Billboard : 12/15/1956
Spotlight on… selection

This should be still another best-seller for the MJQ. The program is typical, except for the addition, on several tracks, of clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre. The cover is a stunning full-color photo. Several of the items were features by the group on the recent Jazz at the Philharmonic tour, including the Variation on Got Rest Y Merry Gentlemen. John Lewis does The Man That Got Away as a particularly sensitive piano solo. Plenty here for the modern jazz coterie.

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Cashbox : 12/15/1956

Dealers ought to reserve extra stock space for this entry by The Modern Jazz Quartet because its an excellent follow-up to Fontessa, an effort by the group that has been one of the best jazz sellers for the past year. Recorded at the newly established “Music Inn School Of Jazz” in Massachusetts, the crew applies its subtle, classical-minded attack on 9 originals and standards. Jimmy Giuffre (clarinet) is added to the inventive four man combo on A Fugue For Music Inn, in which the clarinetist falls admirably in line with the Quartet’s ideas. Must stock for any shop with jazz traffic.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 02/10/1957

Another great album by what is probably the leading small combo of the day – and with Jimmy Giuffre on clarinet. Compare this version of Two Degrees East, Three West with that which Lewis, Heath, Perkins Hall and Hamilton did on Pacific’s Grand Encounter. And, above all, jazz fan or not, hear Giuffre’s lovely version of Serenade from The Unicorn in the Garden.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 12/29/1956

Melody, of course, is not lacking from the best of the modern jazz players, and I hasten to notice two new LPs of stars who have been mentioned here often before. The Modern Jazz Quartet presents a number of pastoral works developed this past summer at Music Inn, Massachusetts. In this case, the delicate chamber group is augmented by the clarinet of California’s Jimmy Giuffre. Their music is all tender and lovely business, none more so than the pianist-leader John Lewis‘s variation on God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (Atlantic 1247). I gather that Music Inn, near Lenox in the Berkshires, has long since become the jazz Tanglewood and is planning still more ambitious jazz caucuses. The MJQ and Mr. Giuffre have set a delightful pace.

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Down Beat : 01/09/1957
Nat Hentoff : 4.5 stars

Recorded last summer at Music Inn during the course of the unprecedented jazz season there (described in John Wilson’s excellent notes) this most recent MJQ recital includes three guest appearances by Jimmy Giuffre, the contemporary jazzman probably closest in spirit to John Lewis. Giuffre appears in Lewis’ Fugue, a pleasant work though not quite as ingratiating as Vendome or some of the other earlier fugal structures. Giuffre also plays David Raskin’s Serenade, a non-jazz performance The piece – from the UPA cartoon, The Unicorn in the Garden – is an experience in unfolding serenity. Jimmy is heard finally in his own Fun, written to be performed with the MJQ. The work has become one of my favorite jazz chamber conversations and is firmly indicative of the subtle wit, skill and disciplined purposefulness that make up Jimmy’s muscular character.

The MJQ’s Bess – one of the loveliest pleas in the Gershwin score – is appropriately tender but somewhat static. The same is true of the otherwise affecting Man. Two Degrees, first recoded in the marvelous Lewis-Perkins–Hall–Heath–Hamilton Grand Encounter LP, is enchanting in a different way here. (Note the quartet’s dynamics-balancing in the beginning and dig Milt‘s solo later.) Sun Dance strikes me as more effective in this version than in the original nonet context. The new Lewis work, A Morning in Paris (basically the same chord structure as John’s An Afternoon in Paris) is a brisk, stimulating promenade. God Rest is a wondrous series of delicate but intensely strong mobiles centered on the kind carol, and the control of dynamics here is beyond the present capacity of any other jazz combo.

There has been increasing talk among musicians here and in Europe that the MJQ should plunge into more challenging areas of form and simultaneously should open up more in terms of emotional improvisation. This may well be true (although it strikes me that people in the jazz field are, as usual, in too much of a hurry to call for change). But in any case, at its present stage, there is much joy and many provocative emotional personal images to be deepened from listening and relistening to LPs of theirs like this. I think Jay Maisel’s cover is the best jazz album photograph of the year.

