Who would have thought this quartet would confound revolutions in fashion and survive for 40 years? And that it would achieve widespread popularity in Europe in 1957? The conquest of the general public by these four gentlemen was more an act of seduction. In 1946 drummer Kenny Clarke created the opportunity for his friend John Lewis to join Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra. Here Lewis replaced Thelonious Monk on the piano for two years before heading with Kenny to Paris for a few months. John Lewis had worked in New York with Charlie Parker and thanks to him was writing arrangements for the now legendary nonet of Miles Davis. John, Kenny and vibraphonist Milt Jackson formed Dizzy’s rhythm section; this trio was to form the nucleus which in 1952 gave rise to the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ). The pianist with the velvet touch had been much in demand for studio sessions while still a student at the Manhattan School of Music. Milt said, “John didn’t want to be a sideman to me and I didn’t want to be one to him. It was all about partnership.” The sound director had found his lead performer. Bass player Ray Brown was replaced by former US fighter pilot Percy Heath, and from 1955 Connie Kay came in on drums for Kenny Clarke.

At the time of these recordings, John Lewis was still in the process of developing the unique concept of MJQ as a jazz chamber group, for which he often scored even the bass and drum parts. The cosmopolitan Lewis successfully exploited a wide variety of source material (folksong, counterpoint, standards etc.) to develop new structures and create a style of jazz that was free of cliché and would ultimately prove timeless. “Change your attitude” was the MJQ motto. Jazz to them was more than mere chance music, loose jamming and a lot of swing: it called for new and innovative approaches. Change was tangible also in their outward appearance – the four musicians wore tuxedos – and in the way they filed onto the stage. Everything was choreographed, exuded dignity. As a pianist, composer and arranger, John Lewis was enormously productive even then, writing music for TV, theatre and ballet. His international success with “Django” gave him the opportunity to compose his first film score for Roger Vadim, Sait-on Jamais (No Sun in Venice). The MJQ had by then become a collective with strictly defined roles: Lewis (music), Jackson (PR), Heath (finance) and Kay (transport).

The fact that Lewis, the man of ideas, was every inch an equal to his partner Jackson, the great improviser, is clearly audible in these tracks. In “Ralph’s New Waltz” (written by Jackson for the critic Ralph J. Gleason in 1955), for example, there is formal sophistication in the way he leads in and out of his own solo. The 18th-century English Christmas carol, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is even mentioned in the works of Charles Dickens – an unusual choice, perhaps, for a jazz ensemble with bebop roots. But what MJQ did with well-known standards was so unique that many of their versions remained in the quartet’s repertoire for decades. During a studio break following TV recordings, Joachim-Ernst Berendt, the dedicatee of “J.B. Blues”, asked vibes player Milt Jackson if he had ever recorded a piece on his own without rhythm section, citing “Picasso”, the celebrated unaccompanied solo by Coleman Hawkins. No, came Milt’s reply, but we could try. He opted for “Tenderly”. When Berendt asked him to shorten the vibrato, Milt told him that Sidney Bechet’s vibrato had been even longer and no one worried about that. The MJQ became a laboratory for a chamber-music style of jazz. Soon they were regularly inviting soloists like Paul Desmond, Jimmy Giuffre and Sonny Rollins, later on the group even worked with symphony orchestras. But every track of this pioneering early phase exemplifies how John Lewis, to quote André Francis, turned four musicians into “a sensitive instrument which vibrates in the same universe of sound, achieving a communion unique in the world of jazz.”