In 1976 the Modern Jazz Quartet was two years into what would become a seven-year hiatus when the group's outstanding vibist, Milt Jackson, took an all-star quintet to Japan. Jackson (1923-1999), a perennial poll-winner who was most responsible for injecting blues-drenched jazz feeling into the MJQ's formalistic arrangements, was utterly at home leading his colleagues in a program that heavily featured some of jazz's Greatest Hits of the 1950s and '60s (like "Birks' Works," which Jackson helped introduce on the 1951 recording by its composer, trumpet great Dizzy Gillespie). All of the material herein elicits first-rate performances by the leader (whose solos proceed as naturally as water in a stream over sun-dappled rocks), the undervalued tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards, pianist Cedar Walton (composer of the bouncing "Bolivia," heard herein), and one of the most buoyantly swinging of all bass-drums teams, Ray Brown and Billy Higgins.

with Ray Brown, Teddy Edwards, Cedar Walton, Billy Higgins