mind, that form fit nicely in the jazz-blues idiom, as evidenced by this multi-suite work, which heralded the type of conceptual projects the MJQ would later produce.
Released that same year, The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn was recorded in the auditorium of the Music Barn at the Lenox School of jazz, which Lewis co-founded. The clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre was the guest artist on the date. His cool clarinet tones fit perfectly with the MJQ sound on "Serenade," a pastoral Lewis piece composed with no improvisation, the mid-tempo "A Fugue for Music Inn," and peppery "Fun." "Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West " and "Sun Dance," Lewis' homage to the Hopi Indians," would soon exit the MJQ catalog, but "Variation No.1 On God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman" AKA "England's Carol," would be a crowd-pleaser for years to come. For its follow-up, The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn, Volume 2, (its first stereo recording), the foursome is joined by an old friend, tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who recorded with the group on the Prestige label in 1953. On Jackson's signature piece, "Bag's Groove," and on the Dizzy Gillespie hit "A Night in Tunisia," Rollins' pecking, but powerful phrases would display the full flower of what composer and frequent Lewis collaborator Gunther Schuller termed "thematic improvisation." (It should noted that for some reason, Rollins was recorded before a live audience on a separate date).
The Music Inn was also the recording studio for several MJQ LPs. Its eponymously-titled 1957 LP contains a medley of pop songs including "My Old Flame" and "Body and Soul;" a fine rendition of Lewis' "La Ronde: Drums:" a rare Connie Kay spotlight, where the contrast between his lickety-split velvet drumming and Clarke's heavier style couldn't be more clear; the first appearance of "Bag's Groove," and the lesser-known riff-like "Baden-Baden." "The Comedy" features actress-then-singer Diahann Carroll, who was married to the group's manager Monte Kay, and is a further exploration of the characters inspired by the Commedia dell Arte. On the enduring soundtrack One Never Knows (No Sun in Venice), directed by Roger Vadim, and set in Venice, Lewis composes several short musical sketches that illuminate and amplify the visual storyline, and retains the signature sound of the group, and contributes a few timeless compositions to the band book. "The Funky Golden Striker" is pulsed by a New Orleans, second line beat reminiscent of the Big Easy ditty "Snag It." "Cortege" is a solemn and syncopated number that melds the local Latin processions honoring the dead and the funeral dirges of New Orleans. "Three Windows" is an intricate triple fugue that was revisited two decades later in full orchestral form on a 1987 album bearing the same name.
The 1959 album Pyramid, widely regarded as the group's best studio date, is a brilliant summation of the cool, swinging clarity the foursome achieved to that point. Duke Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got that Swing) and the standard "How High The Moon," a Jackson showcase, highlight how the group can update and personalize material from other composers. But it is the originals that make this recording stand out. The title track, written by Ray Brown, with singer Mahalia Jackson in mind, is a rising and falling slow number that beautifully sits on the fence that separates gospel and the blues. Jackson's solo shows off his sanctified syncopations, but Lewis also displays his church cred with a moving solo rich with the type of soul-stirring pianisms heard in the sound of Bobby Timmons, Ramsey Lewis and Ray Bryant.
The most controversial aspect of
the MJQ—and by extension, John Lewis—was its melding of classical
devices to jazz; mainly the fugue: a baroque form where a voice or
instrument states a theme, followed by another instrument or voice, in a
succinct pattern resembling a musical relay race. This form reached its
highest peak with Bach. And what Lewis heard in this form was the
intense contrapuntal pull that is also found in jazz. What many
moldy-figs saw as a forced-marriage between two unmeshable types of
music, we now hear an oftentimes successful hybrid based on common
elements from each genre.
When the MJQ first tried its classical-meets-jazz style on its first contrapuntal composition, "Vendome," in the early 1950s, the pace of the track was slow and tentative. A full decade later, the group runs through the fugal races with no problem, as evidenced by two LPs augmented by classical players. Third Stream Music (the term was coined by Gunther Schuller, not Lewis) marked the return of clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre and his trio, featuring the mellow-toned guitarist Jim Hall on the melodically shifting "Da Capo," which British writer Max Harrison wrote was, "based on development of two contrasted ideas," and the rondo-like "Fine." "Exposure," "Sketch," and "Conservation" featured the MJQ with the Beaux Arts Quartet. In this chamber setting, conducted by Lewis, the balance between notation and improvisation is finely walked on both sides of the idiomatic pond, especially in the spectral, ten minute-plus Schuller composition "Conversations."
In 1960 the quartet upped the classical-jazz ante with The Modern Jazz Quartet with Orchestra, recorded in Germany with a full symphony orchestra. French critic Andre Hodeir's shout-out is interesting, but hardly a blues at all. The German composer/conductor Werner Heider's "Divertimento," which contains spirited, boppish solos from Lewis and Jackson, fares slightly better. And Schuller's three-movement "Concertino For Jazz Orchestra" dances on the outer limits of tonality. Lewis' orchestral adaptation of "England's Carol," is the highlight of this aural experiment.
With the folding of the Lenox School of Jazz in the early 1960s, the group recorded its studio projects in New York. Lonely Woman featured some interesting Lewis compositions that dealt with jazz counterpoint ("Fugato"), a selection from a ballet ("Animal Dance), a TV show starring Harry Belafonte ("New York 19"), and the first recording of Lewis Adriatic's tango-tempoed "Trieste." But the most memorable selection on this date was a complete reimagination of the title track, composed by the iconoclastic alto saxophonist/composer Ornette Coleman, who Lewis championed when every other music critic ran for cover. Lewis and company stay true to the haunting melody, but the group adds an R&B-like groove under the solo section, giving the track a danceable bounce similar to those heard on any Motown track of that period. In contrast, one of the oddest MJQ LPs is A Quartet Is a Quartet Is a Quartet, featuring the Quartetto Di Milano and the Hungarian Gypsy Quartet, capped by four MJQ tracks (Jackson's "Reunion Blues," Lewis' "Concorde," "A Winter Tale" and Jerome Kern's "Yesterday"). Obviously Lewis was trying to make the point that the aforementioned ensembles shared more than they contrasted.
