John Lewis – The Jazz Tome

John Lewis at the North Sea Jazz Festival, The Hague, 16 July 1977

Photo by Bert Verhoeff / Anefo (CC BY-SA 3.0 NL)

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Lewis grew up in New Mexico and studied music there before going into the army: while stationed in Europe he formed a close friendship with Kenny Clarke, and on his return to the US he went to New York in 1945 and began working on the bebop scene. In 1946 he joined Clarke in Dizzy Gillespie's big band, besides studying at the Manhattan School Of Music. He is on a few key sideman sessions in this period – such as the Charlie Parker date which produced Parker's Mood (1948) – and he also backs Lester Young on some of the saxophonist's sessions for Verve. But it was his work with Clarke and Milt Jackson in what eventually came to be called (in 1952) the Modern Jazz Quartet which settled the rest of his career, and it is discussed under the entry for that group. Away from the MJQ, though, Lewis pursued a number of related musical interests. He directed the annual School Of Jazz at Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts in the later 50s, was MD of the Monterey Jazz Festival during 1958–62 and developed Orchestra U.S.A. as a performing vehicle for his third-stream compositions during 1962–5. He wrote filmscores, a ballet and other works, which were recorded on both Atlantic and RCA, and in the 80s and 90s he did occasional solo work and recording, including Bach duets with his wife Mirjana. Most of this music has fallen into a state of obscurity, which hasn't been assisted by a generally uncomprehending and mystifyingly hostile critical regard for Lewis's work. Stylistically, he was almost a diametric opposite to bop pianists such as Bud Powell: a gentle, filigree player, favouring delicate counterpoint over any kind of aggressive comping (which also set him aside from a fellow 'classicist' such as Dave Brubeck), whose piano playing was regularly accused of a kind of spineless conservatism, a charge which was also levelled at his composing. While he doubtless borrowed from the European antecedents who clearly fascinated him, his music is better heard as a notably individual response to an idiom otherwise crowded with shouting, jittery music. Such records as Original Sin (1961) and European Windows (1958) have been all but forgotten, but remain intriguingly set aside from the jazz mainstream, and the occasional records where his piano took centre stage (such as The John Lewis Piano, 1958) are all worth rediscovering. Even so, his finest writing was reserved for the MJQ, and the best of it is as accomplished and inspiring as anything in jazz after Parker. While the classical tradition absorbed him, he also – as he once told the author – loved blues, and regarded the earliest records by Muddy Waters as some of the finest music of the 20th century. In his last years he recorded a pair of albums for Atlantic, Evolution and Evolution II (1999–2000), which were a beautiful summary of his career.

Biography from Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia (2005).

If you'd like more information, check out The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2002) or The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (2007), both of which are still in print.