Warne Marsh + Lee Konitz/Sal Mosca/Bill Evans
This is a brief look at Lennie Tristano's most famous students. (The Tristano post should be read first.)
It has been a real pleasure to get to know Warne Marsh's and Lee Konitz's discographies a little better. Marsh and Konitz will always be linked to Tristano, but the more I listen the more I notice the differences, not the similarities.
Warne Marsh
Of the three major musicians of the Tristano school, Lee Konitz was the only one destined to be a jazz star. Warne Marsh is just as hard as is Tristano to get a proper handle on. Dave King poked around in these books a bit too and offered up the analysis that Marsh was a brilliant, eventually underachieving rich kid right out of The Royal Tenenbaums. While naturally not the whole story, Dave’s insight feels correct.
Even more than with Tristano, there is an argument that posterity is denied “the real Warne Marsh.” Not long ago I wandered into Ben Street’s apartment when he was blasting “It’s You Or No One” from Release Record, Send Tape. “Good God!” I thought to myself. “Is this the best jazz saxophone playing I have ever heard?” Undoubtedly many musicians over the years have suddenly been confronted with some prime Marsh and shaken their head in disbelief.
Unfortunately, the extensive Marsh discography is filled with mediocre rhythm sections, the same 15 tunes over and over again, indifferent production, and an appalling lack of drama. Release Record, Send Tape is amazing, but it’s ultimate purpose seems to be some sort of advanced manual for other players, not something you would listen to just as music. I haven’t heard nearly everything, but of what I know, only a few Marsh discs are recommendable to any non-professional jazz lover without reservation.
On the late forties recordings with Tristano, Konitz seems more naturally effusive than Marsh. It’s understandable why Konitz was the one to become a name player. By the time of Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh from 1955, though, Marsh is just as charismatic as Konitz. It’s an essential library item for any good jazz collection.
This album documents Tristano circle’s most successful attempt to work with a heavy black rhythm section, Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke. It is appropriately celebrated as such: Larry Kart’s essay for the Mosaic set The Complete Atlantic recordings of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh is recommended. (It’s available in his anthology Jazz In Search of Itself.)
Clarke’s ride cymbal is well-recorded. I am far from the final expert, but it seems to me that this disc and several Miles Davis/Percy Heath/Kenny Clarke Prestige albums from 1954 contain the definitive ride cymbal beat of the early 50’s. Rhythm section scientists will be interested to compare Pettiford and Clarke here with Pettiford and Philly Joe Jones playing similar tempos on The Musings of Miles recorded exactly one week earlier.
The great punk rock moment of the whole Tristano-era discography is on this record. In a superb “fuck you” to bebop, Konitz and Marsh play the out head of “Donna Lee” one beat off of where it should be. (They might have gotten the idea of playing “Donna Lee” one beat off from the similar procedure in “Marshmallow.”) Chamberlain checked with Konitz; he says they didn’t tell Clarke in advance. I love it: these guys are good enough to get away with heresy against Charlie Parker! It is highly unlikely, though, that Pettiford and Clarke returned to their normal gigs saying, “Hey, Let’s start playing Bird heads one beat off! That really swings!”
In another attempt to integrate, Marsh’s first solo album Warne Marsh put him with Paul Chambers and either Philly Joe Jones or Paul Motian. Konitz repeatedly singles out the four trio tracks of Marsh, Chambers, and Motian as among his favorites. It’s fantastic to hear Paul Chambers so clearly; he’s dominant in the mix, and all the more power to the producer for making it that way.
The two Warne Marsh quartet tracks with Marsh, Ronnie Ball, Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones are rather unfocused; of course, they are all probably high. I mentioned Marsh’s appalling lack of drama before; his take on “It’s All Right With Me” is Exhibit A.
This song is a good example of how superbly Cole Porter could unite harmony, melody, and lyric. In this case Porter envisions a sophisticated way to initiate a rebound fling via AABA + coda. The song carefully inches it way from a nervous C minor to a celebratory Eb major. (This is minor to relative major, the standard sequence for the exposition of any minor-key sonata in the Classical era.)
