Music Aficionado

1955 was a pivotal year for the Modern Jazz Quartet. They made their last recordings for Prestige Records, before starting an enduring run of albums with Atlantic Records. That year also saw their last line up change before settling on the classic group that became known worldwide or their elegant chamber jazz. In this article we will review the group’s musical activities in that milestone year in their career.

The year started with a recording session at Rudy Van Gelder’s Studio in Hackensack, NJ, on January 9. It turned up being the last recording session with founding drummer Kenny Clarke. The band played a single piece of music titled ‘La Ronde Suite’, a 4-part elaborate composition. The music for this suite started life as the wartime big band number ‘Bright Lights’. Pianist and musical director John Lewis created multiple variations on the main theme with solo spots for each of the instruments in the band.

The recording was released on a Prestige Records 10” LP in 1955 titled The Modern Jazz Quartet, Vol. 2. Ira Gitler introduced all band members in the album’s sleeve notes: “This is the original Modern Jazz Quartet, formed in the wake of their tenure with Dizzy Gillespie in 1952. The pianist, composer, arranger, mentor John Lewis, master drummer Kenny Clarke who had met John while in the Army and convinced him to stay in music, Percy Heath, the bearded, happy swinger whose powerful bass is utilized as another voice as well as rhythm instrument and vibraphonist Milt Jackson, one of the major soloists in jazz.”

John Lewis talked about those powerful bass lines played by Percy Heath, who replaced bassist Ray Brown late in 1951, which led to the unique arrangements the group became famous for: “Percy hadn’t started playing until 1947, the rest of us started playing in the 1930s, so a lot of things had to be written for him, chords or whatever, and that was the beginning. We couldn’t do what we had been doing before, all the tunes we’d put together with Ray Brown. But that didn’t matter because that’s the way the other two members, Milt and Kenny, wanted it to be. So the composing evolved by itself, by necessity.”

In 1956 Prestige Records, now fully embracing the 12” LP format, released both 10” LPs The Modern Jazz Quartet, Vol. 1 and 2 on the album Django. The title taken from its centerpiece, which the band recorded on December 23, 1954. Django is one of John Lewis’ most lyrical compositions. It is dedicated to Django Reinhardt who died a year before this recording was made. While it is a blues, it owes as much to Bach as it does to the blues. Its structure is unique, starting and ending with what sounds like a eulogy to Reinhardt, with a somber melody accentuated by single bass notes. It then follows a 32-bar cycle for the solos, but instead of a typical AABA form, each section made of 8 bars, it starts with two 6-bars A part, then an 8-bar B part, and ends with a 12-bar A-part, of which the last 8 bars are in a boogie rhythm. To create anticipation before each solo begins, there is a quick double-time section between solos. In the year 2000 NPR included the composition in its 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.

John Lewis said this of Django Reinhardt and his music: “I was tremendously impressed. Then I heard some records he made with members of the Teddy Hill band, including a duet with Bill Coleman that was unbelievable. I definitely got to know his music when he came to this country in 1947 to play with Duke Ellington. He came down to a club where we were working on Fifty-Second Street, and we played overtime to make a good impression. It was wonderful to watch the change that took place in his playing, from things that were made in 1937 to things he was doing at the time he died. He kept changing. And I was so sorry when he died. I would have liked to spend more time with him.”

In an interview with Downbeat magazine in November 1955, Miles Davis praised the composition, saying, “The Modern Jazz Quartet — that’s the best group out. That piece, Django, is one of the greatest things written in a long time.”

Writer Robert Altshuler raved about this wonderful composition: “The form of the composition is developed with perfect pyramid-like symmetry. The thematic material for the entire work is stated in the two parts of the slow opening, and is used as the basis for the improvised sections. One of the outstanding qualities of Django is that the strict formal design is not emphasized to the point of obviousness. Rather it is done with a disarming naturalness which is all the more convincing.”

The first half of 1955 was busy and fruitful for the Modern Jazz Quartet. Apart from the release of the 10” LPs and a healthy performance schedule, the band received a number of solid mentions in music magazines. In February of 1955 trumpeter Shorty Rogers, a West Coast jazz luminary, was the subject of Downbeat magazine’s popular blindfold test. One of the pieces of music played for him was Vendome, an early orchestrated composition by John Lewis. Rogers said this about what he heard: “Just wonderful — the Modern Jazz quartet with Bags and John Lewis. This record, to my way of thinking, has just about everything. The spontaneous and the preconceived construction work, the very wonderful contrapuntal writing, canonic imitation, without being pretentious about the whole thing. I could say a lot more, but I’ll just sum it up by saying I think this is definitely a five-star performance.”

A month later, in March 1955, Hi Fidelity magazine featured an interview with John Lewis, conducted by jazz writer Nat Hentoff. The composer explained how he sees jazz maturing and capturing the ears of the audience with focus on structure and arrangement: “I think that the audience for jazz can be widened if we strengthen our work with structure. If there is more of a reason for what’s going on, there’ll be more overall sense and more interest for the listener. I do not think, however, that the sections in this structured jazz – both the improvised and written sections – should take on too much complexity. The total effect must be within the mind’s ability to appreciate through the ear. Also, the music will have to swing.”

