Featured Post

BFRC

I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Lee Konitz

Lee Konitz has died of this fucking virus. He was 92. I rarely feel harshly the deaths of people I don't know personally, but in the mood I'm in I just burst into tears.

There was this riff in Kerouac about Lee Konitz's long melodic lines. I can't find it right now. On this and other bop players he based his "spontaneous bop prosody." I studied extensively Coolidge's takes on Kerouac; CC is a drummer, so he really felt it in a quite literal sense. I'm reminded that Creeley based his prosody on bop too.

There's a lot of sentimentalism in the beat / bop connection, but there is a direct influence on the writers. It's a different rhythmic conception in music, and the generation of Creeley combined it with Williams Carlos Williams's sense of syncopation in the line breaks.

We can call this modernism in jazz, but really I guess jazz was modern from the days of Pres, Gershwin, and Ellington.


No comments: