Lee Konitz, Prolific And Influential Jazz Saxophonist, Dies At 92
He played the alto sax solo on "Someone Took The Words Away."
Lee Konitz RIP
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Re: Lee Konitz RIP
Thats another sad loss.
Spookily I was reading a piece yesterday from the online version of Uncut. EC was talking -at length as usual - about some of his favourite albums. Here's the extract about North, and includes EC getting Lee's autograph for his mum!
NORTH
A stark album of jazzy ballads that contemplated a new relationship – chosen by Costello as his ‘classic’
I know this one divided listeners, who were led to believe that it was something to do with an empty martini glass or a dissolute man in an undone bow-tie, while, at the time, I believed that I had written a cracking folio of lieder, only not in German. Actually, I wrote these songs in the dead of night and cut some of them three times over, screwing up and throwing away the drafts, as befits an intense and mortifying farewell note that turns into a love letter. I began by recording all the songs in one long, flawed demo take, including numbers I would never sing again and some which were almost improvised, at jazz virtuoso Errol Garner’s old Steinway, a beast I could barely wrestle into submission. It’s a thin line between being truthful and burdening your friends with a private sorrow, but then my model for confession had always been a wooden box in church. Even an unassailable record like Joni Mitchell’s Blue admits the brightness of “California” and Bob Dylan’s originally released draft of Blood On The Tracks had all that reverb on the voice to chase away the pain. So I listened to my elders and betters, buried raw songs like “In Another Room” until a daytrip to Clarksdale, Mississippi, five years later and chose to travel from the darkness to the light. The Imposters rhythm section proved to be the wrong hammer for the job and quickly departed, but not before we recorded a gem called “Impatience” with Marc Ribot on a Cuban tres, a flourish of pizzicato strings and a horn section drawn from my pals in The Jazz Passengers. Steve Nieve was eventually joined by acoustic bassist Mike Formanek and drummer Peter Erskine, who played with the hushed and steady flow that the songs demanded. I wrote for a low group of woodwinds and brass around my baritone range and brought in a body of strings here and there, so the room was not entirely in black and white. In the very late ’40s and early ’50s, my mother used to smuggle jazz records into Liverpool via seafaring pals for fanatical customers who had read about the music of Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz but couldn’t afford to hear it due to import duty on American records. Lee added his alto saxophone to the end of “Someone Took The Words Away”, so after the session I had him sign the sheet music to my Mam. Obliging, in his terse style, he wrote, “Lillian, Thanks. Lee”. Returning to Errol’s big machine at Nola Studios, I cut “I’m In The Mood Again”, which I finished at 1am. Then I walked outside onto 57th Street, thinking this was a movie that will probably never get made again.
The rest of the piece is here : https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/elvis- ... ds-111782/
RIP
Spookily I was reading a piece yesterday from the online version of Uncut. EC was talking -at length as usual - about some of his favourite albums. Here's the extract about North, and includes EC getting Lee's autograph for his mum!
NORTH
A stark album of jazzy ballads that contemplated a new relationship – chosen by Costello as his ‘classic’
I know this one divided listeners, who were led to believe that it was something to do with an empty martini glass or a dissolute man in an undone bow-tie, while, at the time, I believed that I had written a cracking folio of lieder, only not in German. Actually, I wrote these songs in the dead of night and cut some of them three times over, screwing up and throwing away the drafts, as befits an intense and mortifying farewell note that turns into a love letter. I began by recording all the songs in one long, flawed demo take, including numbers I would never sing again and some which were almost improvised, at jazz virtuoso Errol Garner’s old Steinway, a beast I could barely wrestle into submission. It’s a thin line between being truthful and burdening your friends with a private sorrow, but then my model for confession had always been a wooden box in church. Even an unassailable record like Joni Mitchell’s Blue admits the brightness of “California” and Bob Dylan’s originally released draft of Blood On The Tracks had all that reverb on the voice to chase away the pain. So I listened to my elders and betters, buried raw songs like “In Another Room” until a daytrip to Clarksdale, Mississippi, five years later and chose to travel from the darkness to the light. The Imposters rhythm section proved to be the wrong hammer for the job and quickly departed, but not before we recorded a gem called “Impatience” with Marc Ribot on a Cuban tres, a flourish of pizzicato strings and a horn section drawn from my pals in The Jazz Passengers. Steve Nieve was eventually joined by acoustic bassist Mike Formanek and drummer Peter Erskine, who played with the hushed and steady flow that the songs demanded. I wrote for a low group of woodwinds and brass around my baritone range and brought in a body of strings here and there, so the room was not entirely in black and white. In the very late ’40s and early ’50s, my mother used to smuggle jazz records into Liverpool via seafaring pals for fanatical customers who had read about the music of Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz but couldn’t afford to hear it due to import duty on American records. Lee added his alto saxophone to the end of “Someone Took The Words Away”, so after the session I had him sign the sheet music to my Mam. Obliging, in his terse style, he wrote, “Lillian, Thanks. Lee”. Returning to Errol’s big machine at Nola Studios, I cut “I’m In The Mood Again”, which I finished at 1am. Then I walked outside onto 57th Street, thinking this was a movie that will probably never get made again.
The rest of the piece is here : https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/elvis- ... ds-111782/
RIP