Lee Konitz with Alan Broadbent - Live-Lee

I readily admit it. I am fascinated by the so-called “Tristano School” of improvisers. In fact, you could even say I’m obsessed with it. There’s the Tristano persona, nearly Messianic in its arrogance; the lyrical wisdom of the techniques, especially the translation of classic jazz solos into solfeggio; the precepts against heavily inflected rhythm accompaniment; the ground-breaking experiments in extreme dissonance and themeless improvisation; the emphasis on linear development and nearly perpetual reharmonization of a canon of American popular song standards, the sacred but re-interpretable texts of the Tristano School; the internecine breaches of loyalty, sometimes leading to actual ex-communications… In short, beyond the wonders of the music the Tristano-ites have produced, there is that odd mixture of Protestant ethics and Catholic mysticism in the ideas that lend the music a portion of its unity. The result is that, as the musicians that studied with Lennie Tristano continue to be prolific, we can hear each new performance by them as yet another battle of wills between the Acolyte and the Demiurge.

Since the mid-1960’s, you could say that Lee Konitz has gradually been extending his mastery over his alto sax into a mastery of his musical identity. Or: shortening the distance between his head and his heart. His famous album Motion, featuring Elvin Jones in an trio sans piano, can be heard as a definite repudiation of the most dogmatic of Tristano’s principles. Then there is evolution of his alto sax tone, once so “pretty” in a somewhat arctic, Aeolian manner, now like the voice, dried, roughened, darkened, of a chain smoker. Where Konitz used mainly to glide down from the upper registers of his instrument’s range, he now slurs and keens up into them. Whatever the direction, however, never will Lee abandon melody. Listen to the rendition of “If You Could See Me Now” from this latest set of duets. I thought I had heard as many versions of this, one of my least favorite Tadd Dameron masterpieces, as I would ever want to hear (give me Sarah Vaughn’s Musicraft recording, please). But Konitz does truly work new variations on it, some outright ballsy in their inventiveness – those slowly cascading figures almost reminiscent of the first bars from Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz” – others the product of the most subtle adjustments in phrasing and articulation. As many other reviewers have pointed out, Konitz largely purged his improvising of standard licks years ago. He now plays quite deliberately, looking hard for those choice notes, which may explain why some complain that he does not “swing”. But if you open yourself to Konitz’s adventuresome-ness, you will find yourself rewarded richly – and unusually. Alan Broadbent, Konitz’s partner here, also impresses, sounding only faintly like the torchy pianist in Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. In fact, Broadbent sounds as if he must have listened to Konitz’s 1980 alto-piano duets with Gil Evans (Heroes and Anti-Heroes) in preparation for the gig. He still tends towards the florid in his own solos, but there are some breath-taking two-handed passages here that sound like a direct homage to Tristano. In fact, all of the compositions – and there are true compositions; any musician who has attempted to play them will tell you that those pseudonymous, Tristano-ite “contrafacts”, even when the source material is very, very obvious, are NEVER merely functional blowing vehicles, nor have they been played to death – here are taken at a relaxed pace, ballads and boppish exercises like “Subconscious-Lee” alike. As John Litweiler has pointed out, we may tend to think of “Free jazz” as a musical descendent of earlier styles of jazz, popular African-American musical forms like rhythm and blues, and Western “classical” music from the modern era, “free” beyond a shadow of a doubt by virtue of its musical DNA. But Konitz has long been in pursuit of a different kind of freedom, and a freedom not necessarily equivalent with liberation: a freedom to use the entire extent of his musical experience in new ways, to make music that is, primarily, new to himself.

I guess I can forgive many listeners for treating Ted Brown as a simple stand-in for the sadly departed Warne Marsh, the second most well-known – and perhaps the most accomplished in terms of the conclusions he drew from Tristano's premises – of all of Tristano’s associates. Indeed, Brown’s voice is a very Marsh-like extension of Lester Young’s. But Brown gets more of the Young plumminess in his tone than Marsh did, and, rhythmically, he departs significantly from the Marsh model. Perhaps he’s simply not as agile as he was as a younger player – hear him on Ronnie Ball’s Savoy session All About Ronnie (1956) – but I believe it’s that, like Konitz, Brown has simply moved forward. As a matter of fact, he’s more “Konitz-like” in his approach to rhythm, choppier than Marsh, the master of what I think of as “internal rhythm”, or the most minute sub-divisions of the best within a single phrase. Brown, after something of an extended absence from heavy musical activity (the second or third such sabbatical of his long career) has collaborated with Konitz on a number of recent occasions: on the RCA The Sound Of Surprise and another Steeplechase date, Dig-It, both from 1999. Whatever the case, Ted Brown is a player deserving of scrutiny on his own merits, which are considerable. Hear how he almost loses his no-slouches-allowed rhythm section (Harold Danko, who knows the Tristano tradition very well without being unduly beholden to it; Dennis Irwin; and Jeff Hirshfield) on “Yesterdays” as he investigates and copes with the consequences of his opening phrases. Or listen to how he handles the convolutions of his own “Little Quail” (based on the progressions of “I’ll Remember April”), seemingly playing several new melodies simultaneously in the manner of a Bach fugue. If one can lodge a complaint against this recording, its that Brown himself sometimes disappears into the mix, which is a little flat – quintessentially DDD – anyway. Of course, a certain amount of timbral translucency and attention to nuance is part of this aesthetic. Listening to Brown, who retains the same kind of allegiance to swing era tenor sax verities as, say, Bill Perkins, most obviously on a gorgeous, nearly shockingly original interpretation of “Willow Weep For Me”, you can hear how musicians of an otherwise completely different cast, such as Joe Henderson and Anthony Braxton, have been impressed and, I suspect, moved enough to want to incorporate aspects of the Tristano approach into their own music. With each new recording, Ted Brown is completing that circle that Pres traced all those years ago; there are moments on Preservation during which the tenor saxophonist really does achieve that elusive Pres eloquence without resorting to imitations of the man. It’s as if Brown is acting out, in his very personal manner, that age-old wonderment at why the path to profound simplicity almost always and inexorably leads through the most arduous forms of complexity.

If you care at all about that last question, these two releases are easily recommended. They may not be two of the most electrifying recordings you’ll hear this year, but they are, without question, two of the most substantial, and two of the most faithful to the creative spirit in all its mania, its intractability, and its essential generosity.