On Music

...The audience was hushed and attentive, as at a chamber music recital...

...Larger and more ambitious forms had to be employed to allow an extended development to the jazz spirit and provide interesting contrasts between different kinds of jazz ideas—between dramatic and lyric ideas, for example...

...On the left, Lewis was brooding over the keyboard, his back turned self-consciously toward the audience...

...In the later compositions, we often feel an unpleasant tension created by the proximity of the night club and the cathedral...

...I was not prepared, however, for a wholly new concept of jazz...

...As the forms have become more complex and more demanding, legitimate opportunities to interject jazz improvisations have diminished...

...One can imagine Lewis looking at the jazz scene seven or eight years ago and realizing, as many of us have since realized, that jazz was a mighty spirit straining for release-from its narrow and constrictive form...

...The Quartet's personnel were all veterans of the jazz scene: John Lewis, the leader of the group, was well known for his work with Charlie Parker...

...and Kenny Clark, the drummer at that time, was one of the inventors of Be-bop...

...To make matters worse, Lewis is irresistibly attracted to the static forms of Bach and never attempts the dynamic and freer modes of Beethoven, so obviously appropriate to jazz...

...By employing forms which allowed for free episodes, he was able to introduce jazz improvisation into a fixed structure...

...Today, the Modern Jazz Quartet is obviously straining to transcend its jazz origin and to rise into the sphere of serious modern music...

...But jazz form had remained variations on an eight-bar tune...

...The Negro jazz musician is a cultural hero in America, and his people are proud of him...

...A commission for a film score, Sait-On Jamais ("No Sun in Venice"), produced a number of uneven pieces, the most pretentious of which were practically imitations of Bach and Handel...

...But the familiar expressive content of jazz is found now in only the more casual episodes...

...Thus, it is significant that jazz has come to occupy the position of America's most important indigenous artistic expression just at the time when the Negro is beginning to enjoy equal status in our society...

...The spirit of jazz is really the spirit of the Negro...

...Rather, it is a magic glass in which the Negro glimpses the glamorous life of his highest aspirations...

...It has since proved to be one of the most vivid and enduring memories of my musical life...

...In his early compositions, Lewis seemed to have solved some of the most disturbing problems...

...In this light, the Modern Jazz Quartet's dignified bearing, stylish clothing and penchant for everything elegant, raffiné and European takes on the provocative character of counter-snobbism...

...I walked in during the performance, and I can still see the remarkable tableau which the Quartet formed upon the stage...

...They could soar and spin and swoop like spirits from another world...

...Although earlier attempts to utilize classical forms for jazz (e.g., George Gershwin and various European composers of the 1920s and '30s) had not proved successful, Lewis chose to make the effort again...

...In the center, stood Percy Heath, a stiffly elongated figure oddly contrasted with the voluptuous curves of his double bass...

...Also, growing seriousness of intention has made the original solution to the problem of incongruity impossible...

...To a musician like Lewis, trained in classical procedures, the solution was obvious...

...in any case, they were certainly the most impressive-looking ensemble I had ever seen in a night club...

...The Modern Jazz Quartet has become the most successful and probably the most respected ensemble in jazz history...

...Lewis' independent compositions are trivial, derivative and naive...

...All of them were wearing elegant dark suits and high collars...

...To the modern Negro, jazz represents an achievement which is a token of other, greater achievements to come...

...Another difficulty, the incongruity between the spirit of jazz and the spirit we associate with classical music, was disposed of by taking the contrast in the spirit of wit...

...Heath and Connie Kay, the present drummer, have each created a new style for their instruments which is antithetical to the traditionally light-hearted manner of rhythm performers...

...Similarly, Lewis' excursions into old modes, such as the formal style of the 18th century, were part of a sophisticated and witty process that titillated the imagination and induced novel trains of association...

...Milt Jackson was a popular figure who had played vibes brilliantly in the famous Dizzy Gillespie band...

