Hangin' Out with Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh
By James Bennett
Last week, COVID-19 claimed saxophonist Lee Konitz as one of its victims. It took me a long time to write that single sentence because, for me, it feels Kind of Weird to read or write about a single COVID casualty that you aren’t familiar with on an intimate, personal level. Every time I tried to sit down and write something about Konitz, an inner voice rebuked me for not writing words about every single person claimed by this disease.
But then, I thought, "you're being too self-conscious, you idiot. You're not writing this because you think Konitz is more deserving of flowers than anyone else, you're writing this because he worked on one of the absolute chillest albums you've ever had the pleasure of listening to, and somehow, you don't talk about it enough."
That album is Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh. It’s not the only time those two cut some records together (for example, they linked up in 1975, in Montmartre), but this collaboration has proved to be one of my favorites.
I have no idea when I first listened to LKWM. The album just showed up, and became a go-to of mine without any blessing or ceremony. You know how Slim Charles just appears in season three of The Wire, void of fanfare, and then ten episodes later you're like "oh, this guy enjoys some considerable screen time, when did that happen?" For me, LKWM is like that, and that's the way it is.
The eight-song set opens with "Topsy," a mischievous, plotting tune originally written for Benny Goodman in the back half of the 1930s. Goodman made it what my roommate would call "Problem Solving Music," that is, music fit for a listen while you solve problems, akin to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score for The Social Network, or ADULT.'s recent Perception is/as/of Deception. Cozy Cole took a damn fine crack at it too, a two-parter that’s tightly creeping along, at turns thunderously percussive, serpentine, and electric; complete with choruses that swing harder than Michael Jordan's driver when he's playing eighteen holes from behind.
Konitz and Marsh take the tune and chill it out to its frostiest logical conclusion. At heart, this "Topsy" is still impish, but the intercourse between the alto and tenor provides hints of the garrulous intercourse that follows on later tracks. Fittingly, 20-year old me was obsessed with this arrangement, as 20-year old me was obsessed with "cool." Not being cool, but the mere idea of cool (so much so that I was convinced that I could go to grad school and make it the center of my research. Maybe I still can, who knows?)."Topsy" was so perfect to me, that for a time, I never made it past that opening track.
But eventually I did, discovering a world of sounds that matched various moods and stations of my life. "Two Not One" gives the listener the quiet confidence of a middle-aged White Man, an indispensable asset when trying to forge a career. Perhaps it’s the unified, rolling, insouciance of the head, entwined in what sounds like rapid-fire dialogue but upon closer listen is revealed to be banter-in-unison. Maybe it’s Kenny Clarke’s drum breaks, executed with an effortless concision. Whatever it is, a younger me listens to that track and feels my credit score increase by 20 points. I can get a sizeable loan from any financial institution if I listen to this five-and-a-half-minute jam and then don the requisite pair of "nice slacks." "Two Not One" lets me eat fried chicken around white folks with complete impunity. It is incredible.
The entire album is full of traits belonging to what many critics have called “Cool Jazz.” I have many thoughts on that phrase and the kind of music it tries to describe, but here I’ll just say that this LKWM knows exactly what it is, no pretenses about what it wants to be. It’s simply a good album that appeals to whatever “cool” means to you at whatever junction you find yourself during your life’s journey. But its greatest quality is that the two social saxophones make for a particularly gregarious listening session. I hear this album and I see people. Just not in real life.
The same disease that took Lee Konitz Jr. — the last surviving member of the musicians featured on this album — is forcing us to stay indoors. But LKWM is a proxy for the outside interactions that become the stuff of your fantasies. I’ll be using it to recreate scenes of sidewalk BBQs and hangs with cheap beer on a stoop. I was going to get really into croquet this summer, so LKWM is going to be a substitute for that as well. The function has officially moved indoors, but it’s fine, because this album wants to hang out with you.
Related: check this interview with Lee Konitz on Soundcheck from 2010: