American Record Guide : February, 1958
Martin Williamson

These Paris-made recordings feature young tenor-saxophonist Barney Wilen. His style is yet derivative (at times one has the incongruous feeling that one of Lester Young‘s many American followers has suddenly taken up Sonny Rollins) and, beyond the facts of a promising presence and occasional power and movement, it is difficult to comment on him. Distel sounds to me like a talented guitarist playing rather trite, modish jazz-derived things for a more or less posh cocktail lounge. Lewis, a man who can work excellently within his limitations, seems more inventive, more integrated, and swinging more than on his most recent record with The Modern Jazz Quartet. But his increasing occupation with gentleness may still, I think, lead to reticence. Most of Bags’ Groove is very good.

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Billboard : 11/18/1957
Score of 74

Those who go for John Lewis will go for this in a big way. The Lewis arrangements have qualities of the MJQ, but the solos by Frenchmen Barney Wilen on tenor and Sacha Distel, guitar, have less of the “cool” quality of Milt Jackson‘s vibes. Cool, calculated sessions add up to a highly listenable and excellent exchange of international jazz ideas.

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Miami News
William G. Moeser : 12/01/1957

Three top European jazz musicians team with the Modern Jazz Quartet‘s John Lewis to provide six tracks of restrained, almost delicate blowing in the tradition of the MJQ.

Barney Wilen, a 19-year old tenor saxophonist of Nice, France, should really cause a stir here when Gabs’ Groove, and Willow Weep For Me, swing around the States. To listeners who claim the European tones are sterile, don’t miss hearing this lad.

The warm, communicative guitar playing of Sacha Distel holds the rhythms well and he contributes clever figures to four tracks. Your disappointment in the sounds across the pond may vanish bit by bit, as track after track unfolds here.

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Oakland Tribune
Russ Wilson : 12/29/1957

Afternoon In Paris highlights a fine young French guitarist, Sacha Distel, with a quintet lead by pianist John Lewis. Barney Wilen, a French tenorist, is on all six tracks; Connie Kay and French bassist Pierre Michelot on three with Kenny Clarke and Percy Heath on the others. The lacy MJQ sound is beefed up by Wilen and Distel. Those cats can blow!

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Providence Journal
Philip C. Gunion : 11/24/1957

The taste of John Lewis, the prime mover of the Modern Jazz Quartet, is enhanced by a little contact with a few French jazzmen on Atlantic’s Afternoon in Paris.

Aboard is Sacha Distel, a man whose way with a guitar is certainly international, and Barney Wilen, whose tenor sax also knocks down the sound barriers between European and American jazzmen.

Skillfully guiding the mixture of Americans and Europeans is the group of rhythm men involved: Kenny Clarke and Connie Kay, drums, and Percy Heath and Pierre Michelot, bass. Clarke, Kay, Heath and Lewis, of course, have been mixed up with the Modern Jazz Quartet. Clarke was the original drummer and Kay took over when he left.

Much of this material has been worked over before by Lewis, but his approach – and that of his fellows – is ever fresh. They play I Cover the Waterfront, Dear Old Stockholm, All The Things You Are, Willow Weep for Me, Afternoon in Paris, a Lewis composition, and Bags’ Groove, a delightful thing by Milt Jackson, who plays vibes in the MJQ.

The solos are terrific in many places and there is always something going on. Recommended.

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San Bernardino County Sun
Jim Angelo : 12/28/1957

A must for modernists – Jazz is no longer the exclusive property of Americans. Doubters should bend an ear to Afternoon In Paris which shows off the talents of American keyboard artist John Lewis and French guitarist Sacha Distel. Two other French musicians – Barney Wilen on tenor sax and Pierre Michelot on bass – are likewise in the session. Lewis’ fine musicianship and thoughtful approach are matched by the Europeans who perform excellently on I Cover the Waterfront, Dear Old Stockholm, and the title number. Especially noteworthy is the sax work of nineteen year old Barney Wilen. Check his expressive solo on Bags’ Groove.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 11/30/1957

…I have also been delighted by the well-known pianist-leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Lewis, in An Afternoon in Paris with two modern French experts, guitarist Sacha Distel and tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen, plus rhythm. Lewis is a ruminative, atmospheric pianist and his jazz has sometimes threatened to pass off as vapor, but here is colleagues assist him in a steady process of condensation. The Frenchmen are eloquent proof, if any more were needed, that the modern jazz idiom has become international.

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Down Beat : 01/09/1958
Leonard Feather : 4.5 stars

The work of the three Frenchmen on these dies serves as a jolting reminder the extent to which French jazz has caught up with the times.

Wilen, a 19-year-old prodigy from Nice, plays the kind of tenor that is more likely to be mistaken for baritone than for alto, in contrast with the thin-toned tenors of the cool school. He occasionally falters technically, but then, so have many musicians of far greater age and reputation.

Despite Wilen’s hard-bop tendencies, the John Lewis mood generally prevails, particularly in his delightful unaccompanied opening passes on Waterfront and Willow. If the MJQ were ever to add a guitarist, Distel would be the ideal choice; his solos dovetail temperamentally with John’s, blending simplicity with good taste and a modern harmonic ear.

Michelot is overrecorded; aside from this, both rhythm sections are admirable. It is ironic to find Klook back with the ex-boss he criticized so violently after quitting the MJQ a couple of years ago. His fours with John are a particular pleasure in Bags’ Groove, of which this is at least John’s third recorded version.

Despite Bags‘ absence, this set has the qualities of the MJQ at its best moments, with the added merit of some hard swinging rhythm section and solo work.

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Liner Notes by Ralph J. Gleason

The most significant development in jazz music since the great war between modern and traditional has been its swift spread throughout the world in recent years.

