Blues on Bach

[Note: This product is an authorized CD-R and is manufactured on demand] MODERN JAZZ QUARTETIn the MJQ’s early years, critics often found something incompatible between John Lewis’s European classical leanings, particularly the baroque, and Milt Jackson’s unfettered gifts improvising over bop-blues changes. This 1973 date is structured by that dichotomy, alternating between Lewis’s compositions (based on some of Bach’s best-known melodies) and a series of original blues, the first three by Lewis, the last by Jackson. Lewis emphasizes the contrast by playing harpsichord on the Bach tunes. His treatment of Bach can drift toward the merely pretty, as in his handling of “Sleepers Awake,” but there’s a genuine beauty in “Don’t Stop This Train” and “Tears from the Children,” based on Bach keyboard works. Jackson’s fluent solos on the blues are a continuing delight, while Lewis demonstrates once again that he, too, is a musician imbued with the same roots, inserting a telling variation on “St. James Infirmary” into “Blues in A Minor.”–Stuart Broomer