Search - Lee Konitz, Marc Johnson, Joey Baron :: Sound of Surprise

The great Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown used to get up slowly after he'd been tackled, whether he was hurt or not. If he always did this, Brown reasoned, the opposition could never tell if they had inflicted any damage. He would rise to his feet like an old man, leaving observers to wonder if he'd really slowed down. Phlegmatic alto saxist Lee Konitz has probably never before found himself in the same sentence with Jim Brown. But, like the wily fullback, Konitz has made it impossible for the rest of us to tell if he's gotten old. True, he helped Miles Davis launch his Birth of the Cool in 1949. But since then, Konitz has consistently worked to prune his style of ornamentation, to leave unexpected spaces between his phrases, to avoid fast, note-filled passages when less busy is best. This paring down has resulted in one of the most distinctive styles in all of jazz, one in which Konitz sounds ever fresh because it doesn't depend on youthful energy or knuckle-busting technique. So even Konitz veterans can rejoice in Sound of Surprise, on which he simply does what he always does--play standards and his own relaxed originals at medium tempos. Tenor saxist Ted Brown and an all-star rhythm section of Joey Baron (John Zorn's favorite drummer), Marc Johnson (Bill Evans's last bassist), and guitar hero John Scofield support Konitz with the calm zeal of true believers. The only false note lies in the clichéd album title, which represents the umpteenth use of critic Whitney Balliett's famous definition of jazz (Jeez, is he getting royalties?). The phrase lost its cachet long ago--something you still can't say about Konitz's music. --Neil Tesser