At least it seems this way to me.

The evidence appears rather complete that jazz is now well on the way to becoming the universal music of the youth of the world; that it is popular to the point of a crazy in many countries and that even determined efforts to ban it have not been successful. Jazz attracts youth even at the risk of personal sacrifice.

That the frenzy with which jazz is greeted in some corners of the world carries with it a lack of discrimination at the moment does not seem to me to change the importance of this phenomenon.

Jazz is, perhaps, the last great gift of Western culture to the world. That it is also the gift of the American Negro goes without saying. But today his gift has been accepted by peoples and cultures far removed from Canal Street, Kansas City or Carnegie Hall.

Some indication of the degree to which jazz – freely given – has gone beyond the original creators to become the property of those who have received the gift, can be found in consideration of the non-American jazz performers.

There was no problem in the Thirties in telling Ambrose from any American band; no problem in detecting a French tenor or clarinet as not an American. This was no criticism, implied or explicit. It was merely a marking of the accent. Jazz was an American language and the accent was difficult, if not impossible, to acquire. Conversely, in a land where no one spoke this language naturally, even the mediocre practitioners were welcomed. Hence some of the American musicians and their hegira to Europe from 1925-1939.

However, following the great melting pot of World War II, the jazz of modern America was taken up seriously by musicians from other countries with varying degrees of success. As we have gone on into the Fifties, the quality of European jazz in general has gotten better and better. (Excepting, of course, the traditional jazz field wherein the difference is still immediately obvious, though it is not always quite so obvious whether it is an American or a European revivalist band playing; both being considerably removed from the source.)

The result of this – one result at any rate – is that there is no longer as obvious a difference between an American and a non-American (especially European) performance of modern jazz. Whatever the reason for this (and the possibility that young musicians of all countries today possess a greater area of common experience than their predecessors, allowing them a greater chance of speaking the same musical language with similar accents, suggests itself), it seems substantially true.

This album is a perfect example of what I have been talking about. There are three French musicians on this date: Sacha Distel, twice winner of the top guitarist position in the critics’ poll of Le Jazz Hot; Pierre Michelot, a bassist who has worked with numerous American musicians in Europe, and Barney Wilen, a tenor player, a 19 year old from Nice who has been causing considerable stir in European jazz circles.

It is with a good deal of joy that I can report that the playing of these men is of a calibre never hitherto thought to exist in European jazz. I played this album for numerous friends without identifying anyone on it (it’s unique to have such an opportunity today, when jazz discs are not at all rare and it takes something from another country to be unknown here). Without exception they thought all the personnel to be native Americans. This may be chauvinistic, but it seems to me to be the highest compliment possible for the playing of these men.

Sacha Distel, of whom we have already heard something in the United States, is an excellent guitarist with a warm, directly communicating manner of playing, an ability to construct solo lines that build logically, even inevitably, and whose performance always takes firm hold on your attention.

Michelot is a good bass man. His time is excellent, his bowed solo passages executed with facility and his solo statements straightforward and sincere. His tone does not have quite the mellowness the best American bassists have, but that may change.

Wilen was a sensational surprise to me. His long solos on this album are infinitely more rewarding than many such attempts by native Americans. I can think, for instance, of serval American tenors who have had their on LPs and have yet to contribute one chorus as good as his work here. And his playing on Bags’ Groove shows funk has jumped the ocean.

It came as no surprise to me, nor will it to you, that the performances of John Lewis, Percy Heath, Connie Kay and Kenny Clarke are at their usual exquisite height of perfection. It is interesting to note how much of the effect of the Modern Jazz Quartet carries over into this album without the key sound of the vibes at all. The almost mesmerizing effect of the MJQ is duplicated here. It is an aura of intensity that seems to be created by Lewis’ discipline and considered approach. It is a reflection, of course, of his own personality and a tribute to him that it is the dominant factor here. Paris somehow seems the perfect place for Lewis to bloom (note how the Parisian motif runs through all his work). There is a beatific Parisian warmth that surrounds this session and even the funky sounds are never hard, no matter how exciting they get.

This is no jam session, no free blowing album. This is delightful music, true, but it is marked also with restraint order and form. I Cover The Waterfront is notable for John’s unusual, almost organ tone on the piano and for a surprising tenor and bass duet. Dear Old Stockholm (and it’s a reflection of the further internationalizing of jazz that this is rapidly supplanting How High The Sputnick as the national jazz anthem) has an excellent Sacha Distel solo and some stately, almost plump, John Lewis passages. Afternoon In Paris, written by John Lewis, is remarkable for solos by Wilen and Distel, both of whom reach a high level of creative tension in their improvisations on the second chorus. The composition is marked by the delicacy with which Lewis endows everything he constructs in jazz and still retains that personal liberty of the soloist, without which jazz cannot be created.

All The Things You Are would seem to me to be John Lewis’ track as a player. He almost literally prances through his piano solo and then engages in a fascinating series of breaks with Kenny Clarke. Bags’ Groove again is a showpiece for the guitar and tenor and contains Wilen’s best work of the date – a fine solo. Willow Weep For Me has moving solos from everyone. The rhythm (the drums are brushed here) has that neat, slow tempo bounce that is so suitable for dancing.

I think a word should be said here for Percy Heath and the two drummers, Kay and Clarke. What they do on this LP and on every track is the sort of thing we take so much for granted that we seldom comment on it. They provide a moving pulse, fill the holes properly and switch from time-keeping to musical improvisation at the proper moment, yet never intrude. They are the true heroes of jazz – the good rhythm men – because they get fewer of the rewards and yet without them the solos would never be as good.

With this album, we are all served notice that jazz is no longer the exclusive property of Americans. Europe has launce a jazz satellite here that will be revolving a long time.