Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz And The Tacitly Unplanned Set

One of the most incredible things one can witness in music happens all the time in jazz — even though audiences often don't even realize they're observing it when they are.

Most concerts you go to, in any genre, involve some advance planning: you know, "we're going to play these pieces in this order," etc. But sometimes you'll get some musicians who agree to start playing together without a clue of what they're going to present — and without talking about it either.

Tacit, unscripted agreements are common in jazz, whether deciding the order of solos, or how exactly to end a long, winding piece. It also happens all the time in jazz jam sessions, and in completely-improvised free jazz. The real rara avis, though, is when a band spontaneously decides the compositions it wants to play without a word exchanged between lips. You know, when a band decides to "wing it" for an entire set — and makes it sound amazing.

Two shows I went to recently, both at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., attest to the wonder of such a phenomenon: both were executed so well you wouldn't have guessed there was no pre-existing game plan. Saxophonist Lee Konitz played with a piano trio called Minsarah last weekend, and in October, Bill Frisell's trio stood on the same stage.

Highlights from the Frisell set are the stuff of this week's JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater. For now, here's how the 9:30 p.m. set began:

"You Are My Sunshine," by the Bill Frisell Trio, live at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Terrace Theater. Bill Frisell, guitar/electronics; Tony Scherr, bass; Kenny Wollesen, drums. Washington, D.C.: Oct. 16, 2009.

 

This is, of course, "You Are My Sunshine," rendered with something of the appropriately melancholy sentiment of the original — albeit much weirder. It took Frisell a little while to arrive at the melody, as he spent some time coercing various noises out of his expansive setup, but once he did, his bassist and drummer (Tony Scherr and Kenny Wollesen) instantly caught on. The rest, of course, you hear here.

I couldn't quite tell what was planned vs. what was not, so I made it a point to track down Frisell after the show. I asked him: "So, did you plan out any of that set?" He shot me a quizzical look and laughed softly, as if I were joking. "No, none of it. We had no idea what we were going to play. I had to think, 'OK, what tunes do I know?'"

Here's what he knew: a Monk tune (the infrequently-heard "Raise Four"), a standard ("The Days Of Wine And Roses"), two Hank Williams tunes ("Lovesick Blues," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"), several Frisell originals ("Keep Your Eyes Open," "Throughout," "Poem For Eva"), and even a piece from the Malian musician Boubacar Traore ("Baba Drame"). Multiple communities, composers, continents. And if the rest of the band didn't "know" each piece, they certainly knew how to fake it so it looked like they did.

For many years, Lee Konitz has played a similar, if somewhat more democratic game at his live gigs. He asks everybody to take turns starting off a jazz standard without telling anybody what it is (including his drummers), and for everyone to join in when they figure it out. It makes for plenty of fascinating, fresh timbral combinations as the members of the band attempt to follow along. I've seen Konitz do this twice now, with two different bands, and both times it's confounded me: how well-versed do you have to be to even play the game?

These sorts of situations rely on absolutely clear communication, so they don't always work out perfectly. In the middle of Lee Konitz's set, pianist Florian Weber was having trouble figuring out that the band was playing "What's New," and had to call Konitz over before launching in. And if this interview is to be believed, no less than Brad Mehldau has been stymied by Konitz's well-disguised "Stella by Starlight."

But here's the thing: most people who haven't seen hundreds of jazz shows wouldn't have deciphered what was going on. (There was an audible "ooh" when Konitz announced what he was doing.) More importantly, when it's on, it's fantastic. The moment when a new member locks in is the exact feeling that makes jazz so thrilling to witness. And there are the mutations: a suggestive cymbal scrape or bass ostinato can lead into an entirely different groove — or an entirely different song, for that matter. Again: all done with eyes and ears alone.

Think about that. How can a group of musicians know a shared repertoire so well that all intuit what the others want to play without rehearsal, without prior knowledge, without written notation, without anything but the simplest of audio-visual cues initiated by the extraordinarily eclectic inspiration of one of its members? Part of the answer, as Frisell told me, was that his particular trio had been playing off and on for well over a decade — not to mention their other pairings-off too. Likewise, the band Minsarah is made up of Berklee friends Ziv Ravitz (drums), Jeff Denson (bass) and Weber, who have also played together tightly for some time. Lee Konitz, despite having 40+ years on each of his bandmates, is a musical kindred spirit: they've already made two records together, the second a live Village Vanguard album set for release next February.

Might I repeat: this phenomenon happens all the time. Maybe it's only one tune or encore in an otherwise planned set, or maybe it's the entire thing. But it's still non-verbal, non-written communication that somehow results in beautiful music. Is it not a miracle that anyone can build up such a knowledge base and level of musicianship to do this sort of thing week in and week out? Is it not beyond mind-blowing that so many musicians have done so? This Thanksgiving, I'd like to thank jazz musicians for dedicating their lives to understand music so well that "winging it" loses all its casual connotations.