In the same article jazz composer Gunther Schuller, who the same year founded the Modern Jazz Society with John Lewis, talked about the hidden qualities of The Modern Jazz Quartet’s music: “There is already, in addition to the clarity and the unity of the quartet’s work, an extreme subtlety and sensitivity. These qualities John is sometimes able to write fully into the music, and he sometimes tries to get at it further through the playing of the group.”

In April 1955 Downbeat magazine gave a glowing five-star review to the 12” LP Django: “First side contains two quietly distinguished Lewis works, Django and Milano, both of which make many other modern jazz ‘originals’ sound quite feeble melodically and structurally. On the second side, John Lewis’ beguiling La Ronde has been expanded into a four-part demonstration piece for piano, bass, vibraharp, and drums. Performance throughout is excellent. One of the best LPs of the year, and one I expect will have a long staying power.”

Shortly after the January recording session that yielded the La Ronde Suite, drummer Kenny Clarke left the band. After completing an engagement at the famed jazz club Birdland in New York, Clarke announced that he was quitting the band because, as he later said, “I wouldn’t be able to play the drums my way again after four or five years of playing eighteenth-century drawing-room jazz”. Bassist Percy Heath gave his own perspective on the drummer’s departure: “He didn’t wanna do all that rehearsing and playing drum parts. Kenny did not want to play that kind of music. He was an innovator on his own as far as his instrument was concerned.”

Jazz producer and the group’s manager Monte Kay recommended Connie Kay (no relation) as a replacement. Kay, younger than the other members of the group, previously worked with Lester Young, Stan Getz, Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. He recalled the time he joined the band: “Monte called me and asked if I wanted to make the gig. I said yeah, and then he told me the quartet had a one-nighter that very night and two weeks at Storyville in Boston. I had heard the records and liked the music they were playing, so it wasn’t a problem. It was written, but the only thing that was kind of different was ‘Django’. When I first joined the quartet, we would rehearse every day. I had to find a way to be able to play things that I wanted to play and not overshadow what they were doing.”

Connie Kay fit the concept of the Modern Jazz Quartet magnificently. Replacing a giant legend like Kenny Clarke is impossible, but stylistically Kay complemented the other three members more naturally. Writer Ralph Gleason documented Connie Kay’s impact on the sound of the group: “When the Modern Jazz Quartet returned to San Francisco and the Black Hawk in the early months of 1956, there was considerable anxiousness to discover what effect the change in personnel had upon the group. The new drummer was relatively unknown and his predecessor was one of the most influential of modern drummers. Delightful as the group had sounded before, it sounded even better now because at last it had achieved a true unity of feeling and purpose which breathes the life blood of true art into the performance.”

On July 2 1955 the group returned to Van Gelder’s Studio and in a single day of recording completed a 12” LP titled Concorde. This was Connie Kay’s first recording with the Modern Jazz Quartet. He recalled the experience of playing written arrangements: “At first John Lewis did all the arrangements. He would write out parts for us, including me. If he wanted triangles or chimes or finger cymbals – which were all his idea – he’d write them in.”

Downbeat again gave the album a five-star rating, impressed by “the warmth, imagination, compositional freshness and musical integrity of Lewis and his superb associates—Jackson, Percy Heath, and the unusually tasteful Connie Kay whose first record with the MJQ this is. The potential of the MJQ has been far from fully realized, but the unit is wisely moving slowly, soundly, and so far, rewardingly.”

The album’s centerpiece is the title track Concorde, another effort by Lewis to combine classical forms with jazz. In 1960 he told Metronome magazine: “Some of the music we’ve played, Vendome for instance, was very unnatural when we started playing. On the record it is not natural at all. Now it has become natural, but it has taken a long time. Concorde was better in that it had a more inherent rhythmic feeling of jazz, and even Concorde took time to find its correct rhythmic feeling.”

John Lewis later said that, “Concorde is my use of the fugue form based on Bach’s influence. The theme lends itself more easily to the jazz feeling of swing.” Dedicating an article to the influence of Bach on his music, he wrote: “My first memorable contact with J.S. Bach’s music was a radio performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra on the D minor Toccata and Fugue, arranged and conducted by Leopold Stokowsky. I was later impressed by a radio performance of the slow movement of the orchestral suite in D major – popularly known as the ‘Air on the G string.’ I heard wonderful possibilities for improvisation using the logical chord progression and the melodic lines as a basis for improvisation, and all three pitch instruments have an opportunity to participate in the performance.”

Concorde was the last recording the Modern Jazz Quartet made for Prestige Records before moving to the more lucrative Atlantic Records. Their new lineup became one of the steadiest in the history of jazz, performing for the next four decades. In 1955 they also received the highest praise by the music press when they won the annual Critics Choice award for best combo, leaving far behind other jazz units such as Dave Brubeck’s Quartet.