The Modern Jazz Quartet: Blues on Bach Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		0.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

The Modern Jazz Quartet: Blues on Bach Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 8, 2025

The kind of ironic thing about the Modern Jazz Quartet, at least for potential younger listeners raised around all sorts of decidedly genre mixing efforts probably arguably more daring than anything the MJQ ever offered, is that the four impeccable musicians in this group just can't help but sound downright old fashioned. That may sound like a slight, but it's actually not, and one might only point out that another "old fashioned" sort is lurking in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of this effort, namely none other than Johann Sebastian Bach. The MJQ made its name at least partly on the strength of its approach to both (perceived) classical repertoire as well as its often striking originals, and there are examples of both on this appealing album. There is a quintet of (ostensible) Bach pieces (one was misattributed to good old Johann), here rearranged in a jazz idiom, as well as four originals which are cheekily given German key names and so echo the way Bach famously spelled his own name in any number of compositions (for the uninitiated, "B" in German musical nomenclature is our key of Bb, and "H" is B).

The album's track list can be seen in the screenshots of the disc menu I've uploaded to accompany this review.

The Modern Jazz Quartet: Blues on Bach Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Once again as with most of the Quadio releases, the video content here is simply the static menu seen in the screenshots I've uploaded to accompany this review. In quasi-Forrest Gump mode, I might jokingly suggest that Rhino releases are like a box of chocolates in that you never know quite what you're going to get in terms of disc authoring and changing audio codecs. This disc is authored so that the colored buttons change codecs, which I prefer, and adding to the positives, the song does not start over when the codec is changed (another weird bugaboo that attends some Rhino audio Blu-rays). As can be seen in the screenshots, the colors of the track names change as you cycle through (compare screenshots 3 and 4).

The Modern Jazz Quartet: Blues on Bach Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Modern Jazz Quartet: Blues on Bach features a nicely immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 4.0 track, though in this particular case it's immersion achieved by often pumping material out of all four channels simultaneously, rather than artful discrete channelization. You can therefore hear, for example, Percy Heath's commanding and almost drone like bass tones coming at you from all angles, and similarly a lot of the keyboard work, whether acoustic piano or harpsichord, can be offered out of all four channels. One thing that may be slightly abrasive, at least for those who have never heard this album before, is what sounds like (and I'm kind of joking here) Connie Kay going ballistic on a mark tree or bell tree or something similar in the tunes culled from Bach. It creates a wash of high frequency sound that you can hear quite clearly on older versions of this album, and which is certainly present on the stereo tracks on this disc, but which really tends to overwhelm things in the four channel version. It almost starts to sound like an alien metallic insect or something like that. There's also some very minor distortion on Milt Jackson's vibes for a couple of fleeting moments.

The Modern Jazz Quartet: Blues on Bach Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

As with every Quadio release I've reviewed, there is no on disc supplemental material. The insert booklet recreates the original album's cover information, while offering the Quadio standbys of a picture of the boxes holding the master tapes, as well as Rhino's typical verbiage on setup.

The Modern Jazz Quartet: Blues on Bach Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

One of the highlights of my college music studies was being invited into a very small master class with Jacques Loussier, whom some may know from his absolutely fantastic career of adapting Bach material into a jazz format. I have to say Maestro Loussier's approach was a good deal more energetic than the largely laid back performances here, but being able to spend time with him as he literally deconstructed Bach compositions before our very eyes (and ears) made me even more aware than I probably already was of the undeniable connections between Bach, who after all was a master improviser, and jazz. Blues on Bach is not really "showy", but it's solid, and the Quadio presentation nicely immersive, with the one potential caveat of the high frequency percussion. Recommended.