Billboard : 04/07/1956
Score of 77

Full disks by this tenor sax star are fairly rare, and this excellent sampling of his romping art should find a good, ready clientele. There’s a worthy, swinging rhythm section with Milt Hinton on bass, Gus Johnson on drums and John Williams on piano. Also there’s that stimulating supporting artist, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, who does for Sims what he what he has done for Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan in earlier LPs. There’s a Basie feeling here, and Sims himself is a disciple of both Lester Young and Charlie Parker. A virile, happy package with attractive cover.

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Playboy Magazine : October, 1956

Swingin’ Zoot Sims, who’s managed to retain the benign influences of Prez and Bird, comes on real strong in The Modern Art of Jazz (Dawn 1102), a collection of standards and new compositions in which he’s given a hefty assist by, among others, Bob Brookmeyer.. Side One gives a quick-tempo treatment to September in the Rain and the other three selections: the virtuosity and the modernity here are unimpeachable, but to our thinking the velocity sometimes exceeds the felicity. This is definitely true of the way Them There Eyes is handled on the second side but from there on out to the end it’s as good as you can ask for, sure and solid and impressive. Two of Zoot’s originals we especially like are Dark Cloud and One to Blown On.

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Saturday Review : 05/12/1956
Whitney Balliett

Sims, along with Stan Getz, is the most exciting of the young tenor saxophonists, and when he is really working (One to Blow On), he is irresistible. Bob Brookmeyer is an adept complement here in the linear ensemble weavings, as well as a sound soloist. J. Williams‘ bristly piano, Milt Hinton, and Gus Johnson, who possesses the strength of ten, round out the personnel. Three standards and five originals. Note: There is a sameness of sound, structure, and tempo here that is at times dulling.

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Down Beat : 05/02/1956
Nat Hentoff : 5 stars

Dawn’s second jazz LP is titled The Modern Art of Jazz and even has a backdrop of the Museum of Modern Art on its cover. Inside, there is wonderfully wailing blowing by Zoot, Bob Brookmeyer, John Williams, Milt Hinton, and Osie [s/b Gus] Johnson. The notes accurately sum up the happenings as “freedom, emotion, and swing.”

The LP has Zoot’s best blowing on record yet. Together with his remarkable, Basie-right time, Zoot plays with a warmth that is magnificently open, infectious and room expanding. At the core of Zoot’s excellence as a blowing jazzman is the wail, the cry, that explosion of emotion from as far inside the man as he can go that marks every major jazzman from King Oliver on.

Brookmeyer is also excellent and his somewhat more subdued but no less direct heat is a constantly apt corollary for Zoot. Dig Brookmeyer on the last track, for example. Like Zoot, Bob’s conception is almost always functional rather than rhetorical. The rhythm section is as strong and large-hearted as the hornmen, and there are several stabbing solos by Williams.

The simple, swinging lines for the originals are by Zoot (3), Williams (1) and Johnson-Brookmeyer (1). Dig the lyricism-with-guts of all on Ghost.

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Liner Notes by Nat Shapiro

Not only is jazz The Modern Art, but it is The Young Art as well. Born just a little more than fifty years ago, this unique cultural phenomenon has developed with astonishing speed. Untended, indeed ignored in its infancy and childhood, it had (and still has) a tendency toward rowdiness, an air of mischief and a refreshingly adolescent spirit of revolt. All of these possibly somewhat neurotic elements, however, are not only peculiar to jazz. They have been characteristic of young art and young artists always.

Jazz is The Modern Art because it could only have happened in the 20th century. It could only have came about through the peculiar combination of cultural, sociological and musical forces that met and married in the southern part of the United States at the turn of the century. It sprang forth wholly and healthily from folk sources – and no more secure a background can there be for any art. Jazz was born out of need, as all arts are born. There was both a need and a use for it, both by its creators and its audience. It thrived and continues to thrive for the same reasons.

The development of jazz has been described as being analogous to the birth of modern painting. At just about the same time that the free, new and wonderous sounds were coming form the horns of the New Orleans pioneers, the painters of France were beginning to break away from static traditionalism with spontaneous improvisational vitality.

