FEATURE ARTICLE
For jazzmen Lewis and Marsalis, it's a lifelong affair with Lenox
by Seth Rogovoy(LENOX, Mass., Oct. 10, 1996) -- When John Lewis and Wynton Marsalis take the stage at Tanglewood's Seiji Ozawa Hall on Saturday night at 8:30 in a program called "For The Books: An Evening of Standards to Benefit the Lenox Library," it will mark yet another chapter in a longstanding association for both of them with the town.
Marsalis has frequently performed at Tanglewood over the last decade and a half, in both jazz and classical programs. He also brought his ensemble to the old Berkshire Performing Arts Center a few years ago.
For Lewis, however, the association with Lenox dates back over four decades to the early '50s, when his group, the Modern Jazz Quartet, was first invited to participate in the annual summer clinics, workshops and performances at Music Inn by founders Philip and Stephanie Barber.
The close ties to Lenox shared by Marsalis and Lewis were undoubtedly a factor in their agreeing to appear together in concert in this format for only the second time anywhere. That, and the fact that the request originated with a phone call from Stephanie Barber to Lewis, which he said was all that was needed to get him to come.
"She has done so much for jazz," said Lewis, in a recent phone interview from his home in New York. "She's a wonderful person, remarkably wonderful."
Lewis's association with the Music Inn and the Barbers runs deep. By the mid-'50s, the MJQ, as the Modern Jazz Quartet was commonly known, was in residence as the "house band" at Music Inn, where they spent weeks composing, rehearsing and performing.
"We were invited by the Barbers to come up to be the quartet in residence," said Lewis. "It was a wonderful experience, quite unique. I'd never heard of any other jazz group invited for something like that. It was a usual thing that had been happening for quite some time in classical music, with string quartets, but not in jazz."
The legacy of the group's internship at Music Inn can be heard in two critically-acclaimed albums, "Live At Music Inn," Vols. 1 and 2, recorded there in 1956 and 1958, the first with Jimmy Giuffre and the second with Sonny Rollins.
In addition, Lewis served as the director of the Lenox School of Jazz, the first school of its kind to pair aspiring jazz musicians with a faculty comprised of veteran players. Housed at Music Inn from 1957 to 1960, the faculty included the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Oscar Peterson, and the students included Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Arif Mardin.
The School of Jazz was a groundbreaking experiment, and although it lasted only a short time, its impact was felt far beyond the confines of Music Inn, according to Lewis.
"Since then, jazz has been incorporated into a great many academic institutions," said Lewis, who has variously taught music at City College of New York and Harvard University.
If Lenox has been sort of a home away from home for Lewis all these years, it is one far from his native home in Albuquerque, N.M., where he was raised by an aunt after his mother, a classically-trained amateur singer, died when he was four.
Even after his mother died, Lewis was surrounded by music. "I had an enormously supportive grandmother and great-grandmother, and they liked music," he said. "And also I had my cousins. My mother's first cousins were all extremely musical. And there were a lot of them, seven or eight. And with them we used to make music together, play together. And also one of that same family of cousins was my first music teacher. She was a piano teacher in the public school."
Lewis began taking private piano lessons at age seven, and although he majored in music at the University of New Mexico, he also majored in anthropology. It was the latter area which Lewis intended to make a career of after school.
The intervention of World War II and the influence of drummer Kenny Clarke, whom he met in the armed forces, conspired to turn Lewis away from anthropology and toward music when he got out of the service in 1945. In New York, Lewis worked in Dizzy Gillespie's big band as a pianist and an arranger. He also accompanied Charlie Parker, and he was a member of Miles Davis's nonet during the historic "Birth of the Cool" sessions in 1948-49.
In 1951, Lewis joined the Milt Jackson Quartet, which essentially consisted of the rhythm section from Gillespie's band, which in addition to Lewis and vibraphonist Jackson included drummer Kenny Clarke and bassist Ray Brown.
The next year, Lewis took over the group's reins, replacing Brown with Percy Heath and renaming it the Modern Jazz Quartet. Connie Kaye soon replaced Clarke, and it was with that lineup that the group was to establish its reputation as one of the most artistically innovative and commercially successful ensembles over the course of the next 40 years.
Jazz historian Francis Davis once wrote, "With the advent of bop, the soloist reigned supreme, and the ensemble had some catching up to do. John Lewis was one of the musicians who consciously or unconsciously set out to restore the balance."
Lewis says he was indeed very conscious of what he was doing when he adopted classical European forms and structures into his jazz repertoire. "It was conscious," he said. "I was very conscious of what I was doing. But it wasn't my goal. My goal was to make music I wanted to hear."
These days, the Modern Jazz Quartet is "semi-retired," according to Lewis. After Connie Kaye passed away last year, Percy Heath's brother Albert joined the group, which plays a few times a year. In the meantime, Lewis keeps busy with a number of his own projects. He is too busy to teach, but lately he has been working with various sinfoniettas, one based in Bellingham, Wash., and the other at the Manhattan School of Music in New York.
Lewis's services in concert are still much in demand throughout the world. Only this past summer he was in Lenox to perform at the town hall in a program that was broadcast via the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) to England. And later this month he will spend two weeks in Switzerland, where he will perform with a trio of European musicians.
As for his budding career as a duet partner with Wynton Marsalis, the foremost composer, trumpeter and bandleader of his generation, this weekend's performance marks their second such outing. "It will be mostly standards, just the two of us," he said. "We haven't decided which ones yet. We will rehearse, however. You rehearse for everything."
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Oct. 10, 1996. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1996. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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