(First A. C minor almost but not quite getting to the relative major)
It's the wrong time and the wrong place
Though your face is charming, it's the wrong face
It's not her face, but such a charming face
That it's all right with me
(Second A. C minor almost but not quite getting to the relative major)
It's the wrong song in the wrong style
Though your smile is lovely, it's the wrong smile
It's not her smile, but such a lovely smile
So it's all right with me
(Bridge. Ah! Is this the relative major yet? Not quite: it is uncertain chromatic harmony.)
You can't know how happy I am that we've met
I'm strangely attracted to you
There's someone I'm trying so hard to forget
Don't you want to forget someone, too?
(Last A. C minor almost but not quite getting to the relative major, but rather than going back, moving at last to the dominant of Eb)
It's the wrong game with the wrong chips
Though your lips are tempting, they're the wrong lips
They're not her lips, but they're such tempting lips
That if some night you're free
(Coda. Relative major in Eb at last. Note first directly tender word, “Dear,” and the first actively positive word, “Yes.”)
Dear, it's all right
Yes, it's all right with me
Somehow, Marsh and Co. play this song without going to the relative major: they kind of play the coda, but go back to C minor right away, never resolving to Eb major. What a case of blue balls! I never want to hear this performance again.
The late-fifties into 1960 or so is generally considered Marsh’s best work. This is the era of the brilliant 1959 Half Note recording with Evans, Garrison and Motian, which I discuss in the next section. Marsh devotees also must hear the aforementioned Release Record, Send Tape, which has saxophone playing of the highest genius with an OK band. The trio tracks without Ball are better than those with -- in general, I don’t like the comping of the Tristano school pianists that much, including that of Tristano himself. Certainly just bass and drums are all that either Marsh and Konitz really need.
From the early-seventies until his death, Marsh was notable for his inspired and immaculately improvised playing at blistering uptempos. Marsh even played with Supersax, a once-famous group that surely would draw blank stares from all my peers. It was a bunch of L.A. studio cats playing Bird tunes and improvisations arranged for a thickly-voiced sax section + rhythm. Marsh doesn’t solo much on the studio records, but apparently there are bootleg compilation tapes of his best solos from Supersax’s extensive touring and the tempos are rumored to be impossibly fast. I want one of these tapes!
In 1982 we finally get a truly worthy Marsh quartet record, Star Highs, one that I could recommend to any casual jazz listener. Marsh himself is on form, but that is only to be expected. The crucial element is that his all-star band sounds delighted to be there, too.
Every black jazz drummer loves the white drummer Mel Lewis. For one reason, Lewis worked hard at musical integration, joining with Thad Jones to have the major modern mixed-race jazz big band of the sixties and seventies. But that wouldn’t mean anything if Lewis didn’t have a great beat, which he certainly did. It was simultaneously humid and elevated, just lovely.
On Star Highs, Lewis plays open with George Mraz’s pedals on “Switchboard Joe,” an undulating, dragging rumba on “Star Eyes,” a shuffling backbeat on “Hank’s Tune,” imposes a 3/8 hemiola on the out-head of “Mooche the Mooche,” and generally sculpts the most interactive drum performance I have ever heard on a Marsh record.
Why Tristano and Marsh generally considered this kind of drumming an impediment -- rather than an essential element -- to group improvisation is one of the great mysteries.
Regardless of the overall quality of any Marsh record, his saxophone playing is always spectacular on a basic technical, “language of jazz” level. Rumors of any other serious black or white saxophonist criticizing Marsh for the quality of his craft are all unsubstantiated. There’s a great moment in Chamberlain when Joe Henderson describes seeing Marsh for the first time live in 1987:
...the way he explored the saxophone, and the way his imagination was working..He was just full of great surprises, like "Wow! Do it again!"
Wayne Shorter has also publicly expressed his admiration of Marsh, and so has my contemporary Mark Turner. And this is despite Marsh’s astounding All In the Mix assertions regarding black saxophonists, like this bit in Shim:
I became disenchanted with Duke’s band when I realized that no two saxophones players in that section played with the same vibrato...
