At 74, Lee Konitz is always liable to be called an elder statesman but if he is, he simply refuses to be pensioned off, metaphorically speaking, to the jazz equivalent of the House of Lords. He just wouldn't belong there. Yet one of the more intriguing, if useless and ultimately unfathomable, questions is to ask where does he belong?
From the start, to judge by his music, he seems to have gone wherever his own inclinations took him. Most famously, at a time when Charlie Parker's searingly blues-inflected innovations cast a spell over a whole generation of jazz musicians, Konitz, using the same instrument as Parker - the alto - found another way, more restrained, with little of the vocalised cry that characterised Parker's hot tone. And, if anything, it was also less inclined to rely on formula.
It was, of course, immediately dubbed cool. The term's implied comparisons - black versus white, the emotional versus the intellectual - must have irritated him then, but they didn't deflect him. And the music he created at that time, with the so-called school led by pianist Lennie Tristano, didn't lack intensity or emotional bite. It was just different from the prevailing musical climate.
His career hasn't lacked variety since. There was his time with the massed ranks of Stan Kenton's big bands, where the brass was so powerful that he was forced to blow harder just so his alto could be heard. Over the years he has recorded with quartets, duos, trios, nonets, strings, even essayed some freedom with the avant-garde. It didn't matter if the players were young or old, jazz or classical, mainstream or cutting edge, flavour of the month or obscure; they just had to be good and to have something interesting to say.
Cliques obviously don't interest him. His playing defies categorisation. Try to put him in one box and you'll find he won't fit, or if you think he does, he will have quietly wriggled out of it and gone somewhere else. Yet his reaction to all this concentration on his individuality is surprising.
"Thank you," he says. "Every time someone mentions that phrase about being an individual player I realise that I have never tried to be an individual player. Wherever I turn, everyone is trying, or expressing his need, to be unique, and I guess I'm fortunate in some way in not having been obsessed with that kind of need. And I'm very grateful that it's turned out that way, especially since I've been able to change my sound and my concept from day to day, and still people can say that they can identify me."
How much of this is nature, how much nurture, is anybody's guess. But he is equally surprising - and revealing - when he talks about the culture he grew up in. He was born into a Jewish family in Chicago in 1927 and never felt totally comfortable with it.
"I've had a bit of a problem with Jewishness sometimes," he says. "As a child, I had a distinct feeling of an in-group kind of mentality that separated gentiles from Jews and I'd never liked that before I knew why. I didn't really know the full implications of that as a child but I didn't like that part of it. And the music never appealed to me. I was actually asked to make some kind of a klezmer music situation and I wasn't the least bit interested. This is just my taste; I mean, some guys do it great.
"Just coincidentally, I have a thing about blue notes in jazz, which I refer to as Jew notes sometimes. Whenever I heard Stan Getz going ya-da-da-da" - he sings a phrase with a definite blue tinge - "I said that sounds very Jewish to me. And I've never had a feeling of being funky like black guys can be, most of them insincerely. But Charlie Parker could do it pretty genuinely. And so that's some other connection to Jewishness."
Considering that Konitz's tone has always been so distinctive, what influenced it?
"Well, anatomy," he says. And choice? "Choice." Other players, too? "Of course. I was going to get to Johnny Hodges" - the great altoist with Duke Ellington - "he was probably the first one that seduced me in some way with a sweet sound. And then there was one record of Benny Carter's, especially, that was very influential - I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me, with Roy Eldridge and tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. That was a great solo he played."
Carter, with Hodges and Parker (also an influence on Konitz) are the Holy Trinity of jazz alto. But Konitz mentions a further prime influence, the gentle, utterly unaggressive tenor saxophonist Lester Young, another who resolutely went his own way. When I mention I have Young's picture mounted at home, it draws another direct response.
"If there was a picture of Lester Young in the Middle East someplace, they'd stop all this bullshit. Or maybe in your own country. God forbid. Incidentally, that isn't coming down to Dublin, I hope?"
I assured him it wasn't. "I see some of these assholes marching with their things across their chests," he says, "And I think: 'Come on, grow up.' " If only it were that simple - not that, I'm sure, he believes for a moment it is.
But back to musical, rather than political, divisions. He's philosophical about the current US media emphasis on race where jazz is concerned. "I guess it's different for everybody and there is still that black and white kind of thing going on about hot and cool and all that bullshit, whatever it is. And so we live with it and we say: 'Please spell the name right'. "
As with most musicians, it doesn't enter into his own choices. The excellent young black tenor, Mark Turner, has been on one of his recent albums. Moreover, Turner himself has been influenced by a saxophonist indelibly linked with Konitz's early career, the great (white) tenor, Warne Marsh. But Konitz points out that Marsh has influenced other black tenors, too.
"You know, Wayne Shorter heard Warne pretty good, but he was able to use it in his very creative way," he says. "And Joe Henderson paid great lip service to Warne Marsh and I could hear the influence from Warne. But they were very creative people and Mark is looking for his way, you know."
Konitz has locked horns creatively with another outstanding musician of Turner's generation, when he made a series of live albums from club dates with pianist Brad Mehldau and veteran bassist Charlie Haden. The idea almost didn't bear fruit, because it had been set up originally as a duo with Haden. Mehldau was added later, an addition that at first threatened to upset the apple cart.
"Well, I was a little bit angry after the first set, because the thought that I was going to play with Charlie Haden meant that I was going to play with someone that I could play more notes than in a solo," he admits. "And then Brad came along and did his virtuoso thing and I said: 'Oh shit, here I am again with a virtuoso.' But by the next set he was really listening and he is a great player. His trio is one of my favourites."
One thing noticeable about Konitz - apart from the fact that it's difficult to detect personal clichΘs in his playing - is that, despite his willingness to seek out fresh situations, he does tend to favour standards or lines derived from standard sequences.
"I like the familiarity of those good songs," he acknowledges. "And somehow it gives me extra confidence to go out and just try to play something new on a familiar setting. But more and more I am writing and slowly using things.
"But, you know, I am coming to Dublin and playing with guys that I never played with before; well, I played with the piano player" - the emerging young Italian, Antonio Farao - "when he was about nine, I think, and he was playing like McCoy Tyner then. And his brother was playing like Elvin Jones; he was about 10 or something, a little older than that. But they are both very talented guys."
In fact, the drummer brother will not be here. Farao's trio is completed by bassist Gilles Naturel and drummer Jean-Pierre Arnaud. The pianist, incidentally, is usually described as a virtuoso, but Konitz remains unfazed.
"That will be a new and unique situation and I am looking forward to it," he says.
Lee Konitz plays with the Antonio Farao Trio at Vicar Street on Saturday, September 8th as part of the ESB Autumn Season Jazz Series