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Liner Notes by John S. Wilson

It’s a long trip from dingy backroom dives in New Orleans to a sun-bathed, verdant hillside in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, but jazz has made the journey. This is not simply a long-winded way of saying that jazz can now be heard in the Berkshires – that would be a commonplace that could be true today of almost any corner of the world. What has developed in the hills of western Massachusetts is a unique seed-bed for jazz, basically related to the seed-bed function that New Orleans once performed but in other respects totally different.

The place where this is happening is Music Inn, a rambling, relaxed summer resort outside of Lenox and just down the road a piece from Tanglewood, a long established summer center for classical music. For seven summers, Phillip and Stephanie Barber, the proprietors of the Inn, have been offering their guests panel discussions of jazz and folk music. The discussions, organized by Marshall Stearns, head of the Institute of Jazz Studies, have examined jazz from almost every point of view than an imaginative, inquiring mind might conceive – the viewpoint of the anthropologist, the musicologist, the sociologist, the historian and many others, including the musician.

Complementing these discussions, the Barbers have staged jazz and folk concerts in their Music Barn, which was originally the open courtyard of the barn adjoining the Inn but is now a great gaily striped tent covering the same area.

During the summer of 1956, the jazz program at Music Inn was broadened. The Modern Jazz Quartet was invited to be the Inn’s “jazz group in residence” for the last three weeks in August, not to perform (although they did give two concerts) but to have an opportunity to prepare new material, rehearse, explore new ideas and to take a physical and spiritual breather. In addition, five round-table discussions were arranged in which all the participants were jazz musicians. They talked about such things as improvisation, composition, rhythm – all on a musician-to-musician level with no special consideration for whatever audience might be listening.

The musicians who took part were from all schools and periods of jazz: Wilbur de Paris, Dizzy Gillespie, Jimmy Giuffre and Teddy Charles; Pee Wee Russell, Max Roach, Bill Russo and Charlie Mingus; Sammy Price, Rex Stewart, Oscar Pettiford and Teo Macero and many others. As the discussions moved along, the barriers which have isolated jazzmen in recent years – the steady association with musicians of only one school, the suspicions with which one generation views another, the inbreeding demarcations of style, geographic separations – all these melted away. The older men were soon being drawn out on intimate details of early jazz history and developments by the younger musicians who were almost completely unfamiliar with them. Such men as de Paris and Gillespie, who once sat together in Cab Calloway‘s brass section before they went their widely separate ways, found themselves on common ground in urging that, whatever may happen in jazz in the future, it must not lose its swing.

Given this unique opportunity to emerge from the insulated lives that most jazz musicians live today, they made the exhilarating discovery that they are all of a piece, a discovery which was epitomized by a jam session, climaxing the discussion, in which Max Roach and Connie Kay vied for the opportunity to try their hands at two-beat drumming behind such traditionalists as Wilbur de Paris and Sammy Price, and which produced a clarinet duet between Pee Wee Russell and Jimmy Giuffre that was without precedent in jazz.

The stimulation that these sessions gave to the musicians was obvious. John Lewis, who had been on hand throughout all of the discussions, was disturbed that this exchange of such a wide range of jazz knowledge should be so ephemeral. He urged the Barbers to give it some form of continuing existence so that both established jazzmen and youngsters just getting started could benefit from it. The result has been the establishment of the Music Inn School of Jazz, an annual three-week workshop course under Lewis’ direction which will incorporate the round-table discussions by musicians and Marshall Stearns’ panels along with practical experience in writing for large and small groups, playing with both types of groups, and lessons in the jazz techniques of various instruments. The first session of the school will be held in August, 1957, with a small, carefully selected body of students.

It was in the midst of and as a part of all this ferment of thinking about jazz that the recordings inside this sleeve were made. They are the product of planning which covered the year before the material was actually recoded and which was carried on at various points across the country until everything – and everybody – was appropriately joined under the green and white candy-striped tent of the Music Barn, where this album was recorded.

