Lee Konitz - Duets (1970s US Milestone Gatefold Vinyl LP)

Lee Konitz - Duets | Vinyl LP - 1970s US Milestone Reissue (MSP-9013, orange label, distributed by Fantasy)

One session, one day, a different partner on nearly every track. On 25 September 1967 Lee Konitz walked into Plaza Sound Studios and worked through the list: Marshall Brown's valve trombone on "Struttin' With Some Barbecue", Joe Henderson's tenor on "You Don't Know What Love Is", Dick Katz's piano on "Checkerboard", Jim Hall's guitar on "Erb". He switches to tenor to meet Richie Kamuca on "Tickle Toe", a Lester Young line that drops him straight back among his own roots, then goes close to fully free with Ray Nance, Ellington's violinist, on "Duplexity". The five "Variations On Alone Together" are the clever piece of sequencing. Konitz starts alone on amplified alto and adds one musician at a time, until the final variation is a quartet with Karl Berger, Eddie Gomez and Elvin Jones. "Alphanumeric" then brings everyone back at once. The range covered in a single afternoon runs from something close to Dixieland through to free improvisation, and Konitz sounds untroubled at either end.

He had come close to walking away from all of it. Konitz spent much of the early sixties barely working, one of the architects of cool jazz left stranded by a decade that had moved on to Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, and he was near enough to retiring from music altogether. Duets is the record that put him back in the room, and it handed him something he kept for the rest of his life. The duo setting became his favourite format, and he returned to it for decades with Sal Mosca, Martial Solal, Jimmy Giuffre, Steve Lacy, Michel Petrucciani, Red Mitchell and Karl Berger again. The Elvin Jones meeting was not new either. The two had recorded together on "Motion" in 1961, and their reunion across the "Alone Together" variations is one of the best stretches on the record.

This is the 1970s US Milestone reissue in gatefold sleeve, catalogue number MSP-9013.