Rec.1957 / Remaster /

MODERN JAZZ QUARTET 28 October 1957, Hanover

By the time the Modern Jazz Quartet made a stop at the Lower Saxony regional broadcasting station of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hanover on the 28th of October 1957, the band was already a phenomenon on the jazz scene – here in Europe and in the USA. Four black instrumentalists – John Lewis on piano, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Percy Heath on double bass and Connie Kay on percussion – played a kind of jazz music whose smouldering fire and subtle swing did not quite match the idea that people in post-war Germany had of the improvised music from the United States.

“Integration” was the key word used by Lewis all his life to describe the phenomenon of MJQ (at the latest as of 1955 insiders were using this abbreviation for the Modern Jazz Quartet): finding a balance between cold intellect and hot-blooded emotion, between profound reflection and wild expression, between the language of form of the European classic tradition, that both regulates and restricts, and the eloquent oral tradition of the “black” Blues aesthetic from the USA.

A look back at the genesis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. If we think of the acoustic setting of this quartet, often described later as conservative, it may seem surprising at first glance that the germ cell of the MJQ can be found in the orchestra of the Bebop revolutionary and hothead, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, of the late 1940s. In order to give his brass section a break after the instrumentally and technically highly demanding arrangements, Gillespie often extended the rhythm group by the vibraphone and had them play as a quartet, giving rise to performances by a “band within the band”: with Lewis on piano, Ray Brown on bass, Kenny Clarke on drums and Jackson on the vibraphone.

Shortly afterwards this band was to become the Milt Jackson Quartet, before changing the name in 195.......
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