The last time I heard saxophonist Lee Konitz, at Constellation in 2015, he was defying expectations, just as he had done throughout his musical life.
Sharing the spotlight with a musician less than half his age – 33-year-old pianist Dan Tepfer – the 87-year-old alto saxophonist opened the set by launching into one of the more harmonically complex and rhythmically elusive ballads in the repertoire, Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight.”
At first, Konitz’s lines barely implied the famous tune’s melodic contours, Tepfer accompanying softly on keyboard. But once Tepfer began to swing the piece, Konitz drew the saxophone away from his lips and began to sing wordless lines.
In that moment, “You knew were encountering something extraordinary,” I wrote in my review. “To hear Konitz chant those craggy notes of his – sometimes reflecting the melody, sometimes dancing around it – while Tepfer picked up on what he heard was to behold two artists communing far outside jazz convention.”
Konitz led the conversation, of course, taking Tepfer and the audience to one unanticipated series of sounds after another. Which said a great deal about his youthful sense of adventure at an exalted age — and underlines what we lost with his death April 15 at age 92 of the coronavirus.
For after the unusual vocal performance, Konitz surprised everyone by asking the audience for requests, something musicians of his stature simply do not do. Once Konitz began to play George Shearing’s “Lullaby of Birdland,” there was no doubt the old man still had it: The trademark fluidity of his lines and liquidity of his tone long ago had made him a distinctive voice in jazz, and at this late date still distinguished him from everyone else playing alto.
Much has been made of the “cool” quality of Konitz’s playing, which indeed wasn’t as hard-driving, rhythmically impetuous and emotionally expansive as the music of alto saxophone genius Charlie Parker, whom many musicians of Konitz’s vintage tried to emulate. But Konitz by nature simply went his own way, expressing musical ideas of comparable complexity and considerable emotional intensity, but in idiosyncratic ways. He wasn’t the “cool” opposite of Parker – he just was something different.
“Actually, I learned his music, a lot of his music,” Konitz said of Parker in an interview for the National Endowment for the Arts, which awarded Konitz its prestigious Jazz Masters Fellowship in 2009. “But, you know, I’m not of that disposition. The first time I heard it, it just was too much for me to even enjoy. I could just marvel at it, but I was listening to Johnny Hodges and people like that.”
The “cool” label stuck to Konitz for good in the late 1950s, when a series of singles Miles Davis had recorded with him and others in 1949 and ’50 were released as the “Birth of the Cool” album. The title was chic and ingenious, but the music wasn’t nearly as “cool” as implied, many of the tracks generating plenty of heat through brisk tempos and smoldering expression.
Moreover, Konitz’s discography attests to how widely his musical tastes and palette ranged. You can hear Konitz’s virtuosity alongside pianist-mentor Lennie Tristano in Konitz’s recorded debut, “Subconscious-Lee”; Konitz’s dialogues with such stylistically far-flung collaborators as tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, guitarist Jim Hall, violinist Ray Nance and others on “The Lee Konitz Duets”; and Konitz’s forays into scores of Ravel, Debussy, Faure and Satie on “Lee Konitz & the Axis String Quartet Play French Impressionist Music of the 20th Century.”
Konitz’s concert work, too, rendered the categorizations he has been subjected to virtually worthless.
When he played the Jazz Showcase in 1992, he transcended distinctions between jazz and classical chamber music. “The subtlety of his tonal shading, the surprising – sometimes bizarre – melodic turns keep the listener intrigued,” I wrote in my review.
At the same club in 2000, he transformed Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are” so thoroughly that there was no telling where Kern ended and Konitz began. After Konitz finished, he did not exaggerate when he told the audience, “That was by Jerome Kern and me.”
Listeners can debate how much Chicago influence coursed through the work of this Chicago-born musician, who was first drawn to jazz by the music of Benny Goodman, another Chicagoan, and set on a path of lifelong exploration by Chicago-born Tristano.
But ascribing Konitz’s art to the sound of any one city or style shortchanges the breadth of his contribution. He was an eclectic in the best sense of the word, untethered to dogmas and other people’s orthodoxies, uninterested in following trends.
The singularity of his sound reflected the individuality of his aesthetic, which accommodated many schools of musical thought.
He was way more than “cool.”
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
