In and outthe traditional and non-traditional approach of Lee Konitzs jazz improvisation

Introduction
Its very difficult to define What is Jazz, because jazz music is still growing up, transforming, and having new elements in it nowadays. One of the most important elements in jazz was improvisation. Different styles resulted from different approach of improvisation, for example, bebop and cool jazz. In this research, I want to discuss about a special improviser in the world of jazzthe cool saxophonist Lee Konitz. The famous jazz scholar Gunther Schuller had written sentences about Lee Konitz: Lee Konitz is many things. He is a veteran of the original bop revolution of the early and mid-1940s. He is that rarity, a stylistic innovator whose original contribution some twenty years ago consisted of fusing the musical conceptions of Charlie Parker and Lennie Tristanos piano-based polyphonic style of the saxophone. 1 He is one of the most original and distinctive alto saxophonists in the history of jazz. And he is still alive, performing around the world, and playing his unique intuitive

Gunther Schuller, Musings: The musical worlds of Gunther Schuller. (Madison Avenue, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1986.), 98.

improvisation to the audience. He sounded so different with the so-called mainstream jazz but still won a lot of praises of public and musicians. How he achieved his goal on improvisation, who influenced on his playing, and what materials he was thinking when improvising will be the main concern in this article.

Bebop and its musical characteristics

Before talking about Lee Konitz, we should understand the most important genre in the jazzbebop, which I mean tradition in the title, at beginning. Bebop is a jazz style characterized by fast tempo, instrumental virtuosity and improvisation base on the combination harmonic structure and melody. It was developed in the early 1940s. The most important musicians who contributed to form bebop were saxophonist Charlie Parker, jazz trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie. Bebop was important in the history of jazz, it brought jazz from entertainment music to artistic level, especially in the respect of improvisation. Compared to swing music, which was the predecessor of bebop, there were some differences: First, swing group were large, and often performed notated music as entertainment, especially for dancing. Bebop group were limited, in most cases, to five

or fewer performers, and they played jazz for jazzs sake. 2 Second, in addition to 32bar AABA tunes and blues, the swing and Bebop repertoires featured different harmonic and rhythmic concepts.3 Most of the time, the repertoires for Bebop had more challenges and spaces for musicians to improvise than the ones for swing. Third, in the swing group, the musicians played rhythm section instrument such as pianist, bassist, and drummer may only play the written part and the role for them was simplekeep the form and time feel. In bebop group, each instrument had its own role and function to interact with each other.

The music language of Charlie Parker and his influences in jazz

Jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker was widely considered to have been one of the most influential jazz musicians. Like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, he was a innovator, he played a leading role in the development of Bebop, and then changed the whole world of jazz. Some of Parkers music language became the important vocabulary in Bebop, first of all was formula and thematic improvisation. In Charlie Parkers recordings, we can

Eddie S. Meadows, Bebop to Cool: Context, Ideology, and Musical identity. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2003.), 93. 3 Meadows, Bebop to Cool, 93.

hear some of the music ideas been repeated again and again, those ideas were what Henry Martin called formula in his book Charlie Parker and Thematic improvisation. He thought that the greatness of Parker was be able to duplicate duplicated ideas from solo to solo continue to be so musically satisfying.(Martin, 1) The second significant music language created by Parker was his use of intense harmony structure. For example, in the 12-bar blues, the original chord progression was: | I7---|I7---|I7---|I7---|IV7---|IV7---|I7---||I7---|V7---|V7---|I7---|I7---| Parker played different way, he added some harmonic color at the 2nd and 8th bar and used II-V progression on 9th and 10th bar, the form was being called Bebop Blues nowadays, here is the change of famous Parkers original Nows the Time: |I7---|IV7---|I7---|I7---|IV7---|IV7---|I7---|iii-vi-|ii---|V7---|I7---| The third thing of Parkers music language was the treatment of dominant chord. He often used flat of sharp ninth in the dominant chord to indicate the diminish sound. And the thirteenth and augmented fifth were also used extensively.(yardbrid, 315) Other Parkers music features such as enclosure(chromatic approach to the target chord notes) and the use of rhythmic motif (yardbird, 326) were also famous and being used over and over again by the jazz players today. All those characteristics found by

musicians or scholars in Parkers recordings through decades, the language he used at his time became the vocabulary of the so-called main stream jazz, the majority of the jazz musician after 1940s were influenced by Parker more or less.

