The Modern Jazz Quartet - Pyramid (1976 Japanese Atlantic Vinyl LP)

Vinyl: EX
Sleeve: EX
Obi: EX

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The Modern Jazz Quartet - Pyramid | Vinyl LP - 1976 Japanese Atlantic Reissue (P-7521A, Warner-Pioneer Corporation)

The MJQ had been together for seven years by the time of these sessions, and the interplay between Lewis and Jackson had settled into something that sounded effortless. Lewis's piano is precise, spare, never more notes than necessary. Jackson's vibraphone brings the blues and the heat, filling the harmonic spaces Lewis leaves open. The tension between Lewis's formal compositional instincts and Jackson's improviser's instinct for swing is what gives the group its identity, and it's audible on every track here. "Vendome" opens the album in two and a half minutes of tightly written counterpoint. "Pyramid," Ray Brown's composition, stretches past 10 minutes and gives Jackson his longest solo on the album, the vibraphone building through layers over Heath's bass and Kay's brushwork. "It Don't Mean A Thing" takes Ellington's swing anthem and runs it through the MJQ's chamber treatment, which works better than it has any right to. "Django," Lewis's tribute to Django Reinhardt (first recorded by the group for Prestige in the mid-1950s), is the second version on record and plays at a slightly more relaxed tempo than the original, the melody sitting comfortably in the group's Atlantic-era sound. "How High the Moon" is a standard the group had been playing live for years. "Romaine," Jim Hall's contribution, closes the album with the longest track on side B.

The two Music Inn sessions (August 1959, "Django" and "Romaine") were recorded at the venue in Lenox, Massachusetts where the Lenox School of Jazz held its summer programmes. The two New York sessions (December 1959 and January 1960) produced the remaining four tracks.

This is the December 1976 Japanese stereo reissue on Atlantic P-7521A, from the Jazz-Forever Excellent / Pick Up Your Music series, manufactured by Warner-Pioneer Corporation.