Audio : October, 1957
Charles A. Robertson

The album title comes from the cover photograph of the artist taken through a foreground of equipment in Rudy Van Gelder’s sound salon. The look inside Lee Konitz, provided by the eight pieces, shows him to have mellowed considerably since his Lennie Tristano days. His alto has lost much of its anemic quality and sounds almost well-fed. His recent experiences with the tenor saxophone are detailed for the first time on records, and its tone is so full that it becomes gorged with riches for a politely-honked burp near the end of the concluding Indiana. Altogether, his isi a warmer, more human personality, suited to the father of five childen.

Gathered about him are Tristano graduates: Billy Bauer, guitar, and Arnold Fishkind bass, on the alto side; Sal Mosca, piano, and Peter Ind, bass, on the tenor side. Twenty-year-old Dick Scott is drummer throughout. It is an improvised session and the Tristano influence is felt only when it fits in the constantly evolving flow of ideas. Rather than a base it is applied, especially by Bauer, as a pastel coloration of a stronger pulse. The Konitz originals are Kary’s Trance and Cork ‘n’ Big, named for the nitery where he was playing when the record was released. Ind has a cogent solo in his Nesuhi’s Instant, and the standards All of Me, Star Eyes, Everything Happens To Me, and Sweet and Lovely complete the bill.

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Billboard : 05/20/1957
Score of 82

First Konitz in many months, and it packs unusual interest in that one side features the modern alto star in his first outing on tenor. Konitz has been tending toward a more sanguine, less frigid approach, and on tenor he’s almost gutty. His alto is still highly personal, lyrical and absorbing. Outstanding cover. This one should sell nicely.

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Cashbox : 06/01/1957

Dealers will find this latest Lee Konitz attraction healthy not only in its name value, but also because it occasions Konitz’s first disk try on the tenor sax (all of side 2 plus a section of Kary’s Trance on side 1). With the exception of the appropriate emotion on the plaintive Dennis–Adair item, Everything Happens To Me, the affairs sparkle brightly to the velvet roving of the Konitz sound. Good backing includes Billy Bauer on guitar, Dick Scott and Sal Mosca on piano and Arnold Fishkind and Peter Ind on bass. Keep the jazz shelf well stocked with this one.

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Playboy Magazine : October, 1957

There are times when, listening to a whole batch of new releases, we get to wondering whether we’re jaded, whether it isn’t a failing on our own that makes so many records sound adequate but not especially exciting. Happened to us the other night – and the we put on Lee Konitz Inside Hi-Fi and the old electric thrill bounced right back. This is cool jazz as we like it: musicianly but uncontrived, precise yet relaxed, modern in its attitude but with its swinging ancestry in evidence throughout. Side one brings us Konitz‘ alto in four first-rate bands, two of them Konitz originals. A solid rhythm goes with: guitar, bass, drums. Side two is a surprise; all of a sudden here’s Konitz on tenor – for the first time on a record – with piano, bass, drums backing him up. It sounds good enough to make us hope he’ll do it again.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 06/09/1957

Of the cool school, Konitz is still the coolest of the cool. On this one he blows cool tenor as well as cool alto; the result is a tone a little rougher but not noticeably any warmer. Recommended for Konitz fans.

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Saturday Review
Martin Williams : 06/15/1957

Konitz on both alto and tenor saxophone accompanied mostly by other students of Lennie Tristano, past and recent. They know their techniques. Konitz’s forte has been as a valuable contributor to ensemble styles and occasional soloist (as on the Davis set above or on the Tristano Capitols). On these extended solos we learn again that technique is no more than a means. His first two choruses on Katy’s Trance, for example, are excellent, but after them we are largely coasting through changes and phrases. His work on tenor seems well worth continuing.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 06/29/1957

No one has been more delicately venturesome in modern jazz than the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, unless it be his friend the pianist Lennie Tristano. Konitz has done a great deal of musical celebration; he seems to have gotten a good deal of dry analysis out of his system, and he is a pleasure to hear in Lee Konitz Inside Hi-Fi with rhythmic support and the lovely interplay of Billy Bauer‘s guitar. Konitz also assumes the tenor saxophone in certain passages; he says he enjoyed it, and I think he would have. If I were pressed to the wall in one of those horrid demands for dogma which now and then are asked of us, I would name Billy Bauer as my favorite jazz guitarist. He is an exceedingly subtle and elaborate operator, and, apart from his degree of talent, I prefer a much simpler approach to the instrument – more chording and less linear fancy…

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Down Beat : 07/11/1957
Leonard Feather : 4.5 stars

A unpretentious blowing session, this is must for Konitzologists if only because Lee plays tenor on five tracks.

How he sounds on tenor is no surprise. He is the same musician with his fingers a little farther apart. Play these tracks at 45 r.p.m., and you will immediately and unmistakably hear Konitz on alto. True, his command of the horn is imperfect, but the occasional slight goofs (notably in the second and fourth choruses of Indiana) do not mitigate against mood or enjoyment.

The best tenor solo in terms of continuity is the four-choruses opening on All of Me. Sal Mosca, here as on the others, plays in quiet understatement and could have built more. Nesuhi’s Instant is simply a dozen choruses of andante blues, with Ind wailing two at the top and another pair at the end.

Kary is the best track on the LP. Unlike the rest, it is organized, at least to the extent of an intriguing minor unison line by Lee’s alto and Bauer‘s guitar. Bauer’s comping and solo work are superb throughout this side; he achieves an almost celeste-like sound on the relaxed and charming Everything.

Sweet and Lovely, a stimulating chord pattern, has Lee in fine fettle as he makes the changes with ease and continuity. Cork is another dozen choruses of blues, a little slower, with alto throughout, except for two Bauer choruses, until they suddenly introduce a unison theme for the last two. A funky theme, too; the kind of blues Bird might have written.

