Pyramid (1960)
6 tracks, 37 minutes
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I bought this album in a jazz frenzy at the very beginning of my first year of university. Just around the corner from the campus was a record shop that had some mad deal on classic jazz CDs – something like three for £10. I would go in there and come out with armsful of them, stocking up on all the greats that were so far unrepresented in my record collection – Ornette, Mingus, Paul Chambers, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum, all sorts. A group that I especially stocked up on was the Modern Jazz Quartet. Pyramid was the first album of theirs that I got.
Right from the first track, ‘Vendome’, I knew this was different from the jazz I’d encountered before, even the stuff from the same era. To me, it sounded just like Bach, but jazz. I knew less about classical music than I do now, and when I played that track for my friend Henry, he said “yeah, of course it sounds like Bach, it’s a fugue!” And of course it is. The piece itself is only very short – less than two and a half minutes – but the main motif that comes back around several times in several different guises is a fugue: a complicated compositional device where one melodic line is repeated across several instruments, offset from each other and in different keys; Bach is probably the undisputed master of the fugue (here’s one of my favourite examples). The Modern Jazz Quartet take that form and mix it up with post-bop improvisation and a shuffling rhythm and make it something completely new.
Although the MJQ were most definitely part of that exciting and fruitful hard-bop/post-bop scene of the late 50s and 60s, they were somewhat different. Each of the musicians – Milt ‘Bags’ Jackson on vibraphone, John Lewis on piano, Percy Heath on bass and Connie Kay on drums – had bona fide jazz chops and each performed regularly with other groups and musicians, but as the MJQ, classical was much higher on the menu. Just on Pyramid, there are clear influences from the likes of Bach all the way to Satie in their version of Jim Hall’s ‘Romaine’. They were probably the most well-known artists of the so-called ‘third stream’, which attempted to find a middle ground between jazz and classical, resulting in a music that is at once both and neither. Even their name signals that they were something different: this was a time when small-band jazz records and concerts were billed as the lead soloist only, or as the soloist’s trio/quartet/quintet/whatever. That MJQ purposely chose an anonymising name shows the equality of their set-up. No one musician was the leader, each made an equal contribution to the sound, the performance and the well-running of the group itself.
When it comes from an era of intense musical productivity and innovation, it’s really cool to hear a group that remained true to that scene while taking things off at a right angle in terms of musical approach and band organisation. It also allows their sound to remain fresh and interesting after all this time, especially when you’re listening to a whole load of other stuff from that era at the same time – I picked up this album at just the right time. Pyramid is a great introduction to the band’s sound; give it a listen and get hooked just like I did!
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