John Lewis BBC Music Jazz Pianist of Dizzy Gillespie Hand Signed Letter

CHAU4779 A rare opportunity to secure the autograph of famous jazz composer and musician John Lewis (part of Dizzy Gillespie's Big Band) on this antique 1946 letter specially typed sent on headed BBC paper with fascinating content which I invite you to enlarge and read.  It is personally written typed and hand signed by John Lewis and bar one light fold where originally posted is absolutely mint condition. Please see all our historic BBC musicians, orchestra leaders and composers secured from this same BBC collection at our store.

Pianist and composer. With his light, classically inspired touch at the keyboard, and his compositions that explore counterpoint and polyphony, it is fitting that John Lewis did more than most to bring jazz into the concert hall. Pieces such as Vendome and Versailles explore his interests in classical forms, and his composition Django reveals his gift for melody

As musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, he was a figurehead of the movement to get jazz out of the low dives of its origins and onto the tuxedo-clad concert stage. He also explored the junctions between classical music and jazz, in the so-called 'Third-stream' compositions played by his Orchestra USA in the 1960s and the American Jazz Orchestra of the 1980s. Nevertheless, Lewis had impeccable jazz credentials.

He came out of the US army to play on 52nd Street in 1945, and soon afterwards joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band, with which he toured and arranged until 1948. The band's rhythm section formed the nucleus of the Modern Jazz Quartet, but before that group was launched in its own right in 1952, Lewis had been a member of Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool nonet, and also of Charlie Parker's quintet.