At least four stars for the mainly-alto side and five for the unique value of the tenor side; hence the compromise rating.

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Liner Notes by John S. Wilson

There is more than guile and gallimaufry in the design and title which decorate the front cover of this album. With full justice – and an equal lack of imagination – the set might have been Lee Konitz in Hi-Fi since to be in high fidelity (hi-fi) appears to be the current high fashion (hi-fash). But the Messrs. Atlantic Recording Corporation have no pash for fash. The Messrs. are probing, inquiring and utterly incorrigible gentlemen and when the enclosed performances were being recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s sound atelier it occurred to them that Konitz might look particularly intriguing (even more than he normally does) if he climbed inside Van Gelder’s maze of wires, eggbeaters, thermostats and retrogravitators. That is the real inside story of how Lee Konitz managed to get inside hi-fi and those who are familiar with the work of that other great inside man, John Gunther, will find that Konitz offers a slightly different kind of report. The essential split in the two styles is that Gunther takes notes while Konitz gives them.

Well, so much for gallimaufry. So much for guile.

Beneath this cozening blandishment lies a layer of basic truth. This album may not literally offer Lee Konitz inside hi-fi but it is an unusual peek inside Lee Konitz. For here is a musician exposing his inner workings to the public gaze. On the four selections on Side Two, Konitz, the only postwar alto man who has been able to challenge the overwhelming influence of Charlie Parker, plays tenor for the first time on records.

(In this connection, it may be recalled that Parker himself had a brief fling on tenor when he was with Earl Hines‘ band in 1943. When Hines first heard Bird and was convinced that he wanted him, the only opening he had was on tenor, replacing Budd Johnson. Hines bought Parker a tenor and Charlie rehearsed with it for three weeks but he couldn’t get used to it. “Man, this thing is too big!” he used to complain to Billy Eckstine. Bird couldn’t feel it, Eckstine said. But he played it, anyhow.)

This Konitz tenor session came about as the result of some recordings that Lee made in Germany for Atlantic. During the session, Konitz impulsively borrowed Hans Koller‘s tenor for one number. Afterwards both Lee and Atlantic were sufficiently impressed by this tenor number to think it worth trying a few more, aiming at one side of an LP as a starter.

This is it. The tenor that Konitz plays here is one that he casually borrowed from a shop on his way to the recording session.

“I enjoy the tenor,” Konitz said afterwards, “I enjoy it but if I played it a while I think I might enjoy it too much. I think a lot of the neurotic relationship I have with my alto would start coming out on the tenor. What I mean is, on alto I’ve come to expect that certain things are going to happen automatically, that certain notes are going to sound certain ways. The emotion and the mechanical all get intertwined. The same thing might start happening on tenor but right now it’s all new and unexpected.”

In this sense, the tenor was an adventurous, unshackling experience for Konitz. His playing on All of Me, Star Eyes, Nesuhi’s Instant and Indiana is a rougher-toned, more strongly projected Konitz than is usually heard when he is dealing with the certainties of the alto. (The uncertainties of the tenor even led to an appealing and thoroughly unKonitzian squawk at the end of Indiana. Lee himself says that this tenor date produced “one of the most spontaneous feelings I’ve ever had.”

At the time these recordings were made, Konitz had no regular, steady group but the trio of men who join him on the tenor side are the musicians he is most apt to use when they are available. Pianist Sal Mosca is, like Konitz, a onetime student of Lennie Tristano and is one of the most able followers of Tristano’s own piano style. He has been playing off and on with Konitz since 1951. Bassist Peter Ind, an emigre from England, is also a Tristano student who has played with Jutta Hipp since 1954. Dick Scott is a 20-year-old drummer discovered by Konitz working with Lou Stein. Lee was attracted to Scott because, he says “he hasn’t absorbed all the bad habits of drummers – inflexibility, for instance.” Scott has been part of the Konitz entourage since late in 1956.

The alto side of this album – Kary’s Trance (named after one of Lee’s brood of five children, aged seven years to seven months as of the recording session), Everything Happens to Me, Sweet and Lovely, and Cork ‘n’ Bib (a tribute to a Westbury, L.I., club where Konitz expected to work but, as it later turned out, didn’t) – goes back, in a sense, to Lee’s earlier days. The musicians on this date, aside from Scott – Billy Bauer and Arnold Fishkind – are of the first, or performing, generation of Tristanoites (as opposed to the second, student generation represented by Mosca and Ind.) There is some suggestion of the old Tristano flavor in the unison passages between Konitz’s alto and Bauer’s guitar but for the most part both musicians show a more personalized development of ideas and style than was evident when they were part of Tristano’s group.

This set of numbers is essentially an improvising session, based on familiar materials. It is one of the characteristics of Knotz and those he likes to work with that they stick to a small, basic repertoire of tunes, constantly evolving new improvisations on them. This method has also contributed to the evolution of Konitz as a musician, a process which is still going on.

“Back in 1949,” he says, “I had an unselfconscious quality about my playing. I could sometimes get a very odd tonality and when it did happen, it was all the way out. But then as I heard more I became more conscious of playing what everybody else was playing. I’ve had to give up some of the spontaneous quality I once had, some of the uninhibitedness. But when I get strong in the kind of improvising I’m doing now, I’ll be a lot stronger than I was before.”

The Konitz alto of today, as it is heard in these selections, is a far cry from the early Konitz also. What was once a fleet, glib wispiness has given way to a more clearly formed attack, a stronger, more basic pulsation (listen to him behind Billy Bauer’s guitar on Sweet and Lovely) and a light but gutty flow that is reminiscent (particularly on Cork ‘n’ Bib) of the kind of deep-running, anticipatory excitement that Lester Young used to suggest in his Basie days.