Customer Reviews

Modern Jazz Quartet (1957)

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I agree with the previous reviewer. This is arguably the MJQ's best recording. It is definitely their finest studio effort (and I've heard just about all of them.). This disc served as my introduction to the MJQ as a college student in the early 80's. I was immediately hooked and I wore out a cassette copy that I made and a used LP copy that I found years later. Kudos to Wounded Bird for releasing this on CD before I was too old to hear it! As for the music, it's a great place for anyone to start, whether you are new to jazz, new to the MJQ or just want to add great music to your collection. It includes what for my money is one of the 2 best versions that the MJQ ever recorded of "Bag's Groove", a swinging "Night in Tunisia" and an opening ballad medley that could teach some radio programmers a real lesson about "Quiet Storm". John Lewis also said that this was one of the MJQ's best and who would know better than him (except maybe Milt, Percy and Connie!). If you like your Jazz easy on the ears but not numbing to your brain, pick this up before it disappears again.

These tracks were among the first of the MJQ to come my way when I was in my teens, and I still remember the overwhelming impression of a rare beauty they made on me. That beauty has not diminished with time. This is, I feel confident, the kind of music people will still enjoy centuries hence - among the best music of the twentieth century. The tone was always restrained, but never lifeless: the balance was very exact and satisfying. All of the musicians could swing hard when they chose to, but did so without wildness though with plenty of verve and intensity. The music was intelligent and inventive, but driven by plenty of emotion and sensitivity. Pianist Lewis was a most gifted composer and arranger as well as musician. Milt Jackson was among the greatest instrumentalists, on any instrument, of his generation. The other two were also among the best. The coherence achieved was extraordinary - never surpassed, and rarely if ever equalled. Even my parents enjoyed this music, and not because it is not jazz. It for the most part IS jazz, of a totally distinctive kind: there is no replacement, and you will not regret owning this and playing it frequently. - Joost Daalder

MJQ pianist John Lewis expressed great satisfaction with this disc: it's a well played, well recorded, classic set of MJQ's brand of chamber jazz. Really, this disc vies for top position: it just might be the MJQ's best CD. Good price $$; great sound. Can't go wrong.

After having seen "Annie Get Your Gun" the other night at the local playhouse in San Mateo, I was surprised to discover that "They Say It's Wonderful" was from that 1946 show. I arrived home and reported immediately to the turntable to savor the 5-tune medley that I have listened to since I purchased this album (vinyl) in high school four decades ago). Lewis, Jackson, Kay and Heath never failed to please. The jazz is subtle, lyrical, and just plain beautiful. It's great to have the sounds preserved on CD and MP3! "They say that love is wonderful"...and so is this music.

This, for me, one of their premier efforts; perhaps their 'best' studio album. I remember this as a kid - my father owned it. I am glad to see it finally available on cd.
If you like this type of jazz, collaborative and smooth like a good brandy, get it.
For those that are looking for more of their great albums, "The Complete Last Concert" and "Modern Jazz Quartet - European Concert 1962" are excellent.

I remember how thrilled I was to receive a copy of this record. I gave it to my (highly biased) music theory teachers as a vindication of my taste in a "low-life" form of music, and I hung it up on my dorm-room wall. Listening to this music today--and then--you would never suspect that these musicians came directly out of the loud thunder of the bebop revolution centered on Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Verve head Norman Granz was certainly aware of the individual histories of the musicians and used John Lewis on many of his most heated bebop recordings--featuring Diz, Getz, Stitt, Rollins.

It was that experience that gave the group a resilient fiber not present in other groups that attempted to play a kind of "classical jazz." There was no mistaking the origins of this group, steeped in the soulful blues of an African American tradition and, largely due to the genius of John Lewis, playing their music within the scaffolding of classic American popular songs from the Songbook as well as Baroque forms suggestive (but hardly derivative) of Bach polyphony. For the casual listener, the group was inoffensive music, clearing the stage for jazz in ever more discriminating venues; for the serious jazz listener, they were easily dismissible--unless you listened with extreme concentration. Then you were exposed to a cool fire unlike the music of any other ensemble in the history of jazz.

This album has a diverse program, opening daringly with its most accessible repertory--a medley of ballads from the American Songbook. But soon they begin to cook on medium heat, providing memorable exercises on Diz' anthem of bebop, "Night and Tunisia," as well as the piece most indelibly associated with Milt Jackson through his entire career, "Bags' Groove." No one on any instrument played the blues with more inventiveness and feeling than Milt Jackson but, as I would later discover, some of the magic was lost when Milt would accept a gig as a free agent, working with a local rhythm section, however good. It was the restraint and discipline of Lewis that demonstrated that improvised music, like Shakespeare's rigidly deterministic sonnet form, required boundaries for the liberties taken by the musicians to be meaningful. It was as if he understood Sartre's pronouncement, "Man is a slave of his own freedom," and was determined to show us all the way out of servitude. To those of us who could escape Dick Clark's American Bandstand and remain unimpressed by Elvis and the Beatles/Stones invasions, John Lewis' message remained a paradigmatic archetype for pathways we would take for the rest of our lives.

When the group broke up, Lewis was far from silenced. In a Carnegie Hall concert of 12 pianists, he was, in this listener's mind, the most impressive. And his final two albums, "Evolution I and II," are exemplary solo outings--the perfect antidote to a case of bloat after being over-exposed to the prolific pyrotechnical stormings of Art Tatum or Oscar Peterson.

If you can't afford tne new, 2011 The Complete Modern Jazz Quartet (on Mosaic), of which this is a part, this eponymous record is as good a single selection as any other by the group.

I'm a big fan of the MJQ and have a number of their CD's. The MJQ 1957 is among their very best. If you enjoy their "mellow" years, you'll love this CD.

I first heard the MJQ in 1954 as a 14 year old. So yeah, I'm 70. John Lewis was a great composer as well as a truly fine piano player. Milt Jackson was a very innovative vibe player. Percy Heath was as good as it gets for an upright bass player. Percy had all the electricity inside him and didn't need to plug his bass in anywhere. Connie Kay had so many faces as a jazz drummer. Each of these four musicians was among the very top of their respective professions. There have been other great groups, and I am sure more will come along after I'm gone, but there will never be another group with the chemistry of the MJQ. When this record was released it blew me away. If you don't know the MJQ, this is about as good an introduction as any, and many argue that it is the best. I don't really understand how anyone could pick a particular record and say it was the best the MJQ did. However, if you want to be educated in American jazz, this is a remarkably wonderful and creative group. To this day, when I hear an MJQ track where they are deep in the groove, it makes my very soul dance.

What makes this recording great is the vibe created by these four great musicians. "Chamber jazz", as the latter reviewer calls it, is simply another label that can be given to what is truly provocative and gorgeous music created by four beautiful people. When I look at the front cover and hear the sounds these four beautiful Arican-Americans created in the late 50's I can only sit in awe.
I love Milt Jackson. His vibraphone created some of the greatest sounds in Jazz. John Lewis seems to play with only his right hand, but does with that one hand more than many could do before him. Percy Heath and Connie Kay keep the subtle but powerful rhythm flowing. The best Jazz cd I have found in a long time.