This is bad enough, but later on, when recording a “tenor battle” disc with Lew Tabackin, he went even further. When Tabackin said Coleman Hawkins was a model for saxophonists, Marsh disagreed and said,
That’s the black way of playing. They bend notes.
Tabackin has dined out on this story for years; predictably, the first time I heard it was from a black man. Thankfully, Marsh’s biographer Chamberlain calls it correctly, saying, “This statement is absurd on the face of it.” There is much more in An Unsung Cat about Marsh’s nearly racist opinions about black and white jazz, implying that most black musicians after the bebop era had lost their way from “real” jazz and “real” improvising.
Again, Dave's cue of The Royal Tenenbaums seems relevant. One of the great All In the Mix scenes in recent cinema history is the fight between Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) and Henry Sherman (Danny Glover). On YouTube the poster calls it “You tryin’ to steal my woman?”
Royal: Can I ask you something, Hank?
Henry: [pause] Okay.
Royal: Are you trying to steal my woman?
Henry: I beg your pardon.
Royal: You heard me, Coltrane.
Henry: "Coltrane?”
Royal: What?
Henry: Did you just call me Coltrane?
Royal: No.
Henry: You didn't?
Royal: No.
Henry: Okay...
Royal: But if I did..you wouldn’t be able do anything about it, would you?
Henry: You don’t think so.
Royal: No, I don’t.
Henry: Listen, Royal, if you think can...
Royal: You want to talk some jive? I’ll talk some jive. I’ll talk some jive like you never heard.
(Scene devolves into angry shouting. Apparently Danny Glover was the one who suggested Royal call him “Coltrane.”)
It’s easy to see Warne Marsh in the role of Royal Tenenbaum here. Whereas Royal has lost his woman to a black man, Marsh’s musical universe was passed over in favor of John Coltrane during the 1960’s. They both angrily and pathetically need to assert that they, too, can “speak the lingo” to an unheeding audience.
(At this point, if you haven't checked in yet, read Stanley Crouch's comments on the Tristano school.)
Lee Konitz (+Sal Mosca and Bill Evans)
Unlike Tristano and Marsh, Lee Konitz is still with us. In fact, last week when I was playing the Village Vanguard with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, Konitz sat in!
Before we played, Konitz requested that we play less as individual soloists and more as a collective. Already intimidated, I didn't quite know how to take this suggestion. God -the thought of comping for Konitz is nerve-racking enough - I was planning to mostly lay out - now I have to just go for it and weave with him too? I mentioned that Wayne Shorter, Danilo Perez, John Patitucci, and Brian Blade had been working this on concept lately. Konitz smiled - he likes that band - and told me how much he enjoyed playing with Perez recently (Nate Chinen's NY Times review of that gig is here).
We played "Solar," "My Old Flame," and "Invitation." It was really thrilling to have that incredible tone right next to me on the bandstand. I couldn't get it together to do more than gently comp for Konitz on the first two numbers, but on "Invitation" I went for it and began playing busy rubato circles under his melody, not letting this up for the whole performance. Konitz was right to make his suggestion; this was the best piece of the night. Afterwards, my wife said it sounded like we were on the last cruise ship at the end of the world, and I ordered a drink.
Andy Hamilton's book should be a model for future books about living artists. Lee Konitz: Conversations On the Improvisor’s Art is a carefully organized compilation of many hours of interviews with a remarkably frank subject, his peers, and his followers.
Many of Konitz’ stories involve All In the Mix. A particularly sad one features Charles Mingus.
Also in 1952, Mingus agreed to do two weeks with me in a club in Detroit. Al Levitt was the drummer, and Ronnie Ball was on piano. After the first set we were all in the dressing room and Al was talking with Mingus about the time and Mingus slapped him in the face! After a minute--knowing a bit about his outbursts--I said, “Charlie, could we just play some music and just cool it?” or something like that. After that he just played, with no scenes. Then on the last night some of the Detroit cats were in the room--Milt Jackson, Barry Harris, Paul Chambers among them--and Mingus started in on Ronnie, then Al, then me. He just had to show his friends, I guess!
