Complete Atlantic Studio Rec.- The Modern Jazz Quartet 1956-

Following a year of intensive touring, which had become their way of life (Lewis to Hall: “I’m never home anyway”), the MJQ was back at Music Inn to combine rest and recreation with another summer session of the School of Jazz. They recorded music that, much like that in The Modern Jazz Quartet album of a year earlier, consisted of pieces with which they had become comfortable by way of thorough road testing. The medley, with its ingenious transitions between segments, is primarily a vehicle for Jackson’s inquisitive exploration of three great standard songs. It includes Lewis’s compelling countermelodies. As Gerry Mulligan liked to point out, YARDBIRD SUITE is one of Charlie Parker’s most song-like compositions. Exposition of the familiar melody is shared in fragments around the quartet. There is a pointillist chorus with Heath standing by before the piece devolves into a notably economical Lewis solo. Then Heath and Kay get their licks in, Jackson kibitzes, and Lewis’s arrangement closes with a rapid-fire canon.

MIDSUMMER, slow, and FESTIVAL SKETCH, sprightly, were new Lewis compositions, lightly harmonized to leave generous room for reflective invention by John and Bags. Connie’s and Percy’s rhythmic unity is amazing here.

For the first time since they had recorded together for a memorable Prestige album in 1953, Sonny Rollins joined the Modern Jazz Quartet in concert at Music Inn. When I quoted Gunther Schuller’s observation that “Sonny was in one of his more whimsical and sardonic moods that night,” Rollins laughed at length. “Well, that’s great,” he told me,” still chuckling. “I haven’t heard that record in years and years and years. I usually shrink when I hear my own recordings, but I remember that the last time I heard it I didn’t shrink so much.

“When Milt first came to New York, we played at Minton’s Playhouse. We hung out a lot. I knew Percy maybe even a little better than the others, we played together so much, and I was close friends with Connie Kay. I heard John with Charlie Parker and he accompanied Lester Young, so that’s when I became aware of his soloing. And he’s a great writer. It was great fun just to be playing with musicians of that caliber,” he said. “Considering the success that they’d been having around that period, it was a real boon for them to ask me to do something with them.”

In his notes for The Modern Jazz Quartet At Music Inn/Volume 2, Schuller says of Rollins, “On both tracks, we hear him fooling around with little motives, toying with them and his instrument—almost as a cat will with a mouse—spoofing and kidding, at times facetious and at others pleasantly jocose. Sonny’s unwavering insistence on being funny produces a very interesting by-play of reactions in the Quartet. Milt and Connie buckle down to some real great, swinging—Milt specially in his own BAGS’ GROOVE and Connie in TUNISIA. Percy occasionally joins the fun, as in BAGS’ GROOVE, where he plays, for instance, a typical ‘oom-pah’ bass line which could be, except for its funky swing, straight out of some hotel band.”

Schuller’s unerring ear picks up nuances in the accompaniment that help in understanding something of the mentality of improvising jazz musicians and their ability to adjust. “John’s reactions are more complex,” he writes. “In BAGS’ GROOVE, when Rollins enters with humorously disjointed parodies of Milt’s theme, John prods him soberly with beautiful understated chords. After three choruses he realizes that Rollins will not be swayed, and ‘joins in’ with little discordant semi-tone ‘bleeps,’ which he later develops into a relentlessly building, insinuating rhythmic figure, which Sonny finally can no longer resist. He almost becomes serious for a few choruses, only to return eventually to the prevailing punning mood.”

At the end of our conversation in 2011, Sonny wanted to make a point about the MJQ and about nostalgia. “They’re a great group,” he said, “and I miss them very much. But I’m not a person to wallow in what used to be. The old days were great. Today is great also.”

“Tomorrow is better,” I said.

“Tomorrow is better,” Sonny said with a smile. “Tomorrow is better.”