Modern jazz painters

"The Lacemaker"
originally uploaded by mrgreg.

Whenever I'm in Paris, which is as often as possible, I visit the Louvre and whenever I visit the Louvre I always spend some time in front of Vermeer's painting "The Lacemaker." It's a simple painting, a lone woman in a yellow dress bent over a small table making lace, as the title implies. But I have been drawn to it since the first time I saw it. In part, that's because I find Vermeer himself interesting, a bit of a mystery man, who left behind fewer than 40 paintings, most of them with subjects as common as "The Lacemaker" and as brilliant.

But last time, I finally decided that what really attracted me to the painting was Vermeer's subtle yet affective use of color, the yellow in the lacemaker's dress, the shades of blue and gold in the material she's working with, a swatch of red.

I thought of this the other day as I listened again to my favorite Modern Jazz Quartet CD set, the two-disk "Dedicated to Connie," Atlantic, which captures a concert at Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1960. Like Vermeer, it seems to me, the genius of the MJQ was the subtle use of musical color to render a book mostly made up of standards differently without going to extremes like, say, Paul Smoker and his mates on "Standard Deviation," which I happen to like as well, and without any horns to augment their palette.

Take the medley that opens the first CD, which includes pieces of "The Little Comedy" and "Fontessa," among other well-known tunes, colored with "Pop Goes the Weasel" and "My Old Kentucky Home" quotes, the blues, classical undertones, stride, avant-garde snatches and an unusual cymbal solo by Connie Kay. Also note the stop-and-go version of "'Round Midnight" and the way they come at "I Should Care" from different angles using similar tempo shifts and stutters. They essentially turn "I Remember Clifford" inside out, reversing fast and slow interludes and places where it swings and where it is melancholy. In none of these examples are the individual effects blatant or jarring, but the total effect can be captivating ... like a Vermeer painting.