Maybe it's the heat, maybe jet lag. But during an interview on a sweltering afternoon at the Stanford Park Hotel in Menlo Park, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, 79, is a tad gruff and something less than forthcoming. It's the opposite of his bandstand demeanor, which is generous, almost overwhelmingly so.
There is no other player in jazz who dispenses musical ideas with such fecundity, and fluidity, as Konitz. He never plays what's expected, never indulges in cliche, never comes close to sounding stale. He is, to borrow the title of one of his 150 or so albums, the sound of surprise.
Yet there is something about his attitude during the interview that hints at the kind of performer he is. Konitz is tuned into the sounds around him - people talking, silverware clinking against plates, people coughing - to an alarming extent. It's as if Monk were being interviewed - the obsessive-compulsive TV detective, that is, not the dead jazz pianist. But this ability of Konitz's to listen keenly is obviously part of what makes him a genius. He's attentive to all input and can react at a moment's notice.
This isn't the bandstand, however, and the distractions are rife. He even asks his interviewer to lower his voice. "I like to keep the conversation between us, as it were," Konitz says.
Then someone walking by sneezes. Konitz jerks his head. A second loud sneeze. " Jeesus!" Konitz cries out, craning his neck all the way around to stare at the offender.
Konitz has flown in from his home in New York to close out the Stanford Jazz Festival on Saturday in a trio with bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Akira Tana, and as is the custom with the Stanford Jazz Workshop, he's led some master saxophone classes.
How did he get his start on his instrument?
"You wanna go that far back?" he says, incredulous. "You know, I don't like to talk about my personal life in public. I don't think people are really interested in that. I'm no philosopher. I just play music, that's all I can talk about."
But eventually Konitz settles down and loosens up.
"Did you hear that?" he says as a fork hits a plate. ... "Those people ... eating so loud. ..."
Konitz grew up in Chicago with two older brothers and parents in the dry cleaning business. He spent a lot of time listening to the era's dance bands on the radio. "Benny Goodman, especially, fascinated me with his clarinet playing," he says. "One year I was given a saxophone for Christmas - a tenor saxophone. Two years later I had an opportunity to do a job in a show band, and they needed an alto player. So I got an alto, and that stuck."
In 1947 Konitz joined the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, an outfit that was influential because of its unusual instrumentation for jazz - French horns and tuba in the lineup - and because of its coloristic arrangements by an unknown Canadian named Gil Evans. At the same time, Konitz began studying with a blind pianist named Lennie Tristano, who promulgated a unique twist on modern jazz that combined bebop, ragtime, swing and some European strains into a melodic music that roared like a freight train.
"I was fascinated with what he was doing," Konitz says of Tristano. "It was the answer for me, opening the door to another world that I didn't really know about. ... He was one of the first ones to put the subject matter together. It was a blessing to me."
Then a young Miles Davis, looking to escape the high-wire rigors of bebop, for which he wasn't much suited in the first place, decided to put together a nine-piece unit, and looked to Thornhill's band as a model, adopting the brass approach and hiring Konitz and Evans. With baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, pianist John Lewis and drummer Max Roach also aboard, the nonet recorded sessions that led to the "Birth of the Cool" album, which gave rise to the cool jazz movement that later became associated with the West Coast.
Musically groundbreaking, the nonet was also controversial because it contained black and white musicians together. Konitz says he took a lot of heat over it.
Davis "defended me when guys criticized him hiring me for the nonet. The black guys thought he should have a black alto player, like Sonny Stitt or Jackie McLean. But he wanted my sound for the ensemble."
Here's how Davis recalls the time in his 1989 autobiography, "Miles": "See, this whole idea started out just as an experiment, a collaborative experiment. Then a lot of black musicians came down on my case about their not having work, and here I was hiring white guys in my band. So I just told them that if a guy could play as good as Lee Konitz played - that's who they were mad about most, because there were a lot of black alto players around - I would hire him every time, and I wouldn't give a damn if he was green with red breath. I'm hiring a motherf- to play, not for what color he is."
Race is not a subject Konitz feels particularly easy about discussing.
"I didn't have many intimate friends, white or black," he says. "Charlie Parker was always very gracious toward me. But I remember once being asked to play opposite (alto saxophonist) Cannonball Adderley. My wife was pregnant at the time and I needed the job. But I just thought I wouldn't be comfortable doing that. Because he was great in a very definite way, and I like to try to improvise, and I don't fit in that context."
But this sounds more like a musical choice. "Well, race had something to do with it," Konitz says. "I'm just trying to think if it was a white player, like Phil Woods or something, I think I still would have been intimidated. But a little less, I think."
After the nonet, Konitz joined pianist Stan Kenton's big band for a year or so, then struck out on his own and has been a leader ever since, playing all around the world in a dizzying array of contexts. He's performed in his own nonets, in duets, solo saxophone, free improvised music, classical orchestras; he's played Brazilian and Haitian music. His latest three releases, each on Omnitone and featuring tenor saxophonist Ohad Talmor, are "Portology," with a Portuguese big band; "Inventions," pitting Konitz against an Austrian string quartet; and "New Nonet," featuring top-notch young jazzers like guitarist Ben Monder, drummer Matt Wilson and trombonist Jacob Garchik.
His willingness to try anything has made Konitz a bit difficult to pin down - try as some might. He's been called an intellectual player, even though he's amazingly passionate. A favorite line is to dub him the only alto saxophonist to emerge in the bebop era who wasn't influenced by Parker. That's ridiculous - Parker's sound is in Konitz's genes. It's said Konitz plays without vibrato, which is true, except when he plays with vibrato.
Local tenor saxophonist Anton Schwartz, who as a kid studied with Konitz's longtime colleague, the late tenor player Warne Marsh, says, "There's a beautiful level-headedness about Konitz's playing. He doesn't lunge or streak in one direction. ... I picture him like a basketball player with his hands out, waiting to see the way things are gonna go and then burst in any direction, accordingly."
What it comes down to for Konitz is what's at the heart of jazz: improvisation.
"This method, according to my makeup, it was very attractive. The idea of being able to work at this material and then start from scratch, theoretically, in the act of doing it, was fascinating.
"And all these years I've confined myself to a handful of so-called standard tunes. Because, I ask myself, can I play yet another chorus of 'All the Things You Are'? And I can! It's like the dog who licks itself because it can. Or something like that."
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