Almost from the beginning, Konitz was a major success, first playing with Tristano, then with Stan Kenton, and then as a leader. In the early sixties he left the Tristano fold, which Warne Marsh never did. Since that break, he has engineered a natural synthesis between the hardcore Tristano school and regular jazz.
Paul Bley says in his interview:
I mean he [Tristano] had a few flaws, like wanting the rhythm section to be mechanical, but certainly from a harmonic point of view, he was a genius... Lee overcame that non-participation by the rhythm section in the period post-Lennie.
Lee retained his originality, but at the same point became a vital member of the rhythm section. To me that was a metamorphosis much to the credit of jazz music, period.
Because the pure Lennie-Sal Mosca school didn’t bloom beyond a half dozen or dozen players, whereas Lee went all over the world, and played and recorded with musicians from every country.
...Lee just broke the line and began working with drummers. You see drummers are a wonderful source of cross-pollination to the soloist, and all the great soloists have related to drummers.
Konitz broke that line with 1962’s classic disc Motion with Sonny Dallas and Elvin Jones. It’s impossible not to smile when Jones plays some Afro-Cuban during his trades on the first song, “All of Me.” The color line is officially eroded in this moment.
Konitz’s deliberate embrace of non-Tristano school players and integration resulted in his acceptance by the jazz community as a whole, especially by black musicians. His book includes tributes by Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Greg Osby, and Wayne Shorter. This AAJ article has Steve Coleman and Mark Turner praising Konitz as well.
His embrace of non-Tristano school players cost him something within the hardcore Tristano camp. Konitz wasn’t invited to participate in the Tristano memorial concert, and Sal Mosca, the preeminent keeper of the hardcore Tristano flame until his death last year, proclaims in his interview with Hamilton that Konitz didn’t play as well after leaving the Tristano inner circle. This isn’t true, but it does fit right in with Mosca’s segregated mentality.
Mosca is good example of what happens to those in the Tristano school who didn’t embrace non-Tristanoites and integrate. Mosca was around from the nearly the first - he’s the pianist on “Marshmallow” - and his couple of solos on Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh are a little tentative but still delightful. By the 1970’s he had become a very internal and deep player. The best Mosca I have heard is his unaccompanied recording in Tristano’s memory, For You. At some point I plan to study Mosca further; he is a very special pianist.
Sadly, Mosca stayed outside the larger jazz community and did his own music much harm as a result. There is a hilarious story in Chamberlain about Mosca being asked by a promoter in 1976 to get a black drummer for a gig with Warne Marsh. Mosca suggested Shadow Wilson, who had been dead for sixteen years!
Eventually Roy Haynes and Sam Jones were hired. You can hear the uptempo "Background Music" on a bootleg. If this were the only track I knew of Mosca’s piano playing, I would consider him my enemy, since he is absolutely heedless and disrespectful to Jones and Haynes, two of the heaviest representations of the African diaspora in jazz. Sam Jones eventually quits playing at the end of the piano solo.
I saw Mosca play a quartet gig live at Birdland about a year before he died. There were extraordinary moments of piano playing but the gig as a whole was suffocatingly amateurish. It was certainly no comparison to Lee Konitz with the rough and ready band of Ron McClure and Jeff Williams in the same room. (I once heard a private tape of Konitz, Marc Johnson, and Jeff Williams that was just fantastic; hopefully that will come out someday.)
After the Tristano-era, Konitz became a musician like like Chet Baker and Joe Henderson, all star soloists that were happy to tour the world and play with anybody. Unlike Baker and Henderson, though, Konitz would repeatedly challenge his comfort zone stylistically. As a result, almost every Konitz record seems like a temporary experiment of some kind. Not everything is equally successful, but Konitz’s willingness to explore is refreshing.
One CD I like is Live at Birdland featuring Barry Harris’ trio with Calvin Hill and Leroy Williams. Together, Harris and Williams have some mystical, laid-back “whomp” that sounds like a continual conversation about swing. (Last year, I asked Harris how many gigs he had done without Leroy Williams since their first gig together in 1969. He thought about it for a moment and said, “One.”) Not everything on the absolutely unrehearsed “Live at Birdland” works as a record, but live I’m sure it was stunning. Konitz’s stark, pained sonority over Harris’ solemn bop chords on “This is Always” is affecting; I easily rank this with the great ballad performances I have heard.
