The style-defining jazz musician and pioneer of cool jazz turned 92.
“Subconscious-Lee” was the programmatic name of one of his earliest recordings: alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, born in Chicago in 1927, transformed the wild bebop of his instrumental colleague Charlie Parker (for example in his “Donna Lee”) into somewhat calmer spheres. There was something calm about his runs in all haste. In a young buzzword at the time: You were cool. So it was no wonder that Miles Davis, who had started at Parker, called Konitz by his side when he set out to found a nonet and the cool jazz album “Birth of the Cool” (1949/50) to justify. Black musicians had accused him of preferring white Lee Konitz to them, Miles later said: He would employ such a musician at any time, he replied, “even if it is green or spits fire”.
Konitz ‘most important partner in those years was probably Lennie Tristano, who was considered the prime intellectual of the jazz piano at the time. He tried free improvisation with him, but never without internal structures. He also played with Gerry Mulligan, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman, also interpreted Bach and Debussy. Franz Koglmann, Viennese mastermind of cool, spiritual jazz, valued him and asked him to join his ensembles. Konitz was last at Porgy & Bess in 2018. Now this clever, subtle musician and teacher has died at the age of 92 in Greenwich Village, New York, from an infection with the new corona virus. (tk)
(“Die Presse”, print edition, April 17th, 2020)
–