Released in 1963, The Sheriff is an interesting LP. Half of it contains typical MJQ fare, including the standard, "Mean to Me." "Natural Affection" and "Donnie's Theme" are two Lewis numbers composed for a William Inge Broadway play, contrasted by "In A Crowd" and the implosive, Horace Silver-like title track, dedicated to Martin Luther King. The rest of the tracks are the MJQ's first forays into the bossa nova, which exploded in the US in the early 1960s. Luis Bonfa's "Carnival, AKA Morning of the Carnival" swings with the soft syncopations of Brazilian saudade, a Portuguese term that roughly translates into English as "blues." The esteemed Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos' "Bachianas Brasilieras" is beautifully and skillfully adapted by Lewis to the jazz idiom, with its all of its mid-tempo, contrapuntal complexity and earthy Afro-Amazonian airs intact.
The MJQ delves further into the Latin-Brazilian bag on Collaboration, its 1964 LP featuring Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almedia, who the group met the year before at the Monterey Jazz Festival, where Lewis was the musical director. Blessed with a classically-tinged touch and a thorough understanding of Afro-Brazilian and Afro-American idioms, Almeida fit right in with the quartet. Save for "Silver" penned by Lewis in honor of Professor Jim Silver, author of The Closed Society, an examination of the evils of segregation in Mississippi, "Valeria," and a subtle, note-for-note rendition of Bach's "Fugue in A Minor," Lewis and company head south of the border on the remaining tracks. Kay's dancing and delicate drumming and Almeida's New World-Iberian solos together enhance Antonio Carlos Jobim's "One Note Samba."
Almeida and the quartet turn in their best performance on an impassioned and ingenious rendition of Joaquin Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez," which is rivaled only by the Miles Davis/Gil Evans version. The last album featured in this anthology, The Modern Jazz Quartet Plays George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, released in 1965, brings the foursome back to its American popular song roots, with "Summertime" being the longest-lived George Gershwin selection in the band book. The MJQ's rehearsal regimen was so thorough that the few existing alternate takes of "Bluesology," "Woody N' You," "Sun Dance," "La Cantatrice," and "Harlequin," interesting as they may be, are anticlimactic—clearly, the best tracks were chosen.
After its stint with Atlantic, the quartet signed with the Apple, a label owned by the Beatles, resigned with Atlantic in the 1970s, broke up in 1974, re-formed on Norman Granz's Pablo Records in the 1980s, reunited with producer Nesuhi Ertegun on his East West label, and signed yet again with Atlantic in the 1990s, before death would claim each member. This collection excludes some studio records and live material—mostly because of song redundancy, although the 1965 big band LP, Jazz Dialogue, featuring the boogaloo track "Home," which was the theme song for NBC's Today Show, would have been a worthy addition. That quibble aside, this is a well-produced and remastered box set, and a valuable document chronicling the zenith of an important and enduring musical institution.
Tracks: CD1 Fontessa: Versailles (Porte de Versailles); Angel Eyes; Fontessa; Over the Rainbow; Bluesology; Willow Weep for Me; Woody 'n You. The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn: Oh Bess, Oh Where's My Bess; A Fugue for Music Inn; Two Degrees East; Serenade; Fun; Sun Dance; The Man That Got Away; A Morning in Paris; Variation No. 1 on God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. CD2 The Modern Jazz Quartet: Medley (They Say It's Wonderful/How Deep is the Ocean/(I Don't Stand) A Ghost of a Chance With You/My Old Flame/Body and Soul); Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea; La Ronde Drums; A Night in Tunisia; Yesterdays; Bags' Groove; Baden-Baden. One Never Knows (No Sun in Venice: The Golden Striker; One Never Knows; The Rose Truc; Cortege; Venice; Three Windows. CD3 The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn, Volume 2: Medley (Stardust/I Can't Get Started/Lover Man); Yardbird Suite; Midsummer; Festival Sketch; Bags' Groove; A Night in Tunisia. Pyramid: Vendome; Pyramid; It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing); Django; How High the Moon; Romaine. CD4 Third Stream Music: Da Capo; Fine; Exposure; Sketch; Conversation. The Modern Jazz Quartet and Orchestra: Around the Blues; Divertimento; England's Carol; Concertino For Jazz Quartet and Orchestra, First Movement; Concertino For Jazz Quartet and Orchestra, Second Movement (Passacaglia); Concertino For Jazz Quartet and Orchestra, Third Movement. CD5 The Comedy: Spanish Steps; Columbine; Pulcinella; Pierrot; La Cantatrice; Harlequin; Piazza Navona. Lonely Woman: Lonely Woman; Animal Dance; New York 19; Belkis; Why Are You Blue; Fugato; Lamb, Leopard; Trieste. CD6 The Sheriff: The Sheriff; In a Crowd; Bachianas Brasilieras; Mean to Me; Natural Affection; Donnie's Theme; Carnival. A Quartet is a Quartet is a Quartet: Reunion Blues; Winter Tale; Concorde; Yesterdays. The Alternate Takes: Bluesology (stereo take); Woody 'n You (stereo take); Sun Dance (Stereo take); Django (mono take); La Cantatrice (mono take); Harlequin (mono take). CD7 Collaboration: Silver; Trieste; Valeria; Fugue in A Minor; One Note Samba; Foi a Saudade; Concierto de Aranjuez. The Modern Jazz Quartet Plays George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess: Summertime; Bess, You is My Woman; My Man's Gone Now; I Loves You Porgy; It Ain't Necessarily So; Oh Bess, Oh Where's My Bess; There's a Boat Dat's Leavin' Soon.
