'Three Windows' marks the Modern Jazz Quartet's return to Atlantic and its reunion with Nesuhi Ertegun, who produced most of the albums recorded by the MJQ for that label between 1956 and 1974. For the occasion, John Lewis – the quartet's pianist and music director – has opened up several of his compositions to accommodate the nineteenpiece New York Chamber Symphony.

The vintage works to which Lewis has added strings include the venerable "Django," which the MJQ introduced in 1954, and the album's title track, a triple fugue debuted as part of Lewis's score to Roger Vadim's 1957 film No Sun in Venice. More recent compositions are "Kansas City Breaks" and "A Day in Dubrovnik," both of which Lewis has recorded in various settings – although never before with the MJQ. Even "Encounter in Cagnes," the album's one première, sounds vaguely familiar, borrowing its major strain from "Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West," an insinuating Lewis blues piece from the 1950s.

Granted, a composer has the right to tinker with his works, no matter the consternation it might cause his critics. But Lewis's greatest asset as a composer has always been his modest sense of proportion, and in enlarging the works on Three Windows, he's sacrificed some of the intimacy that made them so appealing.

The one significant exception is "A Day in Dubrovnik," an evocative three-part work that gives the illusion of having been conceived as a discourse between the MJQ and the chamber group. The lengthy second movement, with its magisterial, Vivaldi-like violin sweeps, counts as one of Lewis's most fruitful efforts in writing for classical instrumentation. But the opening and closing movements also boast their share of felicities: call and response with the strings; tension-gathering rubatos and stop times; dovetailing thematic improvisations by Lewis and vibraphonist Milt Jackson; and the usual selfless teamwork from bassist Percy Heath and drummer Connie Kay. "A Day in Dubrovnik" is a masterpiece of its kind, as blissful a marriage of jazz and classical music as the MJQ has ever achieved – which is high praise indeed. (RS 509)

FRANCIS DAVIS