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About Modern Jazz Quartet

399

Album Review

Modern Jazz Quartet: 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival

Read "1963 Monterey Jazz Festival" reviewed by Graham L. Flanagan

by Graham L. Flanagan
March 4, 2010

For nearly half a century, the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ) endured as one of the most well-renowned ensembles in jazz. The original MJQ came together in 1946 as the rhythm section in Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra: Milt Jackson on vibes and John Lewis on piano, as well as bassist Ray Brown and drummer Kenny Clarke. Brown and Clarke were replaced early on by Percy Heath and Connie Kay, respectively, but Lewis and Jackson would remain mainstays of the MJQ all the ...

413

Album Review

Modern Jazz Quartet: Bluesology: The Atlantic Years 1956-1988

Read "Bluesology: The Atlantic Years 1956-1988" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
July 13, 2009

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 ...

470

First Time I Saw

Modern Jazz Quartet: Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise

by Rob Mariani
November 6, 2006

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 ...

283

Album Review

The Modern Jazz Quartet: The Complete Modern Jazz Quartet Prestige & Pablo Recordings

Read "The Complete Modern Jazz Quartet Prestige & Pablo Recordings" reviewed by David Rickert

by David Rickert
November 10, 2003

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 ...

535

From the Inside Out

Preludes and Postludes: The Complete Modern Jazz Quartet Prestige & Pablo Recordings

by Chris M. Slawecki
November 10, 2003

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 ...

678

Extended Analysis

The Modern Jazz Quartet: The Music Inn

by Elliott Simon
November 5, 2003

...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, ...

650

Extended Analysis

Modern Jazz Quartet: Four Dapper Dans Who Weren't Button Down

by Derek Taylor
October 16, 2003

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 ...