These extracts are from an article which appeared in the February 2, 1957 edition of Downbeat.
Entitled John Lewis and written by Nat Hentoff, it carried the following subtitle – The Modern Jazz Quartet’s Music Director Answers Complaints About the Group, And Also Delivers His Musical Philosophy.
With regard to the subtitle, John, like Dave Brubeck, could have called it – “The Story of My Life in Jazz.”
“Criticisms of the Quartet: Do I feel Milt Jackson is being held down as a member of the quartet? You’ll have to ask Milt about that. I don’t think he is any more restricted—or that I am—any more than if he or I were working for anyone else. Milt also has the opportunity to play for other people and to make records for himself. He’s a big soloist in his own right, and he can do whatever he likes outside the quartet if it doesn’t interfere with his major work— the quartet —which has helped, I think, to make him more widely known.
“We have a very unique and wonderful situation. We get to do mostly what we want to do. I say ‘mostly’ because each of us can’t do everything he wants to do. We all have to consider each other. None of us even plays the same when we don’t play together.
“Our music, the quartet’s, is made to listen to. And it was not made for musicians only. When somebody comes to listen to our music, we try to give as much as we’re capable of. The listeners don’t have to guess what’s going on. There’s no mystery on the stand. I mean we try to have our ideas as well made as we can. There’s another kind of mystery that music keeps, that all art has, because you can’t figure it out.”
John was given a list of criticisms made of the MJQ by some musicians and by some laymen—that, aside from Milt, the MJQ isn’t ‘funky’ enough, has too limited a range of expression and particularly of tempo, that it relies too much on fugal structures, etc.
“FIRST OF ALL,” said Lewis in reaction to the “funky” question, “I don’t want to be in a position of defending us in terms of any words. All I care about is how well we’re communicating with the means we have. We must first obviously communicate to ourselves. Then the test is to communicate to somebody else. I don’t care about the terms, words, or anything else like that.
“I listen to what we’re doing; I enjoy it; and listen as much as I can. If what I hear isn’t pleasant to me; if all the numbers were in the same tempo and in the same key, let’s say, that would be dull to me, and I’d know something was wrong. Now, I would agree that sometimes the tempos in the course of a set are quite the same, but there are other considerations. We sometimes sacrifice tempo changes for character. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and D & E, for example, are similar in tempo, but different in key and in character, so we can play them in sequence. And sometimes we achieve the character we want by playing ballads faster as the Basie band used to which made them sound wonderful and which gave them a more live quality.
“Have we played out our use of fugal structures? We only play three — Concorde, Versailles, and Vendome. We don’t use Fugue for Music Inn in the book. Not yet, anyway. So that’s only three things. How can it be said that that aspect of what we do has been played out?
“My writing is going to change, in any case. There are other things we want to do, and have wanted to do from the beginning. By now we know how to do some things fairly well. The counterpoint thing between the three pitch instruments, and even Connie, nas been developed to a fair degree. But I don’t want to set it so that it gets so perfect that we can’t use it for something else in another direction.
“And we have to keep going back into the gold mine. I mean the folk music. The blues, and things that are related to it. Even things that may not have been folk to start with but have become kind of folk-like material that somebody writes but that has been worked on until it doesn’t belong to the composer any more. Like some of Gershwin’s music and James P. Johnson’s. Music that serves as a point of departure for us and for me.”
When it’s not moving every day, the MJQ rehearses two or three times a week, sometimes more. During its August stay at the Music Inn [Stockbridge, MA] last summer the quartet rehearsed everyday. At rehearsal, Lewis makes the final decisions.
There has to be some kind of leader,” he emphasized. “It just can’t work without somebody setting the tempo, etc. Milt often makes suggestions, however.”
As for record sessions, rehearsals alone usually aren’t enough from Lewis’ viewpoint. Whenever possible, the MJQ will play a piece in clubs and at concerts for several months before recording it. “That’s why,” Lewis explains, “we couldn’t possibly make more than the two LPs a year we do. Those two eat up everything. Two a year are enough!”