It began in the summer of 1955 at a concert in Red Rock Canyon, near Denver. Jazz musicians from scattered points throughout the country had been brought in for this concert. Among them were Jimmy Giuffre from California and John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet from the East. It was their first meeting although they had already sense a musical kinship from hearing each others’ work on records.

“We both like the subtle aspects,” says Giuffre.

Lewis, for his part, felt that Giuffre was the one jazz musician whose playing was closest to the Quartet’s style. He asked Giuffre to write something which he could play with the Quartet and Giuffre accepted readily. Later, when their parts crossed briefly in Los Angeles and again in Chicago, Lewis and Giuffre talked out further ideas for their work together in a recording session. The opportunity to hold such a session did not present itself easily because Giuffre works mostly on the West Coast and the Quartet is based in the East. It finally came in the summer of 1956 when Giuffre spent a week at Music Inn taking part in the round-table discussions while the Quartet was in residence there.

Giuffre appears with the Quartet in three selections, one of them his own composition, Fun.

“I call it that because that’s how I felt about the piece, about playing it with the Quartet,” he says, “and that’s how I feel about the whole album. It’s a light tune – at least, the opening phrase is. I felt is should be more than just a nice mood so I made it a little involved in form. And I wanted it to be happy so I wrote in major. But I have a minor feeling even when I’m writing in major. As a whole, though, it’s happy.”

A Fugue for Music Inn is the latest addition to the highly successful series of fugues which have been created by the Quartet – Vendome, Concorde, Versailles. This one carries the idea a step farther with the addition of Giuffre’s clarinet. It is completely improvised except for four bars of melody.

Giuffre’s third appearance is on Serenade, a composition by David Raskin who is best known for Laura. Lewis suggested that Giuffre play it because he kept hearing Giuffre’s clarinet in it every time it ran through his mind. It is transcription, played straight without variations or interpolations and it is not offered as a jazz performance.

“It’s just a piece of music and I like it,” says Lewis in explaining why it appears in an album that is otherwise devoted to jazz. “I refuse to be restricted by any formulas.”

Two of the selections by the Quartet alone are pieces which Lewis originally wrote for larger groups and has now pared down for Quartet purposes. His inspirations for Sun Dance were the Hopi dancers of New Mexico and Watusi dancers seen in the film, King Soloman’s Mines. It was written for a nonet and was first presented at a concert given by the Modern Jazz Society in Town Hall, New York, in the fall of 1955. Lewis found it easy to cut down the instrumentation because, as he says, “It’s a lean kind of piece.”

Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West was written by Lewis for a West Coast recording date with a quintet made up of two Easterners (Lewis and Percy Heath) and three Westerners (Bill Perkins, Jim Hall and Chico Hamilton). It’s a blues, using the traditional twelve-bar structure with a sharply angular melodic line. It is the kind of piece on which the Quartet shows that, despite all its refinements, it has very earthy roots.

Both A Morning in Paris and England’s Carol #1 are current developments in continuing Lewis projects. A Morning in Paris is so titled because its chord structure is basically the same as that of another Lewis composition, An Afternoon in Paris (see Atlantic 1235 for a performance of this number by Phineas Newborn Jr.). It is typical of the deliberation and planning with which Lewis works that, although he wrote this piece a full year before it was recorded, it was written with this specific recording session in mind.

England’s Carol #1 is the first of a set of variation that Lewis hopes to work out on this familiar Christmas carol.

“I’ve been thinking about this piece all my life,” Lewis says. “It’s a very good piece. I like the melodic line. The kind of feeling it has is like When Johnny Comes Marching Home. It has a lift.”

Finally, there are two non-Lewis pieces. George Gershwin‘s Oh Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess is a selection from Porgy and Bess that is almost never heard outside of an actual performance of the show. Originally a waltz, it still suggests its 3/4 origin in this non-waltz version. The Man That Got Away is a rarity – a John Lewis piano solo. It was written by Harold Arlen for whose work Lewis has a special admiration.