Modern Jazz Quartet Essay
The contrapuntal tendency started by the Modern Jazz Quartet, Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck during the 1950s, of creating fully polyphonic jazz did not prospered. With the time it slowly faded away and mainstream jazz remained homophonic in its majority. Perhaps one of the reasons for its disappearance is that in the case of Lewis and Brubeck, they chose baroque counterpoint to exploit it during the twentieth century. There is a clear contradiction in this respect; possibly the only element of modernity in the Modern Jazz Quartet was its name, because they were using one of the oldest music in Western history as a tool for innovation. Maybe Mulligan’s approach could have flourished if it wasn’t because the quartet dismembered after one year,