The Modern Jazz Quartet - The Modern Jazz Quartet (1960s Japanese Atlantic Mono Vinyl LP)

The Modern Jazz Quartet - The Modern Jazz Quartet | Vinyl LP - 1960s Japanese Atlantic Mono (ATL-5003, Victor Record Company)

By 1957 the Modern Jazz Quartet had settled into the group that would last for decades: John Lewis composing and directing from the piano, Milt Jackson's vibraphone as the singing voice up front, and Percy Heath and Connie Kay holding a rhythm section of unusual delicacy. This self-titled Atlantic album catches them recreating the set they were playing on the road, and it moves between two sides of the band. There is the elegant, chamber-like side, a five-song medley of ballads that drifts from "They Say It's Wonderful" to "Body And Soul", and there is the swinging side, a brisk "A Night In Tunisia" and the first version of Milt Jackson's blues "Bags' Groove" the quartet cut for Atlantic. "La Ronde: Drums" hands the spotlight to Connie Kay, whose light, precise playing rarely got a feature like this. The whole record has the poise the MJQ was known for, jazz played with the manners of a string quartet but the blues never far away.

The Modern Jazz Quartet held to this format, and this personnel, for the better part of forty years, which is almost unheard of in jazz. Records like this one built the reputation: serious, understated, and quietly radical in the way they folded European form into a swinging quartet. It is not their most famous album, Fontessa and the Django material tend to get named first, but it is a fine, representative document of the group in its early Atlantic years.

This copy is a Japanese pressing on Atlantic, manufactured by Victor Record Company in a fully laminated flip-back sleeve, catalogue number ATL-5003.