Lee Konitz the Accidental Bebopper
A Living Legend Discusses Jazz Styles and his Contemporaries
A sax man who played with everyone who was anyone during jazz's golden age discusses playing styles and contemporaries Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy Giliepie.
The most quoted statement about Lee Konitz comes from Bird–the jazz immortal Charlie Parker–a friend and contemporary who called him the only alto player of the bebop era who didn’t try to copy him. If Parker single-handedly popularized the alto sax after the tsunami of tenor players who wanted to be like “the Pres”, Lester Young, Konitz has helped keep the alto traditon alive and well though the decades. He was present at the inception of cool jazz and free jazz as well as bebop, and not merely present; he has has always been influential.
Konitz embodies the jazz tradition
Now the post-bop idiom seems best suited to Konitz’s ear for classical jazz styling and delicate, structured ensemble playing. He avoids hard blowing, brash timbres and frenetic flurries of notes while still embodying the whole of jazz tradition, in which he has played an vital role.
Interviewing Lee Konitz is like spending a pleasant hour with a chance acquaintance in a congenial bar, but recounting what was told is more complicated as he tends to answer questions pertinently with just three or four words, a myopic blink, an understated shrug, a milimetrically raised eyebrow and pregnant pauses. Without the context, what has been so economically intimated needs more lengthy explanation, so let’s just go straight to the anecdotes.
"Did Bitch's Brew nearly ruin jazz?" "I haven't heard it."
Did Bird ever relax? "He wanted to; that's why he took a lot of things." I mention that Konitz's melodic solo on the tune Disk Jockey Jump, recorded with Gerry Mulligan around 1958, sounds at first like Bird, but Bird on Valium. "It's hard to avoid being influenced by the master", Konitz allows apologetically, but he is not so sure about playing on the cut. "I don't think I'm on that one. It was a bunch of guys with Gene Krupa."
When shown the album Gerry Mulligan/Lee Konitz Revelation with liner notes crediting him with first solo, Konitz remarks, "Oh, looks like I was on it. I don't have that record. Ornette Coleman has just told me a couple of times that he liked that solo. I must listen to it. I think Zoot Sims plays alto on that. And it was the first time I heard him play alto." (Tenor players more often switch to soprano.) A near comparison to this solo is Bird's playing on the album Relaxin' at Camarillo, entitled with very heavy irony, but nontheless revealing more relaxed playing.
Tell me about the tune Relaxin' with Lee. (Similarly entitled, but not recorded on the album cited above) "There were a lot of Lees around then." He names several. "Everybody talks about it. It's never been proved that the title refers to me."
Did Bitch's Brew nearly ruin jazz? (Miles Davis’s first foray into “Jazz Rock”) [Silence] … "I haven't heard it, or In a Silent Way. Of course I know what's on them. I must listen to them one day." Despite Konitz´s own brief incursions into free jazz and avante garde jazz, he remains profoundly unimpressed by the unstructured meanderings and musings that characterize Miles’s Silent Way period.
"All that clowning. I could never stand it."
Discussing jazz styles, Konitz uses the word theatrical a dozen times, untypical verbosity for him. It defines what he doesn't like. Dizzy Gillespie is an example. "All that clowning. I could never stand it." His arm gestures become for once unrestrained; his facial expression speaks volumes. Imagine a restaurant diner seeing a fetus on a plate.
Konitz's modesty is excessive but genuine. When asked about the intimate club venue for his upcoming gig at the Barcelona Jazz Festival, he responds, "Oh, two hundred people is plenty for me. I'm happy to play for two hundred. Pat Methany plays for thousands, not me." Likewise, he tut-tuts about his presence on the seminal Miles Davis album Birth of the Cool, for which he is best remembered by many jazz fans. He never had much to do with Miles, he says, he just happened to show up. Like with the birth of bebop. He just happened to be there.
A version of this interview was published in the Barclona weekly newspaper Catalonia Today.