One other parallel between jazz and modern painting that has been suggested is the fact that both rely upon primitive source material. But – enough of analogies and parallels. They are poor arguments, too easily disputed and more often than not they prove nothing.

Jazz is young and modern and still reaching for maturity. Like the painters, sculptors and “classical” composers of a few decades ago, jazzmen have been searching for and finding new tools and new forms with which to work. And – like all seekers, they meet their quotas of blind-alleys and dead-ends.

But it will find its way. It will find its way because jazz is young, and with youth comes perseverance and vigor. It will find its way so long as its creative minds remember their roots and do not lose their way along the tricky by-paths of form-for-form’s-sake or sound-for-sound’s-sake. Many musicians have already found the key. To express it in words is difficult; to define it is even more so; to feel it is easy. Duke Ellington came closest to words with It Don’t Mean A Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing…

All of this leads us to a young man named John Haley “Zoot” Sims, a swingin’ lad from Inglewood, California. Zoot is one of those modern jazzmen who have found the key. He found it quite early in his career, and critics quickly realized this and singled him out as “a real swingin’ cat.”

Although his first major break-through towards fame came to him as one of the famous “Four Brothers” of Woody Herman‘s Second Herd in 1947, Zoot had been working professionally as a musician since his knee-pants’ days. After a spell on drums in grammar school, he switched to clarinet – and then, at the age of thirteen, started on sax. It wasn’t too long afterwards that the big jobs came – with Bobby Sherwood, then Benny Goodman (with whom he worked on four separate occasions) and Woody Herman. On a trip to Europe with a Goodman group in 1951, Zoot, by then famous for his records with Woody, garnered far more critical attention and praise than did BG.

For the past few years Zoot has been working both on his own and with small combos on both coasts, and most recently he has been working with Gerry Mulligan‘s band. He has, though, “eyes” for his own group – “even a quartet, tenor and rhythm. That’ll be enough for a start.”

Zoot admits to being influenced by the President of All the Tenor Men, Lester Young. “He’s still the daddy,” says Zoot. “Nobody’s got what he’s got.” Prez and, later on, Charlie Parker were the influences on Sims the instrumentalist, but it was the Count Basie band as a unit that has shaped his overall approach to jazz. That mysterious force, the beat… swing, or “time” as Zoot characterizes it, is the key. Not exactly the loquacious type, he has the following to say about “time”:

“I always liked time, but its something you can’t talk about. It’s not more important than anything else, just one of those things you should have. But you should have a wig too, so you can think of nice notes to play.”

Well, Zoot Sims has “time” alright, and as for those nice notes, they’re abundantly evident on this record.

In support of Zoot on these sides is valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, a winner of Down Beat’s New Star award in 1953 and a young man as committed and as dedicated to swinging as is Mr. Sims. Also a confirmed Basie-ite, Bob was born in the Count’s early stamping ground, Kansas City. It was there that he received his musical education, at the Kansas City Conservatory where he played and studied piano, clarinet and trombone. After a term gig in the army, Bob worked, primarily as a pianist, with Ray McKinley, Louis Prima, Claude Thornhill, Jerry Wald and Woody Herman. His most recent jobs have been with (as a trombonist) Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan.

Bob is a modernist with definite convictions about jazz. In a recent interview, he had the following comments to make about the so-called “West Coast School” of jazz: “The music! You sit down and start to play, and you just look at them and try to figure out what they’re doing.”

“It isn’t even close to being right. It isn’t honest. It has no feeling. It isn’t jazz. The only hope at all out there was Zoot… and now he’s here.”

Rounding out our stalwart group of modern artists are John Williams who played, along with Brookmeyer, for Stan Getz; the always dependable (and brilliant) Milt Hinton and, to insure the Basie spirit, former Basie drummer Gus Johnson.

In all, a group of young men who take their music seriously, but not so seriously that they forget its most basic elements. Abstractionism and non-objectivity are great to experiment with… but freedom, emotion and swing are the characteristics in jazz that separate the men from the boys.