Nothing really seems to matter to Lee Konitz except his ageless, cliché-loathing urge to mine new beauty.
For even as distinguished a venue as New Haven’s Firehouse 12, presenting the iconic, brilliant, forever bold 87-year-old alto saxophonist/composer Lee Konitz in separate shows at 8:30 and 10:00 pm on Friday, December 12, is a real coup.
Without doubt, this is a classy way for Firehouse 12 to ring down the curtain on its successful 2014 Fall Jazz Season with this genuinely grand finale featuring an artist who has been the embodiment of independence, integrity and originality for, incredibly, nearly seven decades. Not only do the Konitz performances bring even more credit to Firehouse 12 itself, but they also give fans in the region a chance to both hear and celebrate this legendary figure, who, although just three years shy of nonagenarian status, still seeks and discovers inventive ways to express startlingly original ideas, still choosing to take the road less traveled.
Konitz collaborates with the celebrated pianist/arranger Alan Broadbent, bassist Jeremy Stratton and the noted cutting-edge drummer George Schuller, a Firehouse 12 favorite.
A key figure in the cool jazz movement in the 1940s ’50s, Konitz, with apprenticeships with the proto-cool Claude Thornhill and progressively powerhouse Stan Kenton orchestras, became indelibly famous early on in his career for his work with the innovative pianist/composer/theoretician Lennie Tristano and with Miles Davis, most famously on the trumpeter’s classic recording, Birth of the Cool.
As a true American original, the high-flying Konitz defied and still defies being defined and confined in any convenient, claustrophobically conventional critical category, even within the promiscuously all-embracing term “cool.” Yes, the long, linear lines of his streaming solos are etched with marvelously edgy, acerbic dramas, every bit as cool and ironic as James Dean. But, uniquely, Konitz’s coolness crackles with a distinctive energy, directness, clarity and an electrifying sense of revelation and celebration of beauty that any writer, painter or poet, cool or uncool, hip or square, mainstream or avant-garde, might well envy.
In the wake of the bebop revolution in the 1940s alto saxophonistCharlie Parker, a jazz genius and the Pablo Picasso of the rising modernism, was the dominant, virtually universal influence on legions of all sorts of improvising instrumentalists. Especially so, of course, on generations of alto saxophonists. Bird was the word, but not necessarily the alpha and the omega for Konitz. Instead, he forged his own creative sound and style that, even beyond his landmark associations with Tristano (including the first two free improvisations ever documented on recordings) and with Davis, just kept evolving, impervious to trends and now apparently even resistant to age.
While he’s always kept his ears and mind wide-open to the creative winds of change, all sorts of pop and cultural trends and commercial ends have come and gone, having about as much influence on his artistry as similar forces had on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, another American original. Although it’s not particularly a sign of 1950s cool, this rugged individualist seems most at home in a collaborative mode, even now in his patriarchal years sharing his gift with a dizzying range of stylists of every school, even musicians who are young enough to be his grandchildren, even his great-grandchildren, as was the case with his recording with the wunderkind alto saxophonist, Grace Kelly.
Styles, age, fads, passing fancies…nothing really seems to matter to Konitz except his ageless, cliché-loathing urge to mine new beauty, whether it lurks under the surface of canonic pop standards like “Body and Soul,” inside tireless bebop warhorses like “Billie’s Bounce” or enseamed in the melodic lodes cached in his own original compositions, including his famous, punningly titled tune, “Subconscious Lee.”
Two recent releases serve as bookends of sorts for Konitz’s legendary career: Lennie Tristano, Chicago, April 1951 (Uptown Records), and First Meeting: Live in London Volume 1, a 2010 session in a Soho jazz spa (Whirlwind Recordings).
Resurrected from long-neglected masters, the previously unreleased 14 tracks on Uptown’s two-cd package were originally taped by the owner of Chicago’s Blue Note Jazz Club during a week-long stint there by Tristano leading his sextet featuring his two premier collaborators, Konitz and tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh.
Also in the front line is the once famously fluent slide trombonist Willie Dennis, a Tristano student who later worked withCharles Mingus,Benny Goodmanand J. J. Johnson’s and Kai Winding’s four trombone band. Dennis, who was married to the singer Morgana King, died in a car crash in New York City in 1965, and has since been pretty much relegated to footnote status, despite the acclaim he once enjoyed for his proficiency.
So the focus here on these digitally restored tracks is the mercurial interaction among Tristano, the iconoclastic, blind pianist, prophet and pedagogue, and his two greatest disciples, Konitz and Marsh. Two saxophone soul mates -- Konitz on alto, Marsh on tenor -- thrived on risk-taking, contrapuntal conversations, and a swinging, cerebral, intensely emotional eloquence.
Along with free-wheeling interpretations of evergreens like “All The Things You Are” and “Pennies from Heaven,” the three modern masters are at their interweaving and witty, conversational best improvising on their original pieces based on the chord changes to standards, including such modern, streamlined designs as Konitz’s “Tautology,” based on the tune “Idaho,” or his “Palo Alto,” based on “Strike Up the Band.”
Right from the first track, “Sound Lee,” which was inspired, appropriately enough, by the changes for “Too Marvelous for Words,” Konitz paints his narrative with his signature extra dry sound, unreeling streaming lines alive with a singing, stinging modern lyrical quality. On “All the Things You Are,” the saxophonist unleashes slashing phrases as lean, mean and clean as the leanest, cleanest, rifle shot of a line that Ernest Hemingway ever wrote. Each spontaneously chosen note falls into exactly the right place at the right time, making each note and then each phrase a telling statement.
