Modern Jazz Quartet

Album Reviews:

1957: One Never Knows: No Sun In Venice (Soundtrack)

1960: Pyramid

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One Never Knows: No Sun in Venice (1957)

Cool Jazz, Fan Acquisition, 5/10

Settles like warm, stuffy odour above Venetian canals

With a combo like the Modern Jazz Quartet, good quality just isn’t enough. While the soundtrack-ish, subdued posture makes sense (it is a soundtrack), and while you can practically see the film with its glorious, slowly shot scenery of slightly decadent allure before your inner eye, the Quartet is somewhat restrained in this format. The vibraphone-centered cool jazz pieces with their typically baroque flair don’t quite unfold, they linger, and the mood doesn’t quite invite intrigue or delight, it rather settles like the warm, stuffy odour above the Venetian canals in summer. As said – this is good, mellow jazz featuring all the Modern Jazz Quartet’s hallmark traits – except maybe their usual sense of compositional exploration. It is quite spectacular though that Roger Vadim chose the Modern Jazz Quartet for his film – this is before Miles Davis’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) and while the band was already established (especially in Europe through relentless touring), this was still rather vanguard stuff. Anyway, minor work in their catalogue, but highly listenable.

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Pyramid (1960)

Cool, but not loungy, progressive, but not sonically avantgardistic

There are no fundamentally weak releases in the Modern Jazz Quartet’s catalogue, but which albums would you recommend as their absolute top picks? That’s no trifling matter. Discounting their live albums, Pyramid is a slight contender among their studio work, with its focus on sophisticated vibraphone-and-piano duels that draw their power from subtlety bordering on inconspicuousness. The Modern Jazz Quartet had entered their phase as elderly statesmen, and alongside their (in my view) epochal Third Stream Music, they were ready to further test out the possibilities to turn their jazz quartet format into a chamber music style that could have potentially broken loose from either jazz or classical – yet without strings or clarinet, they end up on the slightly conventional side of cool, sneaky swing once more.  

As such, this is a terrific jazz release: cool, but not loungy, progressive, but not sonically avantgardistic, minimalistic, but not sparse. It works just as well as background music as it does for an intense listening. Given the fact they barely seem to touch their instruments, these guys put down one mean swing.