Cool Jazz and Its Musical Characteristics

The term cool jazz refers to the jazz style that tends to be softer and easier to follow than the bebop. Cool musical characteristics are its emphasis on written arrangements, interesting orchestrations, melodic counterpoints, and straight tone qualities, and a preference for ballads.(bebop to cool, 262) Compared with bebop, cool jazz was more acceptable to the audience. Some critics about cool jazz because its less of dynamics, less of passion, too many arrangements and less improvisation, it some times been misunderstood as the music those white musicians who cant play as fast as black bebop players did. However, one of the most important pioneer in cool jazz was African American jazz saxophonist Lester Young,cool performers adopted one or more of Youngs elements in their music, including lyricism and phrasing, timbre and phrasing, and mostly vibratoless tone(bebop to cool, 244) Another important musician for forming the style was trumpet player Miles Davis, he led the nonet, recorded the

famous album The Birth of Cool from 1947-50 and released at 1957. In this album, Miles Davis concept of cool sound was applied: light sound, beautiful arrangement, counterpoints, which all had been considered as the characteristics of cool jazz nowadays. Hence, in the mind of some critics and performers, cool was a completely new jazz innovation rather than a reinterpretation of earlier practices.(bebop to cool,293)

Lee Konitz
Alto saxophonist Lee Konitz had long been considered as one of the most important cool saxophone players in the history of jazz, because of his beautiful tone, non-bebop approach for improvisation and his unique lines. However, Lee Konitz is more than a cool jazz player, he can play bebop, his rhythmic used in improvisation was very advanced, his concepts of improvisation were unique, and worthy to research. In my opinion, he is the one who redefined the term cool jazz and brought it to the higher musical level.

Early Career and influences of Lennie Tristano

Lee Konitz was born in Chicago in 1927, he started to play clarinet as his first instrument at age of eleven because he listened to the recording of clarinetist Benny

Goodman, then he switched to play saxophone. His early jazz saxophone influences were Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, and Benny Carter. He met Lennie Tristano when he was fifteen and started to study off and on with him while going on the road with different band. Lennie Tristano was the most important person in Lee Konitzs musical life. The blind pianist Lennie Tristano had very unique concepts on jazz music and he taught a lot of students. He and his pupils formed a style which close to but independent from cool--we called it Tristano School. First of all, his concepts of the role of rhythm section were quite different. He claimed that the rhythm section should provide a steady, forward-driving 4/4 metronomic pulse instead of being active and improvising while coming. Therefore, while he used forward drive simultaneously with polyrhythm, creativity in the group was limited to the horn and the piano. This was one of the major differences between Tristanos and the standard Bebop approach to rhythm section.(bebop, 315) Second, when improvised, he liked to create another melody line rather than just play changes. He thought that improvising should be more intuitive rather than prepared specific licks. Third, he was the pioneer of the free jazz, he

experimented with the ideas of free, such as escaped from predetermined music characteristics, experimented with spontaneously creative ideas--something like collective improvisation, no preset melodies, rhythms, harmonies, or meter. Most striking of these are Intuition and Digression, two free jazz composition performed years before Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor made that one of the most significant stylistic developments of post-1940s jazz(bebop,333) Although rarely performed at his late life, as an educator, Lennie Tristano was very successful: Tristanos teaching, focused as it was on emotion, feeling, and consistency, was designed to produce a complete jazz musician, one who could achieve controlled freedom within the style and aesthetics of a composition. (bebop, 325) Students went study with him in his house, they played music together in the sense of Tristanos aesthetics of improvisation and composition, a lot of students came from Tristano School were successfully achieve their music goal and gained respects from other jazz musicians at their time. Lee Konitz, as the most famous student of Tristano, his improvisation was very lyrical, prcised with harmony and full of interesting rhythmic character. Also, one more thing he learned from Tristano was the use of contrafactcomposed a new melody over

the chord progression of jazz standards. The example I used for analysis here Subconscious-Lee ,was the contrafact came from the jazz standard What Is This Thing Called Love, which was the assignment he wrote for his weekly lesson with Tristano. I was basically improvising on melodies, just playing variations. It was pretty intuitive, I would say. I still do that really. I like to think of playing from melody first, rather than a chord structure. But of course the harmony included.(andy, 15) The citation above was Lee Konitz describing himself as an improviser, and this showed the evidence how he been affected by Lennie Tristano.

The influences of Lester Young and Charlie Parker

Through Tristanos teaching, but also independently, Lee Konitz became open to two other crucial influencesLester Young and Charlie Parker. As a saxophone player, Konitz listened to a lot of saxophone players live performance or recordings, and one of his favorites was Lester Youngone of the greatest tenor saxophone players in the swing era. For saxophone technique, he appreciated the sound of Lester Young, as he said: Its all coordinated, and very beautifully molded.(lee knotiz, 19) And also, he liked the way Young played vibrato, compared with another great tenor player Coleman Hawkins at that time, Lee thought Youngs vibratos were

more interesting and not over used. For music, he thought Young presented very good sense in playing lyrical lines.