This one came out of a Goodwill haul. I picked up a lot of used records, most of it the usual thrift store stuff you flip past without slowing down, and sitting in the middle of the stack was this. The Modern Jazz Quartet. Patterns. United Artists UAL 4072, the mono pressing with the High Fidelity banner across the top of the jacket. Records like this are the whole reason you buy the lot.
Here is the fun part. Patterns is not really called Patterns. The album first came out in 1959 as Music from Odds Against Tomorrow. United Artists put it back in stores in 1960 with a new cover and the Patterns title. Same record, same music, different clothes. So the copy in my hands is the reissue, and the reissue is its own little piece of label history.
The backstory is a movie. Odds Against Tomorrow was a 1959 heist picture directed by Robert Wise, with Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan. John Lewis, the piano player and musical brain of the Modern Jazz Quartet, wrote the score. United Artists had started a record label a couple of years earlier mostly to put out music from its own films, and this album landed there.
What the record actually is: the quartet playing music from that score as a jazz album. They cut it on October 9 and 10, 1959, at Olmsted Sound Studios in New York. Milt Jackson on vibes, John Lewis on piano, Percy Heath on bass, Connie Kay on drums. The classic MJQ lineup, nobody else in the room.
One heads up if you go looking for this. John Lewis also made a separate soundtrack album from the same movie with a full orchestra, released the same year. Two different records from one film. The one I found is the quartet version, just the four of them, and that is the one you want for listening rather than collecting movie music.
The music is after dark stuff. It came from a film noir and it sounds like it. Skating in Central Park is the famous piece, and it is really pretty, Lewis and Jackson circling each other like the title says. A Cold Wind Is Blowing is the long one and the darkest thing here. The whole record runs around half an hour and never raises its voice.
That is the test for any soundtrack record and this one passes. You do not need to have seen the film. It plays like a moody MJQ session that happens to have a plot somewhere behind it.
If you know the MJQ, you know the deal. Chamber jazz, quiet, controlled, everybody in a suit. Some people hear that and check out. Give it a real listen though and it swings the whole time, it just refuses to sweat while doing it. Milt Jackson is the reason it never gets too polite. Every time the arrangements start feeling like homework, he leans into the blues and pulls the whole thing back to earth.
On the turntable the mono does what mono from that era does. Everything sits together in one solid block of sound, vibes shimmering right on top of the piano. It sounds amazing for a record that spent who knows how long in a donation bin.
I will be straight about where this sits. It is not the first Modern Jazz Quartet record I would hand somebody. But as a thrift find it is about perfect. A real pressing from 1960, a movie score with a story attached, and a band that never made a sloppy record. For the price of a coffee, in a box of somebody's castoffs. That is the hobby, right there.
Flip through the bins. Buy the lot. Sometimes the lot pays you back.