Five-Star Collection... The Modern Jazz Quartet

The Modern Jazz Quartet

Plays

One Never Knows

Original Film Score for No Sun In Venice by John Lewis

In December 1956 the globe-trotting Modern Jazz Quartet found itself in Paris. Among the enthusiastic Parisians who flocked to St. Germain-des-Pres to hear the group was Raoul Levy, producer of the film And God Created Woman and other international cinema hits. Levy did not come over to the Left Bank merely to spend a pleasant evening digging jazz sounds, but to make John Lewis a business proposition. He was about to produce Sait-On Jamais, a film to star Francoise Arnoul, and wanted to know whether John would be free to write the background music and whether it would be possible to use The Modern Jazz Quartet to make the soundtrack.

John consented to write the score and worked on it assiduously during his scanty leisure hours while he and the Quartet were touring the United States in the first months of 1957. Despite the fact that some of the music was written in Los Angeles, some in Chicago, some of it in New York, the score has structural unity and a high degree of internal organization. It was John Lewis' first film score and represented a special challenge. As he put it, "Jazz is often thought to be limited in expression. It is used for 'incidental music' or when a situation in a drama or film calls for jazz, but rarely in a more universal way apart from an explicit jazz context. Here it has to be able to run the whole gamut of emotions and carry the story from beginning to end". *Gary Kramer (from the liner notes)*

This is the music composed for the sound track of a confused and trashy little French sex-pot movie, Sait-on Jamais (One Never Knows, but called No Sun In Venice by the American distributors) and even with its faults, it represents an achievement in several respects.

The role of sound-track music is, of course, entirely functional. Its basic purpose is to complement the film, comment on its action and mood, and (at base) keep the audience from becoming distracted. The moment the usual film score begins to draw attention to itself, it fails. Despite the fact that in the film one hears only what is in effect snippets of the total score, I think most of it can stand (like Virgil Thompson's The Plow That Broke the Plains, Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky, and, perhaps, Aaron Copland's Of Mice And Men) as exceptional, as a film score that ingeniously manages to be both effective in context and strong enough to stand on its own.

Second, it is now evident that the quartet has so thoroughly assimilated and transformed the 18th century fugal form that we can no longer speak of a pastiche, a novelty, or a toy, but, in its case, of a jazz-fugue. And perhaps that means a new kind of specifically jazz polyphony, such as is heard here on The Rose Truc (a blues, despite what the liner says), something Lewis and Jackson do so excitingly, may be now developed.

The two fugues (Striker and the triple fugue Windows) dramatize the fact that the rhythmic disunity heard on the quartet’s previous release is not a fact but, in retrospect, seems a flaw in engineering. Connie Kay's work is almost unbelievably integrated. He is magnificent on Striker and almost manages to overcome the parts handed to him on Windows, which did not work out as intended but became monotonous.

Knows is a lovely melody and shows again how much Lewis can make out of the simplest materials, but the performance explores it little, using it almost as a vehicle for dynamics and tone-colors. The same sort of thing happens on Cortege, which is rescued a bit too late from its lushness and returned to it too soon. At this point in its career, the quartet still seems to find it necessary to treat such exhibitions as if they were ends in themselves—which they are not. Cortege begs comparison to Django, and Django succeeds by an opening and closing condensation of theme-statement and melodic exploration where Cortege fails. Venice is another simple melody which a solo by Jackson rescues from a certain cocktail-ish impressionism; Lewis' solo therein is not up to the level of passion understatedly achieved on his recent The Bad and the Beautiful.

Finally, the recording preserves a better performance of the score than any of several recent "in person" ones that I have heard. *Martin Williams (Down Beat, July 10, 1958 [5 stars])*

1 - The Golden Striker

2 - One Never Knows

3 - The Rose Truc

4 - Cortege

5 - Venice

6 - Three Windows

(All compositions by John Lewis)

Milt Jackson (vibes), John Lewis (piano),

Percy Heath (bass), Connie Kay (drums, percussion).

Note: Connie Kay's use of triangles, finger cymbals, tambourines,

open high hats and mallets on cymbals to create gong-like effects.

Recorded in New York City, April 4, 1957