Of the Lennie Tristano "school" of music, which predated the Lennie Tristano School of Music, Lee Konitz is the outstanding "pupil". Naturally Lennie’s music had a great influence on Lee. Other influences are lesser and have been more completely absorbed in to the mainstream of his playing. For instance, in his rhythmic figures you can hear Charlie Parker (Bird left very few untouched and unmoved) but whatever sources Lee has drawn on have been integrated beautifully into his personal expression. His style and sound are both highly personal. The point of excellence as an individual voice is a signal triumph for any artist.
The three sessions in this LP show Lee off in many different ways with quintet, quartet and duo. The interplay with Tristano, duetting with Billy Bauer and unisons and exchanges with Warne Marsh are all self- illuminating examples of Lee’s early work in this graphic collection of Konitz.
Incidentally, the Subconscious-Lee session not only launched Lee’s career but was the first recording date of this company. New Jazz was then the label.
notes by IRA GITLER
Notes reproduced from the original album liner.
I’ve never been quite sure what liner notes (that’s what you’re reading) were designed for except for disc-jockeys to read to their listeners. If the writer happens to be a musician, you find informed discussion about the notes themselves, the shape and form the music takes. I don’t understand music in this way. I just happen to like jazz and it’s men well enough to spend the greater part of my waking time telling a radio audience about what they are listening to . . . and to go out and buy!
In trying to trace the influences various groups and styles have had on a particular musician, I feel a little like a distraught medical student looking at a diagram of the nervous system for the first time; the nerves branch in and out of each other, come and go, yet each fulfills a specific function, is responsible for a certain twitch.
Follow back the career of a man who has played with the best and he ends up sounding like none of them, and like all of them . . . Which is a pretty nice statement to be able to make. Take Lee Konitz for instance. Here he is playing sometimes with Lennie Tristano, the man who has influenced him most, and Lee manages to arrive at some very persona) and individual sounds.
During the past years Lee has played with Miles, with Stan Kenton; he has been heard in concert in Europe, taught in New York City. The determinedly radical Tristano, with a "way back when" history of Dixieland and harmonic investigation, imparts a good deal of the neat, clean sound to Lee’s album. But there is a languid and uncomplicated clarity, a durable performance that is all Konitz. The man has reacted through many nerve canals and arrived with reactions of his own . . . no mean accomplishment.
There is a comfortable feeling about this session, with four of the members of the sensational 1949 Capitol recordings playing together again, talking back and forth with a familiarity which requires no effort on the part of the listener. And yet, with this ease, you are conscious somewhere of a constant broadening of expression, the humor creeping in and out of the interplay with Tristano, the duet with Billy Bauer. A nice group of sounds.