The Modern Jazz Quartet Plays One Never Knows

The Rose Truc

The Modern Jazz Quartet Plays One Never Knows

Original Film Score for No Sun In Venice by John Lewis

Recording Engineer: Tom Dowd

Cover Design: Narvin Israel

Supervision: Nesubi Ertegun

Atlantic 1284

1958

The Modern Jazz Quartet is composed of John Lewis, piano; Milt Jackson, vibraharp; Percy Heath, bass and Connie Kay, drums.

The music on this LP was especially written  by John Lewis for the film No Sun In Venice, produced by Raoul Levy, directed by Roger Vadim and featuring Francoise Arnoul, Christian Marquand, Robert Hossein and O. E. Hasse (A Kingsley International release in CinemaScope and Eastmancolor).

The Cover Painting, "View Of The Grand Canal", is one of a famous series of Venetian scenes painted by the great English artist J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851). From his first visit in 1832 to this city suspended between sea and sky, until his death, Venice remained one of Turner's most important subjects. Its mists rising from the water, its light striking down in rose and gold and reflected back from the canals, its lively humanity fascinated Turner as almost nothing else in his experience. His paintings strongly influenced the Impressionist and a considerable body of modern art.

This painting is reproduced by permission of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From the back cover: In December 1956 the globe-trotting Modern Jazz Quartet found itself in Paris. Among the enthusiastic Parisians who flocked to St. Germanin-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 sound track.

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 the drama or film calls for jazz, but rarely in the more universal way apart from the explicit jazz context. Here it has to be able to run the whole gamut of emotions and carry the story from beginning to end."

The Golden Striker

One Never Knows

The Rose Truc

Cortege

Venice

Three Windows