John Lewis

John Lewis

John Lewis is an American jazz pianist, composer and arranger from La Grange, Illinois, born in 1920 and dying in 2001. He is best known as the musical director and pianist of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and his work also connects him with the Miles Davis Nonet, Miles Davis All Stars, Miles Davis Quartet, the John Lewis Group, and Miles Davis and His Band.

Early life and training

Lewis is raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after being born in La Grange. He begins learning classical music and piano at seven. His family is musical and has a family band, which gives him regular performance experience, and he also plays in a Boy Scout music group. Although his early piano study is based in classical repertoire, he hears jazz from a young age through his aunt, who loves to dance and plays jazz records at home.

He studies at the University of New Mexico, where he forms and leads a small dance band and double majors in anthropology and music. He later decides not to continue with anthropology after being told that work in that field does not pay well. In 1942 he enters the army and plays piano with Kenny Clarke, whose influence helps lead him to New York after military service.

New York years and bebop work

Lewis moves to New York in 1945 to continue his musical studies at the Manhattan School of Music, where he eventually receives a master’s degree in music in 1953. In New York his focus shifts more towards jazz, though he continues to play and listen to classical music by composers such as Chopin, Bach and Beethoven.

He and Kenny Clarke audition for Dizzy Gillespie’s bop big band with Lewis’s tune “Bright Lights”, which is later renamed “Two Bass Hit” and becomes a success. Lewis composes, arranges and plays piano for Gillespie’s band from 1945 to 1948, including after the band’s European tour. After leaving the band, he works independently and accompanies Charlie Parker, appearing on recordings such as “Parker’s Mood” and “Blues for Alice”. He also works with Lester Young, Ella Fitzgerald and Illinois Jacquet.

Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quartet

Lewis takes part in Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool sessions and joins Davis’s nonet from 1948 to 1949. He is regarded as one of the most productive arrangers for the 1949 Miles Davis Nonet and arranges “S’il Vous Plait”, “Rouge”, “Move” and “Budo” for the Birth of the Cool material. He also plays in the Miles Davis Quartet and Miles Davis All Stars.

Lewis, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, drummer Clarke and bassist Ray Brown first work as a small unit within Gillespie’s band. The group eventually becomes a full-time quartet, first called the Milt Jackson Quartet in 1951 and renamed the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1952. Lewis acts as musical director from the beginning, even though the group presents itself as leaderless.

With the Modern Jazz Quartet, Lewis helps develop a polished chamber-jazz style that balances improvisation with carefully arranged sections. His compositions bring classical elements into jazz and help define the quartet’s sound. The group’s line-up around Lewis includes Milt Jackson, Kenny Clarke and Ray Brown, and Lewis remains with the quartet as writer and performer from 1952 to 1974. His writing contributes to the group’s international reputation for making jazz sophisticated without losing swing.

Compositional style and wider work

Lewis’s compositions for the Modern Jazz Quartet are linked to a neoclassical approach that combines bebop with dynamic shading, dramatic pauses, fugue, counterpoint and other European classical techniques. His music often uses simple motifs, few chord changes and a strong sense of structure. He also composes for string orchestra in some works, and his pieces are associated with Third Stream music, which brings together classical and jazz traditions.

He forms the Jazz and Classical Music Society in 1955, presenting concerts at Town Hall in New York City that support the development of classically influenced jazz. He also forms Orchestra U.S.A., a cooperative big band that performs and records Third Stream compositions from 1962 to 1965. In addition, he is commissioned to write the score for the film Sait-On Jamais.

Teaching, festivals and later career

From 1957 to 1960 Lewis is head of faculty for the summer sessions at the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts. From 1958 to 1983 he serves as director of the Monterey Jazz Festival in California and also works there as musical consultant. After the Modern Jazz Quartet disbands in 1974, he teaches at the City College of New York and Harvard University.

He travels to Japan, where CBS commissions his first solo piano album. In Japan he also works with Hank Jones and Marian McPartland, including piano recitals. The Modern Jazz Quartet reforms for a tour of Japan and the United States in 1981, and Lewis later forms and plays in the John Lewis Group, a sextet.

In 1985 he helps form the American Jazz Orchestra with Gary Giddins and Roberta Swann. He continues teaching jazz piano throughout his career, with an approach that requires students to be fluent in the blues, a ballad and a piece that moves.

Final years and influence

During the 1990s Lewis takes part in the Re-birth of the Cool sessions with Gerry Mulligan and in The Birth of the Third Stream with Gunther Schuller, Charles Mingus and George Russell. His final albums for Atlantic Records are Evolution and Evolution II, and he continues to perform sporadically with the Modern Jazz Quartet until Milt Jackson’s death in 1999. He gives a final concert at Lincoln Center in New York, presenting music that ranges from solo piano to big-band repertoire.

Lewis’s playing is associated with a controlled, understated bebop style, shaped by classical training, Count Basie’s arranging and band discipline, and the improvisations of Lester Young, Earl Hines and later pianists such as Art Tatum, Hank Jones and Oscar Peterson. His approach to piano, composition and accompaniment is marked by quietness, clarity and attention to detail, and he becomes closely linked with a refined, modernised Basie-like style within jazz.