Personnel: Milt Jackson: vibraharp; John Lewis: piano, conductor (CD4#5);; Percy Heath: bass; Connie Kay: drums; Jimmy Giuffre: clarinet (CD1#9, CD1#11-12); Sonny Rollins: tenor saxophone (CD3#5-6); Gerard Tarack: first violin (CD4#5-6); Alan Martin: second violin (CD4#5-6); Carl Eberl: viola (CD4#5-6); Joe Tekula: cello (CD4#5-6); Gunther Schuller: conductor (CD4#3, CD4#6); Bill McColl: clarinet (CD4#3); Bob Di Domenica: flute (CD4#3); Manny Zegler: bassooon (CD4#3); Paul Ingraham: French horn (CD4#3); Joe Tekula: cello (CD4#3); Betty Glamann: harp (CD4#3); Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Wernere Heider (CD4#7); Symphony Orchestra, Conducted by Gunther Schuller (CD4#6, CD4#8-11); Diahann Carroll: vocal (CD5#5, CD6#16); Laurindo Almeida: guitar (CD7#1-7).
When the MJQ first tried its classical-meets-jazz style on its first contrapuntal composition, "Vendome," in the early 1950s, the pace of the track was slow and tentative. A full decade later, the group runs through the fugal races with no problem, as evidenced by two LPs augmented by classical players. Third Stream Music (the term was coined by Gunther Schuller, not Lewis) marked the return of clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre and his trio, featuring the mellow-toned guitarist Jim Hall on the melodically shifting "Da Capo," which British writer Max Harrison wrote was, "based on development of two contrasted ideas," and the rondo-like "Fine." "Exposure," "Sketch," and "Conservation" featured the MJQ with the Beaux Arts Quartet. In this chamber setting, conducted by Lewis, the balance between notation and improvisation is finely walked on both sides of the idiomatic pond, especially in the spectral, ten minute-plus Schuller composition "Conversations."
In 1960 the quartet upped the classical-jazz ante with The Modern Jazz Quartet with Orchestra, recorded in Germany with a full symphony orchestra. French critic Andre Hodeir's shout-out is interesting, but hardly a blues at all. The German composer/conductor Werner Heider's "Divertimento," which contains spirited, boppish solos from Lewis and Jackson, fares slightly better. And Schuller's three-movement "Concertino For Jazz Orchestra" dances on the outer limits of tonality. Lewis' orchestral adaptation of "England's Carol," is the highlight of this aural experiment.
With the folding of the Lenox School of Jazz in the early 1960s, the group recorded its studio projects in New York. Lonely Woman featured some interesting Lewis compositions that dealt with jazz counterpoint ("Fugato"), a selection from a ballet ("Animal Dance), a TV show starring Harry Belafonte ("New York 19"), and the first recording of Lewis Adriatic's tango-tempoed "Trieste." But the most memorable selection on this date was a complete reimagination of the title track, composed by the iconoclastic alto saxophonist/composer Ornette Coleman, who Lewis championed when every other music critic ran for cover. Lewis and company stay true to the haunting melody, but the group adds an R&B-like groove under the solo section, giving the track a danceable bounce similar to those heard on any Motown track of that period. In contrast, one of the oddest MJQ LPs is A Quartet Is a Quartet Is a Quartet, featuring the Quartetto Di Milano and the Hungarian Gypsy Quartet, capped by four MJQ tracks (Jackson's "Reunion Blues," Lewis' "Concorde," "A Winter Tale" and Jerome Kern's "Yesterday"). Obviously Lewis was trying to make the point that the aforementioned ensembles shared more than they contrasted.
Released in 1963, The Sheriff is an interesting LP. Half of it contains typical MJQ fare, including the standard, "Mean to Me." "Natural Affection" and "Donnie's Theme" are two Lewis numbers composed for a William Inge Broadway play, contrasted by "In A Crowd" and the implosive, Horace Silver-like title track, dedicated to Martin Luther King. The rest of the tracks are the MJQ's first forays into the bossa nova, which exploded in the US in the early 1960s. Luis Bonfa's "Carnival, AKA Morning of the Carnival" swings with the soft syncopations of Brazilian saudade, a Portuguese term that roughly translates into English as "blues." The esteemed Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos' "Bachianas Brasilieras" is beautifully and skillfully adapted by Lewis to the jazz idiom, with its all of its mid-tempo, contrapuntal complexity and earthy Afro-Amazonian airs intact.
The MJQ delves further into the Latin-Brazilian bag on Collaboration, its 1964 LP featuring Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almedia, who the group met the year before at the Monterey Jazz Festival, where Lewis was the musical director. Blessed with a classically-tinged touch and a thorough understanding of Afro-Brazilian and Afro-American idioms, Almeida fit right in with the quartet. Save for "Silver" penned by Lewis in honor of Professor Jim Silver, author of The Closed Society, an examination of the evils of segregation in Mississippi, "Valeria," and a subtle, note-for-note rendition of Bach's "Fugue in A Minor," Lewis and company head south of the border on the remaining tracks. Kay's dancing and delicate drumming and Almeida's New World-Iberian solos together enhance Antonio Carlos Jobim's "One Note Samba."
Almeida and the quartet turn in their best performance on an impassioned and ingenious rendition of Joaquin Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez," which is rivaled only by the Miles Davis/Gil Evans version. The last album featured in this anthology, The Modern Jazz Quartet Plays George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, released in 1965, brings the foursome back to its American popular song roots, with "Summertime" being the longest-lived George Gershwin selection in the band book. The MJQ's rehearsal regimen was so thorough that the few existing alternate takes of "Bluesology," "Woody N' You," "Sun Dance," "La Cantatrice," and "Harlequin," interesting as they may be, are anticlimactic—clearly, the best tracks were chosen.
After its stint with Atlantic, the quartet signed with the Apple, a label owned by the Beatles, resigned with Atlantic in the 1970s, broke up in 1974, re-formed on Norman Granz's Pablo Records in the 1980s, reunited with producer Nesuhi Ertegun on his East West label, and signed yet again with Atlantic in the 1990s, before death would claim each member. This collection excludes some studio records and live material—mostly because of song redundancy, although the 1965 big band LP, Jazz Dialogue, featuring the boogaloo track "Home," which was the theme song for NBC's Today Show, would have been a worthy addition. That quibble aside, this is a well-produced and remastered box set, and a valuable document chronicling the zenith of an important and enduring musical institution.
