Jazz ensemble. Three of its original members – Milt Jackson (vibraphone), John Lewis (piano and director) and Kenny Clarke (drums) – with Ray Brown (doublebass) first performed together in 1946 in Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. In 1951–2 these four players made recordings under the name of the Milt Jackson Quartet; by 1952, when the first recordings under the name the Modern Jazz Quartet were issued, Percy Heath had replaced Brown as bass player. The group began performing regularly in concert halls and night clubs from 1954. In the following year Clarke was replaced by Connie Kay, thus establishing the group’s longstanding membership. After two decades of recordings and international concert tours the MJQ broke up in 1974. For several years its members pursued separate careers, reuniting occasionally for short concert tours, but in 1981 they resumed playing together for several months each year. In 1997 the players disbanded in order to pursue other musical interests.
The MJQ played in a restrained, conservative bop style that is sometimes referred to as cool jazz. In its best moments it had a finely honed ensemble sound, owing in part to the abiding association of the four excellent players and in part to Lewis’s compositions, which include some of the most carefully organized works in jazz history. The main soloist was Jackson, whose exuberant and rhythmically complex solos contrasted effectively with Lewis’s restrained and deceptively simple manner of playing. By frequently accompanying Jackson with subsidiary countermelodies rather than the usual chordal punctuations of bop, Lewis created a distinctive contrapuntal texture seldom heard in other bop performances.
Throughout its long career the MJQ also performed and recorded much third-stream music, combining techniques of European art music and jazz improvisation. These works, written by Lewis, Gunther Schuller, André Hodeir and others, are uneven in quality, some suffering from disparities between the composed and improvised sections. Among the best are Lewis’s England’s Carol and his fugal pieces Versailles, Three Windows, Vendome and Concorde.
For worklist see Lewis, John
M. Harrison: ‘Looking Back at the Modern Jazz Quartet’, JazzM, iv/2 (1958), 2–5; repr. in The Art of Jazz: Essays on the Nature and Development of Jazz, ed. M. Williams (New York, 1959/R), 219–31
T. Owens: Improvisation Techniques of the Modern Jazz Quartet (thesis, UCLA, 1965)
M. Williams: The Jazz Tradition (New York, 1970, 2/1983)
N. Koyama and others: ‘John Lewis and MJQ Discography’, Swing Journal, xxviii/3 ( 1974), 266
T. Owens: ‘The Fugal Pieces of the Modern Jazz Quartet’, Journal of Jazz Studies, iv/1 (1976), 25–46
W. Balliett: ‘ Like a Family’, Improvising: Sixteen Jazz Musicians and their Art (New York, 1977) 169–201
W. Knauer: Zwischen Bebop und Free Jazz: Komposition und Improvisation des Modern Jazz Quartet (Mainz, 1990)
THOMAS OWENS