Lee Konitz/Alan Broadbent, More Live-Lee

[Nate Dorward]

This is, er, more of the same live residency that yielded Live-Lee a year ago. Creative album-title, eh? (& the cover art is as naff as on vol. 1, too...) I was perhaps slightly less excited about Live-Lee than I'd expected--I revere Konitz & Broadbent is I think a really underrated pianist (Personal Standards is one of the great piano albums of the 1990s) but despite the many felicities of the music it did seem a bit mannered & narrow. The new one isn't strikingly different, though it's a trifle more uptempo on average than the (more ballad-heavy) first volume, which may recommend it to some tastes. It certainly isn't a second-best helping--it's all at the same (high) level as the first, though perhaps the first still has the edge for the lovely "Gundula". -- The ballads here as before are a bit uninvolving (compare the papery, dry "Body & Soul" here with the much more emotionally resonant version on Jazz Nocturne), but when the pace picks up it's good stuff: a nice "Invitation", a sharp blow round "Thingin'" & a themeless improv on "Lennie's Pennies", a Konitz solo called "Nothin'", & a curious piece called "Bending Broadly" which has a few snippets of favourite Konitz lines (one I recognized from Lee's RCA album with Brown & Abercrombie) with a little improv to mortar them together. Broadbent gets a short "You Go to My Head" as a solo feature.

Pretty good, though I think I'll be returning to other Konitz discs more frequently. This is one of the rare albums where I feel that the accusations of dryness & lack of emotion that you sometimes hear tossed at the Tristanoite school might stick. This doesn't excite me in the way that the best stuff in this genre does (e.g. Konitz's Motion or his work on Alone Together--a great album, despite Mehldau's general noxiousness on it).

[mke]

Originally Posted by Nate Dorward

lack of unemotion

err...?

[Nate Dorward]

Fixed the typo, though the phrase has a kind of interesting ring to it anyway....

[shrugs]

I had the first one and liked it on my first listen but could never get into it again.
Hopefully, the Horo 2lp set Duplicity with Konitz/Solal will get a cd reissue. However, the Horo catalog seems to be lost for the time being.

[frankiepop]

i have the 1st cd and cant imagine why they would have released that, let alone release a 2nd. i love lee, but mannnnn, was this ever a dud.

[frankiepop]

i have to say i love this description for this cd let's use it as a sniglet or something for jc ----------->

lack of unemotion

this could be fun..

a lack of unemotion...is utterly vacant of any emotion...it is even completely swept clean of no emotion...it is well described as or defined as a black hole of no emotion.

ex; a vulcan lacks emotion or is emotionless. lack of unemotion reaches the level where there is no emotion to lack because the space is devoid of even the concept of emotion, so there can be no lack of emotion...or......

[frankiepop]

please expound if u pleeze...

err...?

come on, mke, do i have to write it out for you, draw you a map, color-in your coloring book for you.....? get with the pro-gram.

[Nate Dorward]

Oh the first volume's okay, so is the second volume, but neither of them really has the intensityof Konitz's best work. It's a bit of a pity as I like the underrecorded Broadbent a lot & was really looking forward to these discs as a result.

[mke]

Originally Posted by frankiepop

a lack of unemotion...is utterly vacant of any emotion...it is even completely swept clean of no emotion...it is well described as or defined as a black hole of no emotion.

ex; a vulcan lacks emotion or is emotionless. lack of unemotion reaches the level where there is no emotion to lack because the space is devoid of even the concept of emotion, so there can be no lack of emotion...or......

Awesome! Will Nate go with it in his final review?