Tracks: CD1 Fontessa: Versailles (Porte de Versailles); Angel Eyes; Fontessa; Over the Rainbow; Bluesology; Willow Weep for Me; Woody 'n You. The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn: Oh Bess, Oh Where's My Bess; A Fugue for Music Inn; Two Degrees East; Serenade; Fun; Sun Dance; The Man That Got Away; A Morning in Paris; Variation No. 1 on God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. CD2 The Modern Jazz Quartet: Medley (They Say It's Wonderful/How Deep is the Ocean/(I Don't Stand) A Ghost of a Chance With You/My Old Flame/Body and Soul); Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea; La Ronde Drums; A Night in Tunisia; Yesterdays; Bags' Groove; Baden-Baden. One Never Knows (No Sun in Venice: The Golden Striker; One Never Knows; The Rose Truc; Cortege; Venice; Three Windows. CD3 The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn, Volume 2: Medley (Stardust/I Can't Get Started/Lover Man); Yardbird Suite; Midsummer; Festival Sketch; Bags' Groove; A Night in Tunisia. Pyramid: Vendome; Pyramid; It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing); Django; How High the Moon; Romaine. CD4 Third Stream Music: Da Capo; Fine; Exposure; Sketch; Conversation. The Modern Jazz Quartet and Orchestra: Around the Blues; Divertimento; England's Carol; Concertino For Jazz Quartet and Orchestra, First Movement; Concertino For Jazz Quartet and Orchestra, Second Movement (Passacaglia); Concertino For Jazz Quartet and Orchestra, Third Movement. CD5 The Comedy: Spanish Steps; Columbine; Pulcinella; Pierrot; La Cantatrice; Harlequin; Piazza Navona. Lonely Woman: Lonely Woman; Animal Dance; New York 19; Belkis; Why Are You Blue; Fugato; Lamb, Leopard; Trieste. CD6 The Sheriff: The Sheriff; In a Crowd; Bachianas Brasilieras; Mean to Me; Natural Affection; Donnie's Theme; Carnival. A Quartet is a Quartet is a Quartet: Reunion Blues; Winter Tale; Concorde; Yesterdays. The Alternate Takes: Bluesology (stereo take); Woody 'n You (stereo take); Sun Dance (Stereo take); Django (mono take); La Cantatrice (mono take); Harlequin (mono take). CD7 Collaboration: Silver; Trieste; Valeria; Fugue in A Minor; One Note Samba; Foi a Saudade; Concierto de Aranjuez. The Modern Jazz Quartet Plays George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess: Summertime; Bess, You is My Woman; My Man's Gone Now; I Loves You Porgy; It Ain't Necessarily So; Oh Bess, Oh Where's My Bess; There's a Boat Dat's Leavin' Soon.
Personnel: Milt Jackson: vibraharp; John Lewis: piano, conductor (CD4#5);; Percy Heath: bass; Connie Kay: drums; Jimmy Giuffre: clarinet (CD1#9, CD1#11-12); Sonny Rollins: tenor saxophone (CD3#5-6); Gerard Tarack: first violin (CD4#5-6); Alan Martin: second violin (CD4#5-6); Carl Eberl: viola (CD4#5-6); Joe Tekula: cello (CD4#5-6); Gunther Schuller: conductor (CD4#3, CD4#6); Bill McColl: clarinet (CD4#3); Bob Di Domenica: flute (CD4#3); Manny Zegler: bassooon (CD4#3); Paul Ingraham: French horn (CD4#3); Joe Tekula: cello (CD4#3); Betty Glamann: harp (CD4#3); Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Wernere Heider (CD4#7); Symphony Orchestra, Conducted by Gunther Schuller (CD4#6, CD4#8-11); Diahann Carroll: vocal (CD5#5, CD6#16); Laurindo Almeida: guitar (CD7#1-7).
Title: Modern Jazz Quartet: The Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings 1956-64
| Year Released: 2011
| Record Label: Mosaic Records
Sonny Rollins with The Modern Jazz Quartet
Biography Sonny Rollins with The Modern Jazz Quartet
Sonny Rollins will go down in history as not only the single most enduring tenor
saxophonist of the bebop and hard bop era, but also the greatest
contemporary jazz saxophonist of them all. His fluid and harmonically
innovative ideas, effortless manner, and easily identifiable and
accessible sound have influenced generations of performers, but have
also fueled the notion that mainstream jazz music can be widely enjoyed,
recognized, and proliferated. Born Theodore Walter Rollins in New York
City on September 7, 1930, he had an older brother who played violin. At
age nine he took up piano lessons but discontinued them, took up the
alto saxophone in high school, and switched to tenor after high school,
doing local engagements. In 1948 he recorded with vocalist Babs
Gonzales, then Bud Powell and Fats Navarro, and his first composition,
"Audubon," was recorded by J.J. Johnson. Soon thereafter, Rollins made
the rounds quickly with groups led by Art Blakey, Tadd Dameron, Chicago
drummer Ike Day, and Miles Davis in 1951, followed by his own recordings
with Kenny Drew, Kenny Dorham, and Thelonious Monk.
In 1956 Rollins made his biggest move, joining the famous ensemble of Max Roach and Clifford Brown, then formed his own legendary pianoless trio with bassist Wilbur Ware or Donald Bailey and drummer Elvin Jones or Pete La Roca in 1957, doing recorded sessions at the Village Vanguard. Awards came from Down Beat and Playboy magazines, and recordings were done mainly for the Prestige and Riverside labels, but also for Verve, Blue Note, Columbia, and Contemporary Records, all coinciding with the steadily rising star of Rollins. Pivotal albums such as Tenor Madness (with John Coltrane), Saxophone Colossus (with longstanding partner Tommy Flanagan), and Way Out West (with Ray Brown and Shelly Manne), and collaborations with the Modern Jazz Quartet, Clark Terry, and Sonny Clark firmly established Rollins as a bona fide superstar. He also acquired the nickname "Newk" for his facial resemblance to Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe.