...Jackson, who is generally referred to as the group's soloist—a title he would be too modest to assume—is perhaps the greatest jazz talent of recent years...

...all had beards...

...It increasingly ignores the principles of jazz...

...Even more important is the failure to really solve the question of form...

...The only member of the group who did not look as though he had been posed by an artist was Jackson, who shuffled about easily behind his gleaming vibraharp...

...In recent years, the rather casual synthesis of Lewis' early works has broken down under the heavy demands of more ambitious composition...

...This music presents an image of sophistication, refinement and high culture which is a fantasy inversion of the traditional image of a people who were naive, crude and illiterate...

...I don't know whether the effect was calculated or the musicians were simply nervous...

...For a long time the jazz musician had poured all his wealth of imaginatipn into one of the simplest and most circular of musical forms: variations on an eight-bar theme...

...There is no lack of swing, of course...

...But we aren't taking ourselves very seriously and the incongruity you feel is part of the fun...

...The harmony, melody and rhythm of jazz had changed repeatedly over the years and had become, for an art of improvisation, extremely sophisticated...

...Everything about the Modern Jazz Quartet bespeaks a unique and deliberately unconventional character for a jazz ensemble...

...Traditional jazz reflected the spiritual life of the American Negro, his suffering, exaltation and uniquely ironic humor...

...Clark was leaning tensely forward over his hedge of drums, apparently anxious about a cue...

...It is clear that the sort of jazz or American music created by the Modern Jazz Quartet is no longer a mirror of the Negro world...

...Deeply serious emotion, the sort of profound bitterness and spiritual suffering which pervaded the playing of Charlie Parker, was never part of the Modern Jazz Quartet's expressive content...

...It has taken jazz out of its familiar haunts, the night clubs and theaters of big American cities, and made it seem at home in the intellectual environment of the university or the traditionsteeped atmosphere of the European concert hall and music festival...

...And this corruscating style still flashes out in Jackson's playing...

...With such talented musicians, I was expecting an evening of good playing in the high style of the moment...

...These later works are beset with faults which never appeared in the Quartet's early material—diffuseness, anticlimax, a tendency to bog down pursuing an idea which would have been better dropped...

...He is a master of the technique developed long ago by the Bop musicians who founded modern jazz...

...The group has also pioneered in the use of jazz as accompaniment for the dance and as background music for movies...

...Yes," Lewis seemed to say, "here we are playing with a real jazz beat and a real jazz subject in strict three-voice counterpoint...

...The grave and somber sound of Heath's bass and the delicacy and fancifulness of Kay's percussion work are things delightful in themselves...

...What is more, the atmosphere in Basin Street that night reminded me of a concert hall...

...and in Europe...

...As performers, the musicians are the finest of their kind...

...The sound of the instruments was curiously faint and distant, and it took me a while to realize that the microphones had been turned off and we were hearing the music pure...

...As I recall, the Quartet was playing at Basin Street, one of those basement night clubs along the edge of the theater district that have little platform stages where shifts of musicians provide continuous entertainment all night...

...Now, six years later, this strange scene, or something very like it, is a familiar image for thousands of people in the U.S...

...Certainly, no organization which stands for America has ever assumed such an "un-American" attitude of cultural superiority and condescension...

...He is probably the only jazz musician active today who is comparable to Charlie Parker...

...Every popular art reflects back upon its audience an image of themselves...

...He is primarily concerned with shape and texture, rather than melody and harmony, and tends to see music as large, simple structures...

...Its music is really a thing apart from jazz, aspiring to a higher art form though drawing its sustenance from the same deep taproot of the past...

...The Bop stylists completely freed themselves of all the limitations in phrasing, rhythm and tonality which had kept earlier jazz earthbound...

...Its emotional range has always been confined to pleasant feelings: gaiety, pensive melancholy and the subtle sensualism characteristic of French Impressionism...