Another wonderful example of Konitz fitting in with players that know each other well is Paul Motian’s On Broadway Vol. 3 with Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, and Charlie Haden. Motian’s approach to making a standards record is at the highest level. On Broadway Vol. 3 has duos, trios, quartets, and quintets: Konitz likes to do this kind of “orchestrating” live, too, but this is a rare example of it working so well on record. Konitz’s arabesques behind Lovano’s melody on “I Wish I Knew” sound like a freeform Bach violin partita, but then Konitz and Lovano have to play the long corny tune of “Tico Tico” completely straight -- and not get a solo, either. Genius!
There is even a tribute to Lennie Tristano: “Pennies From Heaven” is really “Pennies in Minor.” After five hard-charging choruses, Motian and Haden are left alone to play an even quarter-note time that fades out, just like the end of “Line Up” or other Tristano performances from 40 years earlier. It’s an ideal synthesis of classic Tristano-school and normal exciting jazz.
Perhaps jazz history would be written a little differently if Live at the Half Note with Konitz, Marsh, Bill Evans, Jimmy Garrison, and Paul Motian had been available at the time of its recording in 1959 instead of being released in 1994.
Another record that was held back for several years is the celebrated Miles Davis quintet Plugged Nickel sets with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. Konitz suggests that his Half Note and Miles’ Plugged Nickel - both in raw but clean sound and in front of a small audience - are of comparable quality. That’s a large claim, but he might be right. At any rate, musicians serious about playing changes will find a lot to chew on from either set.
Live at the Half Note features Tristano’s band and repertoire with a guest pianist. Bill Evans sounds very unselfconscious about being in Tristano’s chair, imitating Tristano at times but also making sure to be himself. Evans never denied being influenced by Tristano. While not a "Tristano student" in the hardcore sense, Evans, through his own vast influence, has probably put more hints of the Tristano conception in common-practice jazz than anybody else. (Evans' "Tristano aspect" is more obvious than Wayne Shorter, although Shorter's playing on the Plugged Nickel set is a good example of a Shorter that has listened to Warne Marsh.)
Evans’ comping on this record is divine. One of his choices is to lay out frequently, including on the Tristano melodies. I wish Tristano, Ball, and Mosca had done more of this too; something like “217 East Thirty-Second” is hard enough to hear without thick chords behind it. Evans’ restraint enables you to hear Jimmy Garrison clearly, too.
All In the Mix: I like to hear a black bass player get in Bill Evans’ way and be a funky counterpoint to his impressionism more than I like to hear Evans with the long line of white virtuoso bassists he would soon specialize in. (Not that I don’t admire Scott LaFaro, Eddie Gomez, and Marc Johnson, but my preferred LaFaro, Gomez, and Johnson records are somehow never with Bill Evans!) My favorite Evans is the comping he did with Miles Davis and Oliver Nelson with Paul Chambers on bass, my favorite Evans trio record is Everybody Digs Bill Evans with Sam Jones on bass, and my absolute favorite Evans piano solos are on this Half Note date with Garrison on bass. (Of course, there are white bassists who play more in that tradition, too; I would have loved to have heard Charlie Haden or Dennis Irwin play with Evans. Teddy Kotick on the very first Evans record sounds great, too.)
On “It’s You Or No One,” Evans tosses out a few single note lines, hears them stick, and then follows the thread into first seconds and then fourths, getting quite dissonant at times. He tastefully quits before anything stales. It is just a jaw-dropping piano solo, and a kind of solo that seemed harder for him to take as a leader. Fifteen years later, he would reunite with Konitz and Marsh for the Evans album Crosscurrents. It is a leaden stone compared with Live At the Half Note.
Live at the Half Note suggests endless possibilities for playing changes in straight-ahead jazz. This sense of endless possibility is what the Tristano message truly is. That Tristano isn’t on this recording, which for me is the best of the whole Tristano-era, only fits in with his essential loneliness.
