Lee Konitz (13 October 1927-15 April 2020)

Just occasionally a live concert set proves so memorable that it lives in the memory for years. And so it was with the trio of Lee Konitz, guitarist Dave Cliff and bassist Peter Ind at the Clore Ballroom of the Royal Festival Hall in 2002 for Radio 3’s Jazz Line-up. It was a time when Konitz was often to be heard at the freer end of his stylistic spectrum, but here he rekindled the lyrical perfection of his early 1950s work, and for half an hour he held a rapt audience enthralled.

His mixture of lyricism and poise first emerged in the 1940s orchestra of Claude Thornhill, particularly in his electrifying solo on ‘Yardbird Suite’. He told me: “Thornhill’s was a beautiful ballad band. Gil Evans was teaching them how to phrase bebop eighth notes effectively – I mean they were older players most of them. As a ballad band it was thrilling with two French horns and tuba.” From there he and Gil migrated to Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool nonet where Konitz’s alto provided a counterpart to the leader’s elegant trumpet. During that New York period of the late 1940s, Konitz and tenorist Warne Marsh were part of Lennie Tristano’s circle. Konitz recalled: “With Tristano and Warne that was a very vital swapping of ideas. Warne and I were meeting with Lennie at least once a week and talking it over, and then being able to try it out together in a band situation as apprentices. “

He then moved West, playing and recording in LA in 1952-53 alongside Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, and also working in the Kenton band. Most other players of his stature then formed their own groups, but apart from a short-lived couple of quartets in the 1950s and a 1960s group with Jim Hall, that wasn’t the main route Konitz opted for. In one of our conversations he said: “I settled long ago for a kind of improvising sideman role, and feel very flattered about people inviting me to join them to play.”

Based for much of his life from the 1970s in Europe, he worked with a wide and stylistically diverse range of colleagues, notable among them pianist Harold Danko and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. He won the Jazzpar Prize in Denmark in 1992. Latterly he would sometimes sing a few choruses rather than playing saxophone. He remembered one of his first ventures in this direction was on Dig Dug Dog (1997) with Ira Coleman and Laurent De Wilde, saying “I even felt so relaxed there that I sang some free harmonic blues”.

In the early 2000s, Konitz came to Britain often. In 2004 at Cheltenham his set showed off his free jazz credentials, but for me — as well as that magical RFH day — I shall particularly remember him on Kenny Wheeler’s ‘2005 Suite’ at the QEH, his elegant playing projecting a lyrical melancholy over Kenny’s big band.