But between 1959 and 1961 he sought a less superficial, more spiritual path to the rat race society of the times, visiting Japan and India, studying yoga and Zen. He left the music business until 1962, when he returned with the groundbreaking and in many ways revolutionary recording The Bridge with guitarist Jim Hall for the RCA Victor/Bluebird label. Rollins struck up a working relationship with trumpeter Don Cherry; did a handful of innovative LPs for the RCA Victor, MGM/Metro Jazz, and Impulse! labels; did one record with his hero Coleman Hawkins; and left the scene again in 1968. By 1971 he came back with a renewed sense of vigor and pride, and put out a string of successful records for the Milestone label that bridged the gap between the contemporary and fusion jazz of the time, the most memorable being his live date from the 1974 Montreux Jazz Festival, The Cutting Edge. Merging jazz with calypso, light funk, and post-bop, the career of Rollins not only was revived, but thrived from then onward. He was a member of the touring Milestone Jazz Stars in 1978 with McCoy Tyner and Ron Carter, and gained momentum as a touring headliner and festival showstopper.
His finest Milestone recordings of the second half of his career include Easy Living, Don't Stop the Carnival, G-Man, Old Flames, Plus Three, Global Warming, This Is What I Do, and Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert. He has worked extensively with road and recording bands that have included such artists as electric bass guitarist Bob Cranshaw; trombonist Clifton Anderson; pianists Tommy Flanagan and Stephen Scott; keyboardist Mark Soskin; guitarists Bobby Broom and Jerome Harris; percussionist Kimati Dinizulu; and drummers Jack DeJohnette, Perry Wilson, Steve Jordan, and Al Foster. Rollins formed his own record label, Doxy, through which he issued the CD Sonny, Please in 2006. Well into his eighth decade of life, Rollins continued to perform worldwide. As a composer, he will always be known for three memorable melodies that have become standards and well-recognized tunes in the jazz canon -- "Oleo," "Airegin," and especially "St. Thomas." (Michael G. Nastos). Source: Blue Note Records.
In 1956 Rollins made his biggest move, joining the famous ensemble of Max Roach and Clifford Brown, then formed his own legendary pianoless trio with bassist Wilbur Ware or Donald Bailey and drummer Elvin Jones or Pete La Roca in 1957, doing recorded sessions at the Village Vanguard. Awards came from Down Beat and Playboy magazines, and recordings were done mainly for the Prestige and Riverside labels, but also for Verve, Blue Note, Columbia, and Contemporary Records, all coinciding with the steadily rising star of Rollins. Pivotal albums such as Tenor Madness (with John Coltrane), Saxophone Colossus (with longstanding partner Tommy Flanagan), and Way Out West (with Ray Brown and Shelly Manne), and collaborations with the Modern Jazz Quartet, Clark Terry, and Sonny Clark firmly established Rollins as a bona fide superstar. He also acquired the nickname "Newk" for his facial resemblance to Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe.
But between 1959 and 1961 he sought a less superficial, more spiritual path to the rat race society of the times, visiting Japan and India, studying yoga and Zen. He left the music business until 1962, when he returned with the groundbreaking and in many ways revolutionary recording The Bridge with guitarist Jim Hall for the RCA Victor/Bluebird label. Rollins struck up a working relationship with trumpeter Don Cherry; did a handful of innovative LPs for the RCA Victor, MGM/Metro Jazz, and Impulse! labels; did one record with his hero Coleman Hawkins; and left the scene again in 1968. By 1971 he came back with a renewed sense of vigor and pride, and put out a string of successful records for the Milestone label that bridged the gap between the contemporary and fusion jazz of the time, the most memorable being his live date from the 1974 Montreux Jazz Festival, The Cutting Edge. Merging jazz with calypso, light funk, and post-bop, the career of Rollins not only was revived, but thrived from then onward. He was a member of the touring Milestone Jazz Stars in 1978 with McCoy Tyner and Ron Carter, and gained momentum as a touring headliner and festival showstopper.
His finest Milestone recordings of the second half of his career include Easy Living, Don't Stop the Carnival, G-Man, Old Flames, Plus Three, Global Warming, This Is What I Do, and Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert. He has worked extensively with road and recording bands that have included such artists as electric bass guitarist Bob Cranshaw; trombonist Clifton Anderson; pianists Tommy Flanagan and Stephen Scott; keyboardist Mark Soskin; guitarists Bobby Broom and Jerome Harris; percussionist Kimati Dinizulu; and drummers Jack DeJohnette, Perry Wilson, Steve Jordan, and Al Foster. Rollins formed his own record label, Doxy, through which he issued the CD Sonny, Please in 2006. Well into his eighth decade of life, Rollins continued to perform worldwide. As a composer, he will always be known for three memorable melodies that have become standards and well-recognized tunes in the jazz canon -- "Oleo," "Airegin," and especially "St. Thomas." (Michael G. Nastos). Source: Blue Note Records.
From Bop To Baroque: The Modern Jazz Quartet
Milt Jackson
Jackson rode the irresistible pulse and beautiful blend of bassist Percy Heath, often used as a third melodic voice, and drummer Connie Kay, who had his own bright colors that didn't clash with vibes. I've been listening to The Modern Jazz Quartet a lot lately — even more with the arrival of Mosaic Records' seven-CD box set of 13 and a half albums that the group made for Atlantic between 1956 and '64. As good as the swinging numbers are, I'm more drawn to what some call the band's pretentious side. Besides a whole lot of blues, John Lewis wrote the group baroque-style canons and fugues, where one imitative line shadows another. These Euro-Renaissance practices were alien to most jazz musicians, but had been developed way-back-when as guidelines for improvising. And three staggered lines made for a clear ensemble texture. The music had plenty of light.
John Lewis' music for the MJQ often had that kind of stately grace. But once the other players got used to his baroque methods, and playing in scripted or spontaneous counterpoint, they could really fly on the material.
