Then I heard some record he made with members of the Teddy Hill band, Including a duet with Bill Coleman that was unbelievable.
[2] The entry for "django" in the original edition of the Real Book only contained the chord changes for this theme.
[2][3][4] It was one of the Modern Jazz Quartet's signature compositions, with the group's bassist Percy Heath recalling that "If we didn't play 'Django' in a concert, we risked getting stoned.
"[5][6] Miles Davis described "Django" as one of the best compositions ever, and in their book Clawing at the Limits of Cool, Salim Washington and Farah Griffin said, "It is almost like a poem in its economy and poignancy.
Here all the elements of Lewis's skill and the MJQ's interpretive power are as one: the evocative Gypsy feeling in the main theme, recalling the Adagio of Mendelssohn's Octet; the eloquently stout bass motif; the congruence of delicacy and force, discipline and spontaneity, tragedy and joy.
Lewis and Gunther Schuller arranged the album The Modern Jazz Society Presents a Concert of Contemporary Music (1955), on which "Django" appears, and Schuller's 1961 album Jazz Abstractions contains three variations on "Django".