Customer Reviews

Another Shade of Blue

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I attended the recording session at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles ( Dec 1996) The first Cd was entitled Alone Together....that is a great CD.....but I noticed that a lot of the material recorded in those 2 nights was left out.....I wanted to hear more. Finally in 1999 the second installment was released....ANOTHER SHADE OF BLUE..... DO yourself the favor now.....buy both the CD's they are both truly awesome recordings

I've always loved the sound of Mr Konitz, I confess, as much as that of Paul Desmond or Charlie Parker. Some have noted an alleged "thinness" of tone but I prefer to call his sound "distinctive and different" but also beguiling and attractive. Taste I guess. I enjoyed this album as much for the beautiful SOUND of the three instruments as for the melodic variations or swing it contains. Mr Mehldau has an exquisite touch - check out his solo on the title track - and Mr Haden, who favours always the low end of his instrument, has one of the best sounds in all bassdom, woody, full, resonant. This is not ground breaking music but a relaxed live recording of a trio of musicians very comfortable with each other and their art. They make it sound so easy. Mr Konitz's exploration of WHAT'S NEW is worth the price of admission. But all of Mr Mehldau's work on this album is a delight.

... but spurn jazz:

"tonality"

"modulation"

"chromaticism"

"development"

"prepared dissonance"

"melisma"

"inversion"

"rubato"

"polyrhythm"

"hemiola"....

I could go on and on, but my point is that this CD contains very sophisticated music, to which all those terms could be applied. The trio of saxophonist Lee Konitz, pianist Brad Mehldau, and bassist Charlie Haden combines three of the most classically knowledgeable jazz musicians ever. If you can appreciate the rhythmic complexity of Ockeghem, the chromatic finesse of Gesualdo, the mathematical intricacy of Bach's 'Musical Offering', the thematic inventiveness of Boccherini, then I can't imagine why you wouldn't hear some of the same musical values in this performance.

Konitz, Haden, and Mehldau all have the reputation, in the jazz world, of being dispassionate, i.e. "cool", performers. Disciples, if you will, of pianist Lennie Tristano. Konitz in fcat did study with Tristano, and the emphasis here is on "study". These "cats" do play a studied, disciplined form of jazz, and their discipline gets expressed on this recording as beautifully sensitive ensemble. They don't just take turns wailing choruses; they play into each other's musical thoughts. They dialogue harmonically and melodically. They mix and match. And a more perfectly matched trio, in terms of musical instincts, would be hard to find.

Konitz is often described as "the only alto saxophonist of his generation that didn't sound like Charlie Parker." That's sort of a back-handed compliment, but it's not entirely true. Konitz learned as much from Parker as anybody. You'll hear the influence in the way Konitz incorporates his musical memory into his extended choruses - themes from standards, riffs from other jazzmen, bits of folk and classical melody, all integrated into his development of the 'composition' in the play book. I don't want to assert that Konitz is another JS Bach -- that would be hyperbole -- but it seems to me that his almost subliminal allusions to familiar musical themes is very similar to Bach's subtle incorporation of Lutheran hymns and chorales into his most abstract instrumental variations. In a sense, all music alludes to all other music. It depends on the listener's memories, conscious or unconscious, of all the music the listener has heard in her/his lifetime. That's how music evokes our emotions. Konitz is at his most evocative on this recording.

I've never picked a jazz CD for my "Must Buy" of the month before, but that's what I have in mind for June, 2010: "Another Shade of Blue".

For the information of "editorial reviewer" Britt Robson, "Everything Happens to Me" was written by Thomas Adair and Matt Dennis, not Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael.

Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael wrote an obscure song called "Everything Happens to Me," but it's not on this album. Matt Dennis and Tom Adair wrote a much more famous song with the same title, and that's the one that appears here.