Now leap ahead from the Chicago session to six decades later to 2010 and the First Meeting recording in Soho. Here a much older, perhaps more serene sounding but not less creatively and intellectually restless Lee Konitz doubles on alto and soprano in a live matchup with a whole new generation of progressive players, each with avant-garde roots. So here’s the revered Old Master (think Rembrandt or Matisse) in the swift company of rising contemporary artists, Paris-born pianist Dan Tepfer, the then London-based American bassist Michael Janischand drummer Jeff Williams.
Although these four musicians shared past cross-connections, their two live sessions at the famous Pizza Express Jazz Club, a basement supper-club venue in Soho, marked the first time they had all been on the same stage together.
Not only was this their premiere as a unit, but, as the CD’s sleeve notes say, “There was no rehearsal, plan, or preconceived notion of the music’s end result.” In other words, this session resonates with the in-the-moment, razor’s-edge risk that Konitz has thrived on since his teens right up to the present to his iconic but never static status in his 80s as a grand patriarch of spontaneity, still actively in quest of the new.
“Under Mr. Konitz’s instruction,” the sleeve notes say of the session’s barebones strategy, “anyone on the bandstand could simply start playing a melody, and the rest of the band could follow. Or not.”
In an interview withSebastian Scotney, editor of London Jazz, not long before the Soho recording, Konitz, then a mere 82, confided in his belief in the central role played by feeling in music, tempered by concision
“I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, but emotion is the main point,” Konitz said. “The more notes you play, the less attention you can pay to each one. So I tend to put more faith in single notes -- held notes. …I’m lucky I can still play. I’m enjoying it more than ever.” Tickets for Konitz’s Firehouse 12 performances: $30 for the first set; $20 for the second set. Information: firehouse12.com and (203) 785-0468.
Portrait of the Artist
Besides being one of the finest trumpeter/flugelhornists and wittiest/hippest vocalists in jazz history, Clark Terryhas been a wise, sensitive mentor, inspiration and support for countless artists as diverse as Quincy Jones, Miles Davis and Dianne Reeves.
Terry’s remarkable career as a premier player and his extraordinary gift as a compassionate, caring teacher is celebrated in the 2014 documentary, “Keep on Keepin’ On,” which will be shown at 7:30 pm on Sunday, December 14, at Cinestudio on the Trinity College campus, 300 Summit Street, Hartford. Screenings are repeated on Monday, December 15, and on Tuesday, December 16, with show times at 7:30 pm. Information: cinestudio.org and (860) 297-2544.
Aside from Terry’s seven decades of musical triumphs—including being among the chosen few who played in both the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras—he has also made history by breaking a number of racial barriers. He toppled a major color bar when he became NBC’s first full-time African American staff musician to play on-air after landing what became a prominent, 12-year-stint with the Tonight Show band. An NEA Jazz Master and one of the most recorded jazz musicians of the 20th century, Terry turns 94 on Sunday, December 14, the day “Keep on Keepin’ On” opens its three-day run at Cinestudio.
A nationally acclaimed documentary by filmmaker Alan Hicks, “Keep on Keepin’ On” presents an especially moving, memorable close-up portrait of Terry’s mentorship and ultimately deep friendship evolving over several years with the blind piano prodigy, Justin Kauflin, a major talent painfully hobbled by crippling stage fright.
As the storyline of the relationship unfolds, Terry, who was by then already in his early 90s and afflicted with diabetes, confronts increasingly serious health challenges. At the same time, his protégé and friend, Kauflin, is struggling to launch a career, and, most particularly, with dark, debilitating anxiety of his own as he faces the emotionally terrifying prospect of competing at the elite Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition. Known for its potentially high-stakes for winners, it puts heavyweight championship bout-like pressure on all performers, even those seemingly immune to performance anxiety.
As Terry’s health takes a drastic turn for the worse, the inspiring student/teacher relationship still flourishes. Even when the elderly guru is hospitalized, ill, weak and bed-ridden, he’s still, even though unable to sit-up on his own, able to instruct and inspire his protégé in their intimate, one-on-one skull sessions that go on for hours at a time.
Kauflin’s New Album
More than just another jazz bio stocked with terrific rare archival clips, Keep on Keepin’ On, The New York Times declares, is very much about the mystery of the “basic universal process” called learning. What sets it above more conventionally framed bios is that it is simultaneously a real-life dramatization of human wisdom being triumphantly passed on from one generation to the next. Even against the oppressively heavy odds posed by the ravaging effects of aging and the debilitation of diabetes, teaching and learning win out as Terry and his star pupil somehow just keep on keepin’ on.
Kauflin celebrates Terry in a moving original piece called “For Clark” on his new album, Dedication (Jazz Village) to be released January 13, 2015.
Produced by Quincy Jones, the album features 12 originals, seven of which are “dedications” to pivotal figures in the pianist’s life including his teacher, the late Mulgrew Miller.
Kauflin, who was born in 1986, began playing piano and violin at age six. At eleven, he lost his sight due to a rare disease. By 15, he was hooked on jazz and committed to piano.
A summa cum laude graduate of William Paterson University, Kauflin has absorbed the modern jazz piano teachings of such masters as Bud Powell, Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock. With encouragement from his mentors, he has created his own expressive voice that might, in turn, influence generations coming up after him.
Of Kauflin’s uniqueness as a person and a player, Jones said: “Simply a beautiful cat…you can feel it in every note he plays.”
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