The Modern Jazz Quartet had an original concept, exploiting two musical traditions in a very specific way. It may be the best exemplar of so-called "third-stream music" jointly inspired by jazz and classical. The MJQ's interplay was mostly impeccable, and for variety the band worked with guests including soft clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, loud saxophonist Sonny Rollins, guitarist Laurindo Almeida and the Beaux Arts string quartet.
Milt Jackson was never crazy about the Modern Jazz Quartet's high-art material or John Lewis playing counterpoint behind his solos; he'd have been happy just to play the blues, which he did extremely well. But the vibes, with all that doorbell chiming, could be hard to get down and dirty on, and Jackson's gloriously round tone could make a slow blues sound whistle clean.
Not everything The Modern Jazz Quartet recorded between 1956 and '64 is gold; there are a few limp ballads and bossa novas, a couple of meet-ups with orchestras where the quartet's tighter than the symphony, and times when Lewis' composer's piano is a little stiff. MJQ devotees will want Mosaic's The Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings of the Modern Jazz Quartet 1956-1964 partly for Doug Ramsey's detailed booklet essay; where some annotators barely roll out of bed, he did his research and interviewed participants and witnesses like a real reporter. But most of the albums included are already out, and curious listeners might better start with No Sun in Venice or Pyramid or Fontessa, at least until they get the bug for more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Jazz_Quartet
Modern Jazz Quartet
MODERN JAZZ QUARTET
(Left to Right: Percy Heath, Connie Kay, and John Lewis; Front: Milt Jackson
The Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ) was a jazz combo established in 1952 that played music influenced by classical, cool jazz, blues and bebop. For most of its history the Quartet consisted of John Lewis (piano), Milt Jackson (vibraphone), Percy Heath (double bass), and Connie Kay (drums). The group grew out of the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie's big band from 1946 to 1948, which consisted of Lewis and Jackson along with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Kenny Clarke. They recorded as the Milt Jackson Quartet in 1951 and Brown left the group, being replaced as bassist by Heath. During the early-to-mid-1950s they became the Modern Jazz Quartet, Lewis became the group's musical director, and they made several recordings with Prestige Records, including the original versions of their two best-known compositions, Lewis's "Django" and Jackson's Bags' Groove". Clarke left the group in 1955 and was replaced as drummer by Connie Kay, and in 1956 they moved to Atlantic Records and made their first tour to Europe.
Under Lewis's direction, they carved their own niche by specializing in elegant, restrained music that used sophisticated counterpoint inspired by baroque music, yet nonetheless retained a strong blues feel. Noted for their elegant presentation, they were one of the first small jazz combos to perform in concert halls rather than nightclubs. They were initially active into the 1970s until Jackson quit in 1974 due to frustration with their finances and touring schedule, but reformed in 1981. They made their last released recordings in 1992 and 1993, by which time Kay had been having health issues and Mickey Roker had been his replacement drummer while Kay was unavailable. After Kay's death in 1994, the group operated on a semi-active basis, with Percy Heath's brother Albert Heath on drums until disbanding permanently in 1997.
History
Background, formation, departure of Kenny Clarke, and Prestige recordings (1946–1955)
Two of the four founding members of the Modern Jazz Quartet, pianist John Lewis and drummer Kenny Clarke, met and first performed together in 1944 while stationed with the US army in France during World War II. In 1946, they reconnected in New York, where Clarke, who had joined his friend Dizzy Gillespie's big band, introduced Gillespie to Lewis, who went on to replace Thelonious Monk as the band's pianist. The band's rhythm section now consisted of Lewis (piano), Milt Jackson (vibraphone), Ray Brown (bass), and Clarke (drums). On Gillespie's encouragement, they began to perform improvised renditions of jazz standards as a standalone unit between sets of the big band's music, as an entr'acte, a practice that had been accepted in jazz since Benny Goodman introduced his trio in 1935. Jackson later recalled: "From the first time we performed in that band as a quartet, we became prominent and a part of the band. We would play fifteen to twenty minutes, two or three tunes, and everybody loved it, including Dizzy and the band."[1] Upon the dissolution of Gillespie's band, the rhythm section considered continuing as a quartet under Jackson's name, but they went in their own directions for the next three years.[1] On August 18, 1951, they made a recording as the Milt Jackson Quartet for Gillespie's record label, Dee Gee Records. Brown then left the group to concentrate on working with his wife, singer Ella Fitzgerald, and was replaced as bassist by Percy Heath, who had also performed with Gillespie.[1] The quartet was incorporated on January 14, 1952, as the Modern Jazz Society, Inc., of which the Modern Jazz Quartet became the working entity.[2][3] Three or four names were considered, including the New Jazz Quartet, before the group decided to use the name Modern Jazz Quartet.[1][4] In a 1992 interview, Lewis said of the name: "It was an arbitrary name, the quickest name we could get cleared for a corporation in New York state. It had nothing to do with a description of the music."[3] Heath later recalled a conversation between the group members that occurred in Jackson's Cadillac on the way home from a nightclub date that led up to the creation of the Modern Jazz Quartet:[1][5]
John had this idea to write some different music for the instruments that were in the quartet, and wrote "Vendome" and a few other very orchestrated pieces. He wasn't interested in writing for Milt Jackson's quartet, so we became a partnership, a corporation—the Modern Jazz Quartet was the performing entity. John's vision for the group was to change the music from just a jam session, or rhythm section and soloist idea, to something more. We were all equal members, and the dress, the wearing of tuxedos, and trying to perform in concert rather than always in nightclubs, was part of what he envisioned to change the whole attitude about the music.[1]In April 1952 they recorded for Hi-Lo Records as the Milt Jackson Quartet and also made a record for Blue Note Records with Lou Donaldson on saxophone as the Milt Jackson Quintet, later released on Wizard of the Vibes; the latter record contained the first recording of Bags' Groove", which would become a signature song of the Modern Jazz Quartet.[1][6][7][8] In November of that year they accompanied Charlie Parker in a live recording at Birdland. For Prestige Records, they made their first recordings as the Modern Jazz Quartet on December 22, 1952 which, on Prestige CEO Bob Weinstock's insistence, were released under the group name Milt Jackson and the Modern Jazz Quartet. These recordings contained the original version of Lewis's composition "Vendome", the Quartet's first experiment with combining jazz and fugal counterpoint.[1][6][9] Between 1953 and early 1955 the group recorded the tracks that were eventually released on the album Django (1956), including their first recording of Lewis's composition "Django", another signature piece for the Quartet.[1][9] In 1953 they also accompanied Ben Webster and Sonny Rollins on live recordings, the former being released in 2001 as 1953: An Exceptional Encounter.[6][10] In October 1953, the Quartet began its first major booking at Birdland, which was followed by appearances in Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Carnegie Hall. Reviewing their appearance at Birdland, Nat Hentoff wrote: "If the success of the Modern Jazz Quartet depended only on the support of jazz musicians, this could be the most in-demand unit in the country."[1] Heath recalled:
