Live at Birdland catches four of the most personal voices in modern jazz in a single, unplanned encounter. Alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian played two nights at the New York club in December 2009. There was no rehearsal and no set list. The six standards and jazz classics chosen from those sets all run beyond ten minutes, and each one sounds worked out on the spot.
The meeting had a history. As John Fordham recalled in The Guardian, Konitz, Mehldau and Haden had first worked together on a 1997 Blue Note session, which helped bring the young pianist to wider attention. Haden and Motian had shared the rhythm section of Keith Jarrett's American group some forty years before. Konitz, then in his eighties, or Mehldau would ease into a tune of his choosing and the others would join. The sets were recorded by James Farber with Paul Zinman, Nelson Wong and Sean Mair, then mixed at Avatar Studios by Farber and Manfred Eicher, who produced the album.
The programme runs from Lover Man and George Shearing's Lullaby of Birdland to Miles Davis's Solar, which Konitz introduces loosely before the group gathers around it. In I Fall in Love Too Easily he bends the shape of the song freely. It closes with a long duo for alto and piano that Fordham heard as a classical-sounding rhapsody. Sonny Rollins's Oleo, the longest track at over fifteen minutes, opens as a duet for Motian and Konitz before the quartet turns it into a brisk four-way conversation. On Lullaby of Birdland Haden takes a solo that keeps the outline of the tune in view while Mehldau's right hand strays far from the melody.
Reviewers in 2011 were taken with the lightness of the interplay. In The Guardian Fordham praised "Mehldau's uncanny amplification of Konitz's phrases" and the up-tempo passages that "fizz with collective energy". Paul de Barros wrote in DownBeat that "these guys hook up softly and magically", adding that Konitz played with more verve than usual. The album is also one of the last records of Haden and Motian together, as Motian died in 2011 and Haden in 2014.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2162, first released in May 2011. The cover uses a still from Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma.
