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About Modern Jazz Quartet
Instrument: Band / ensemble / orchestra
Related Articles | Concerts | Albums | Photos | Similar ToModern Jazz Quartet: Bluesology: The Atlantic Years 1956-1988
by Chris May
Asked to name the most insurrectionary artists associated with the Atlantic label, most jazz fans would probably think first of saxophonists John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Pianist John Lewis' Modern Jazz Quartet would come much further down the list. Yet in its own, more velvet manner, the MJQ was as radical as Coltrane and Coleman. When the group came to prominence in the mid-1950s, its elegant chamber music, a blend of the blues and European baroque, subverted many of the ...
read moreModern Jazz Quartet: Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise
by Rob Mariani
New York City empties out like a condemned playground on a Sunday afternoon in July. People cooped up in air-dried apartments and offices all week escape in search of sunshine and trees. The good things that still happen in the City on weekends happen mostly inside of little hidden enclaves, isolated places well below street level. Places like the Village Vanguard, a wedge-shaped East Village cellar smaller than a one-car garage, where not so much as a splinter of daylight ...
read moreThe Modern Jazz Quartet: The Complete Modern Jazz Quartet Prestige & Pablo Recordings
by David Rickert
The Modern Jazz Quartet may best be remembered for bringing a heightened sense of respectability to jazz – the coattails and gentlemanly demeanor helped bring the music from smoky clubs to concert halls and thus to a wider audience. The concept the MJQ employed – fusing a classical sense of composition to basic jazz improvisation – resulted in a series of records that were packed with effortless swing; it seemed as though no one broke a sweat during the recording ...
read morePreludes and Postludes: The Complete Modern Jazz Quartet Prestige & Pablo Recordings
by Chris M. Slawecki
The Complete Modern Jazz Quartet Prestige & Pablo Recordings (Prestige) may seem a curious collection to certain MJQ fans. It’s a bookend compilation, with 54 remastered tracks from their 1952 – ’55 Prestige recordings near the beginning, and from their 1981 – ’85 Pablo recordings near the end, of their 48-year, illustrious and elegant jazz career. Some might think this is not a truly representative MJQ set because it misses the guts of their tenure – their Atlantic ...
read moreThe Modern Jazz Quartet: The Music Inn
by Elliott Simon
...in our desire for beauty in all things we are open, and one in our search for that little city of gold where the flute-player never wearies, and the spring never fades, and the oracle is not silent, that little city which is the house of art, and where, with all the Music of the Spheres, and the laughter of the gods, Art waits for her worshippers-Oscar Wilde In 1950, while Senator McCarthy spearheaded his anti-artistic witch hunts, ...
read moreModern Jazz Quartet: Four Dapper Dans Who Weren't Button Down
by Derek Taylor
The Modern Jazz Quartet Complete Modern Jazz Quartet Prestige & Pablo Recordings Prestige 2003 Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond were busy trading in the irregular time signatures that made their album’s staples in college student jazz collections the country over. Chico Hamilton had the lock on chamber jazz popularity on the West Coast with his piano-less quintet and a string of popular records for Pacific Jazz. Fertile Third Stream experiments were propagating on both ...
read moreModern Jazz Quartet with Laurindo Almeida: Collaboration
by AAJ Staff
In the CD jacket notes, Label M founder Joel Dorn informally, as is his wont, tells the buyers of Collaboration that it is one of his two favorite Modern Jazz Quartet recordings. The other is European Concert. Now, both albums have been re-released, and Dorn's perseverance and dedication to the highest level of jazz have paid off--more for the listening public than for himself.For on Collaboration, we do get to hear a superlative recording on which ...
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