We had a hard time getting people to quiet down and listen. At that time in nightclubs, people were talking about hanging out. In order to break that down, instead of trying to play over the conversation, we'd use reverse psychology and play softer. Suddenly, they knew we were up there and realized the conversation was louder than the music. Of course, if it got too loud, we'd come off – just stop playing and walk off. It didn't take long for them to realize they were wasting their time because we weren't going to entertain them in that sense. We didn't have funny acts, we didn't have any costumes. We were conservatively dressed, we played conservative music, and if you didn't listen you didn't get it. We were four instruments going along horizontally, contrapuntally. There was no backup and soloist, the concept was changing.[1]In January 1955, they returned to Birdland, and on the last night of that engagement, Clarke announced that he was quitting the band. He later said that he did so because "I wouldn't be able to play the drums my way again after four or five years of playing eighteenth-century drawing-room jazz".[11] Lewis recalled "He was trying to find himself. There was a change in the music, but it was early when Kenny left so it was easy to handle and adjust to. If we had to make the change later, it would have been a disaster. We had to give up a lot of pieces we played when Kenny left."[1] Heath commented "It had to change, because there is no other Kenny Clarke. Kenny didn't want to have such orchestrated music because he was an innovator and didn't want his part dictated."[1] Jackson said "The three years Kenny was in the group was an experimental stage. We were still looking for a direction."[1] Monte Kay, who had by then become the group's manager, suggested that Clarke be replaced by Connie Kay (no relation), who joined the group the day after Clarke had left. The group members had come to have various responsibilities besides playing their instruments: Lewis was the musical director, Jackson handled public relations, Heath managed the finances, and Kay organized the accommodation and transportation.[1] On July 2, 1955, the Modern Jazz Quartet recorded their last album with Prestige Records, Concorde; its title track was Lewis's second major fugue-influenced piece for the group.[1][9]
Move to Atlantic Records and international success (1956–1974)
Modern Jazz Quartet at Schiphol Airport (1961)
They then moved from Atlantic to Apple Records, for which they released Under the Jasmin Tree (1968) and Space (1969). Lewis, who produced these albums, recalled: "Monte Kay was a friend of the president of the Beatles' company, and he felt we weren't getting the attention we should have, so we went there and had two good records."[1][9] Returning to Atlantic, they released Plastic Dreams (1971) and The Legendary Profile (1972). In 1973 they recorded the last studio albums before their hiatus, In Memoriam with an orchestra and Blues on Bach, both of which were released the next year).[1][9]
Hiatus, reunion, and final years (1974–1997)
"It was nothing personal. In '74, when I decided to leave, the biggest reason was I was not just disappointed but bitterly disappointed about the financial outcome of what I felt was a major contribution by the group to music. To see other people making so much more money than we would ever see, that was a disappointment to me. I thought this group would make as much money as any group in jazz, or in music for that matter, because of what we stood for in the musical profession."
--Milt Jackson on quitting the group[2]
In July 1974, Jackson quit the group, later citing frustration with their finances as his primary reason. He was also unhappy with the group's touring schedule, which by then had become year-round rather than the previous arrangement in which they had vacations during the northern hemisphere summer. Jackson had previously used the downtime to play and record music that was not in the style of the Modern Jazz Quartet, but felt saddled in the group after they also began playing at summer jazz festivals in 1969 or 1970.[2] The jazz magazine DownBeat compared their breakup to "the abrupt disintegration of Mt. Rushmore".[14] In November 1974 they performed a farewell concert at Avery Fisher Hall, later released as a series of two albums and then as a complete package, The Complete Last Concert (1988).[1][9] They had occasional reunion concerts, never going more than eighteen months without playing together, before reuniting in 1981 for a tour of Japan, recorded as Reunion at Budokan 1981 for Pablo Records.[1][9] They recorded three more albums for Pablo, Together Again: Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival '82 (1982), Echoes (1984), and Topsy: This One's for Basie (1985), before returning to Atlantic, recording Three Windows (1987, with the New York Chamber Symphony) and For Ellington (1988).[1][9]
Kay had a stroke in 1992 and during his recovery was replaced by drummer Mickey Roker, who performed on some tracks on the group's last released recording, MJQ & Friends: A 40th Anniversary Celebration (recorded 1992–1993, released1994).[15][16][17][18] Kay died in November 1994, after which the group operated on a semi-active basis; the 1995 album Dedicated to Connie, a recording of a 1960 concert in Slovenia, was released in his memory.[4][19][20] In February 1995, Albert Heath, Percy Heath's brother, became the quartet's percussionist. Percy Heath had become tired of touring by 1997 and the group permanently disbanded in that year after a final recording date.[21][22][23] In October 1999, Jackson died,[24] followed by Lewis in March 2001[25] and Heath in April 2005.[21]
Style and public image
The Modern Jazz Quartet played in a cool jazz style that combined bebop and the blues with classical elements. There was a marked contrast in styles between Jackson's rhythmically complex blues-based solos and Lewis's restrained manner of playing and classically influenced pieces.[1][23] One of the first small jazz combos to perform in concert halls rather than nightclubs, the group was noted for habitually wearing formal attire at concerts, inspired by the bands of Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford.[1] In his book Visions of Jazz, Gary Giddins summed up their legacy with an explanation of the jazz scene in 1992: "... Young bands customarily performed in concert and at festivals, often in tailored suits. Composition was as widely vaunted for small ensembles as improvisation, and flawless intonation was considered vital. Such traditional jazz devices as polyphony, riffs, breaks, boogie bass, mutes, and fugal counterpoint, as well as a repertory that ranges over the entire history of the music, were everywhere apparent. You could say that the Modern Jazz quartet now resided in a world at least partially of its own making."[1]
Honors
The Modern Jazz Quartet earned a variety of honors, including the first NAACP award for cultural contributions in the field of music in 1957, top billing on numerous jazz magazine polls, and honorary doctorates from Berklee College.[2]
Discography
First dates are of recording, in parentheses are dates of release
- 1952: The Modern Jazz Quartet Quintet recorded 1952 and 1954 (Prestige)
- 1952 Wizard of the Vibes (10" LP issued 1952, 12" LP as Milt Jackson issued 1956) – session has identical personnel to the Modern Jazz Quartet of the time plus Lou Donaldson.
- 1953: 1953: An Exceptional Encounter (The Jazz Factory, 2001) – with Ben Webster
- 1955: Concorde (Prestige)
- 1953–55: Django (Prestige, 1956)
- 1956: Fontessa (Atlantic)
- 1956: The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn (Atlantic) – with Jimmy Giuffre
- 1958: The Modern Jazz Quartet Plays No Sun in Venice (Atlantic)
- 1957: The Modern Jazz Quartet (Atlantic)
- 1957: The Modern Jazz Quartet and the Oscar Peterson Trio at the Opera House (Verve)
- 1958: The Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn Volume 2 (Atlantic) – with Sonny Rollins
- 1959: Music from Odds Against Tomorrow (United Artists) – also released as Patterns (United Artists, 1960)
- 1959–1960: Pyramid (Atlantic, 1960)
- 1960: European Concert (Atlantic)
- 1960: Modern Jazz Quartet in Concert (Jazz Life, 1990) – recorded in Ljubljana
- 1960: Dedicated to Connie (Atlantic, 1995)
- 1960: The Modern Jazz Quartet & Orchestra (Atlantic)
- 1960: Third Stream Music (Atlantic) with guests including the Jimmy Giuffre 3
- 1962: The Comedy (Atlantic)
- 1962: Lonely Woman (Atlantic)
- 1963: 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival (Douglas, 1997), also released as In a Crowd (Atlantic, 1998)
- 1964: The Sheriff (Atlantic)
- 1964: Collaboration (Atlantic) – with Laurindo Almeida
- 1964–65: The Modern Jazz Quartet Plays George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (Atlantic)
- 1965: Jazz Dialogue (Atlantic) – with The All Star Jazz Band
- 1966: Concert in Japan '66 (Atlantic/Jazz Forever, Japan only)
- 1966: Blues at Carnegie Hall (Atlantic)
- 1966: Place Vendôme (Philips) – with The Swingle Singers
- 1967: Live at the Lighthouse (Atlantic)
- 1968: Under the Jasmin Tree (Apple)
- 1969: Space (Apple)
- 1971: Plastic Dreams (Atlantic)
- 1972: The Legendary Profile (Atlantic)
- 1973: In Memoriam (Little David, 1974)
- 1973: Blues on Bach (Atlantic, 1974)
- 1974: The Complete Last Concert (Atlantic, 1988) – includes The Last Concert (1975) and More from the Last Concert (1981)
- 1981: Reunion at Budokan 1981 (Pablo)
- 1982: Together Again: Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival '82 (Pablo)
- 1984: Echoes (Pablo)
- 1985: Topsy: This One's for Basie (Pablo)
- 1987: Three Windows (Atlantic)
- 1988: For Ellington (East West)
- 1992: A Night at the Opera (Jazz Door, 1994)
- 1992–93: MJQ & Friends: A 40th Anniversary Celebration (Atlantic)
Compilations
Dates are of first release.- 1960: Plays for Lovers (Prestige)
- 1973: The Art of The Modern Jazz Quartet – The Atlantic Years (Atlantic)
- 2002: A Proper Introduction to the Modern Jazz Quartet: La Ronde (Past Perfect)
- 2003: The Complete Modern Jazz Quartet Prestige & Pablo Recordings (Prestige/Pablo/Fantasy, 4-CD box)
- 2005: The Modern Jazz Quartet & Jimmy Giuffre – Complete Recordings (Lone Hill, 2005)
- 2010: The MJQ in the Movies (Giant Steps)
- 2011: The Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings of The Modern Jazz Quartet 1956–64 (Mosaic, 7 CDs)
- 2012: Original Album Series – The Modern Jazz Quartet (Warner, 5 CDs)
Filmography
- 2005: The Modern Jazz Quartet: 35th Anniversary Tour
- 2007: 40 Years of MJQ
- 2008: Django
References
- Keepnews, Peter (March 31, 2001). "John Lewis, 80, Pianist, Composer and Creator of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved November 24, 2018.
Further reading
- Rupp, Carla Marie (2011). "Respectability and The Modern Jazz Quartet; Some Cultural Aspects of Its Image and Legacy As Seen Through the Press". CUNY Academic Works. City College of New York. Retrieved November 25, 2018.
External links
THE
MUSIC OF THE MODERN JAZZ QUARTET: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF
RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS
WITH THE MODERN JAZZ QUARTET:
Modern Jazz Quartet
The Modern Jazz Quartet Live in London 1982
The Modern Jazz Quartet - Pyramid - Full Album
The Modern Jazz Quartet - Blues In A Minor
Modern Jazz Quartet - Concert in Jazz (full album) HQ
Modern Jazz Quartet and Jazz Quartet: (2 Hours of Best
MJQ The Last Concert
The Modern Jazz Quartet - Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise
Modern Jazz Quartet - 'Round Midnight
Modern Jazz Quartet - North Sea Jazz Festival (1982)
Modern Jazz Quartet - Live in Jazz 1958.
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