The Modern Jazz Sextet The Modern Jazz Sextet The Modern Jazz Sextet is a jazz album featuring the combined talents of Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, John Lewis, Percy Heath, Skeeter Best and Charlie Persip. The album was conceived by producer Norman Granz for his own label, Norgran Records. Although no single album artist is credited as a bandleader for this album, Verve Records - which owns the Norgran catalogue - files it as a Dizzy Gillespie album. Two of the album's rhythm section - Lewis and Heath - also feature in the 1952-founded Modern Jazz Quartet. Allmusic gives the album 4 stars stating "it
John Coltrane played together occasionally in the late 1940s. He was a member of groups led by Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and Johnny Hodges in the early to mid-1950s. In the summer of 1955, Coltrane was freelancing in Philadelphia while studying with guitarist Dennis Sandole when he received a call from Davis. The trumpeter, whose success during the late forties had been followed by several years of decline in activity and reputation, due in part to his struggles with heroin, was again active and about to form a quintet. Coltrane was with this edition of the Davis band (known as the "First