Beethoven's String Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59, No. 3
As played by the Budapest String Quartet from Beethoven - The Middle String Quartets, In Concert at the Library of Congress: 1940-1960.
I pulled this set out arbitrarily the other night and this recording from 1946 jumped out at me.
After a crappy day of working from home, and my now regular Friday post-apocalyptic grocery store experience, this was was I went to to ease myself into the evening.
Another week, another hero gone, another loss to the pandemic.
I came to Lee Konitz relatively recently. I'd known him since first learning about Birth of the Cool as a teenager, but really only started to dig in over the last decade. A half-dozen or so years younger than Charlie Parker, Konitz had Bird's melodic and rhythmic complexity, but burned at lower flame. "Cool" was the label, but he deliberately displayed a warmth which his mentor Lennie Tristano deliberately lacked. Like Jim Hall, he was always "modern," but never "avant-garde."
Konitz mostly made a career of improvising over the standard standards (Body and Soul, All the Things You Are, and the like) sometimes with his own melodies in the Parker/Tristano tradition (for example Subconcious-Lee is set to the harmonies of What is This Thing Called Love,) often eschewing the melody all together.
Here's a short tribute, an arbitrary selection of favorites spanning 62 years.
I also wrote this when I saw him live back in 2014.
The pandemic has taken a number of musicians I've respected and admired, Manu Dibango, Bucky Pizzarelli, Ellis Marsalis among them. The one that's hit me most to the bones is Hal Willner, the brilliant producer and musical thinker, whose cross-genre compilation albums were a bedrock influence on the Unpopular Music webcasts.and on my musical outlook in general.
I posted this about two-and-a-half years ago, and that's the way I feel now.
Here's a small sample of his work. A lot of these tracks have
been presented in various Unpopular Music programs, but bear repeating. The first half is the brighter of the two.
