Billboard : 12/17/1955
Score of 80

This album is remarkable not only for the superb modern musicianship of Konitz (on alto) and Marsh (on tenor), but for their successful use of varied old and new jazz sources. They open with a Basie classic, Topsy, and then romp thru several standards; there is a wonderful blues, Don’t Squawk, by Oscar Pettiford, with the bassist himself on hand and contributing a brilliant solo – and Lennie Tristano‘s Two Not One and Charlie Parker‘s Donna Lee. The taste and versatility of the saxophonists give a stamp of quality to each of these varied items. Billy Bauer on guitar, Kenny Clarke on drums and Sal Mosca on piano also deserve praise.

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Hartford Courant
Maitland Zane : 02/26/1956

Seven years or so ago some extraordinary records were made for Capitol by a group led by Lennie Tristano, a blind pianist.

Tristano and Co. blew jazz as cool and clean as a wintry landscape, consciously “cerebral” and perfectionistic (if there is such a word). The music was a rejection of the excesses of bop as typified by Illinois Jacquet and other honk-screamers and was as far ahead of Dixieland as the Nike guided missile is to the boomerang of the Australian aborigines.

This is not to say that the Tristano group blew better jazz, in the value-judgement sense; but the Tristano sound did reflect the Cold War and the Aspirin Age more precisely than the jazz of Satchmo Armstrong, whose personal universe seems so ordered and benign.

Tristano had (and has) several marvelously disciplined disciples, among them the tenor man, Warne Marsh, the better known alto man, Lee Konitz, and a guitarist, Billy Bauer (who, you will recall, blew with the original Herman Herd).

On a new Atlantic 12-inch LP Lee and Warne and Billy are featured. Since their mentor, regrettably, is absent, the piano chores are handled by Sal Mosca, who has a nice percussive style; Kenny Clarke is on drums.

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Baton Rouge News Leader
Lee Andrew Jones : 12/31/1955

This album is remarkable not only for the superb modern musicianship of Konitz (on alto) and Marsh (on tenor), but for their successful use of varied old and new jazz sources. They open with a Basie classic, Topsy, and then romp through several standards – there is a wonderful blues Don’t Squawk, by Oscar Pettiford, with the bassist himself on hand and contributing a brilliant solo – and Lennie Tristano‘s Two Not One and Charlie Parker‘s Donna Lee. The taste and versatility of the saxophonists give a stamp of quality to each one of these varied items. Billy Bauer on guitar, Kenny Clarke on drums, and Sal Mosca on piano also deserve praise.

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Playboy Magazine : May, 1956

Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh spotlights two of the brightest “thinking” saxophonists in captivity (Lee plays alto, Warne tenor), and the jazz comes at you like gamma rays shot in a line of tricky time and knife-sharp tones. Lee took a lot of his harmonic training from Lennie Tristano, grand mufti of a brilliant contemporary jazz school in which every not counts, so you best keep three or four ears cocked at all times. Here are some of the most subtle, whip-smart musicians around these days, whose control over their instruments constantly amazes us. As just one example, listen to Oscar Pettiford‘s Don’t Squawk (Oscar plays bass with the group, which also includes Billy Bauer on guitar, Sal Mosca on piano and Kenny Clarke on drums).

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Down Beat : 01/11/1956
Jack Tracy : 5 stars

I have never heard Lee and Warne recorded this warmly before. Perhaps it is due to a rhythm section that spurs and swings, rather than acting as a metronome. Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke, two swingers from the word Go!, combine with Billy Bauer and Sal Mosca (Ronnie Ball plays piano on Ronnie’s Line) and push the cool pair into some situations they have to wriggle to get out of, and it is a pleasure to hear them blow forcefully to do it.

For though this might not be the immersedly thoughtful Konitz and Marsh you are familiar with, there is a personality and relaxedness present that offers a stronger bond of communication that I have ever heard. Perhaps the album cover is a clue – Lee and Warne are laughing heartily and unabashedly. Their playing here also shows that they can laugh as well as think.

Topsy starts right out swinging, as Pettiford sets the pace and Lee and Warne take it up; Lee is eloquent on You, with further explorations coming from Marsh and Pettiford; Started is one long, lovely line, and Bauer’s guitar is superb; Charlie Parker‘s Donna Lee again shows how much the saxists enjoy working over the Indiana changes.

Lennie Tristano‘s writing hand is evident on Two; Don’t Squawk is a wailing blues, credited to Pettiford; Line is by Ball; Marsh composed Background Music.

This is a provocative album, one with virility and lasting music.

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Liner Notes by Barry Ulanov

From their entrance together in this set, after the opening bass beats in Topsy, right through to the last measures of Background Music, Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh exhibit that elegance of sound and subtlety of time, together and apart, which distinguish them beyond most other present-day practitioners of the art of saxophone. Whatever other excellences, skills, ingenuities other altomen or tenor saxists may possess, the arts of tone and time are Lee’s and Warne’s and in these they revel and romp across both sides of this rich display of their talents. Because of the commanding authority of their blended sounds, the fine old Basie classic, Topsy, has the persuasive brilliance of a big-band performance while retaining the relaxation and intimacy only a small-band improvisation can offer in jazz. Because of their appreciation of the nuances of time that make modern jazz such a challenge to anybody brought up in any older version of this music, they make Charlie Parker‘s Donna Lee into a fresh piece, and not only in their own contributions to the work, but also in their performance of the familiar unison line which Bird first blew on records with Miles Davis.

Sound and time, however, are not enough; it is what they are used to hold together that makes them of such importance in the jazz of this decade. And that is? Why the melodic line of course; and beyond everything else it is the melodic line that Lee and Warne woo and win in their music, whether they start with somebody else’s or make up their own as they go along. Now to make a melody appealing, a sweet, a tender, a rasping, a throaty, or a tough sound – whatever is called for – helps considerably. Lee and Warne generally fit the sound to the tune, including with their tastes in melody to the sweet and lovely, but not the tremulous and treacly: they have too much respect for their instruments to indulge themselves in sweaty vibratos.

To give a line the kind of rhythmic impulse that makes it jazz calls for a tricky sense of time, not syncopation necessarily, not simply a metronomic steadiness of beat, but a delicate feeling for odd accents and even stresses, and all effected with such continuity that, as in the playing of Charlie Parker, the beat may be most irresistible in the rests. At its best, as in I Can’t Get Started or Background Music in this collection, such playing makes the whole performance into one long melodic line, starting with the first not and ending with the less. This is the secret of Baroque music, of Bach‘s most moving lines, and at a lower level, not quite so ambitious, but not so far removed as many might think, it is the driving impetus of the jazz musicians of this heady school.

It isn’t difficult to hear, to feel, to dig – any verb that describes your own response will do – the continuity in such performances as the first and last of the eight bound together here, or such up-tempo exercises as There Will Never Be Another You and [I[Donna Lee[/I]. In Lennie Tristano‘s Two Not One, however, it isn’t quite so obvious; but it’s all the more captivating when you get it. What you get – when the tune does get to you – is first of all the way it starts, on the second rather than the customary first beat of the measure, and then the way Sal Mosca‘s diverting piano solo is drawn into the tonal work, the way it is linked to the unison line and the individual sax solos by the soft background line Lee and Warne play behind the piano and Sal then joins to his own line. Similarly, Billy Bauer moves in and out of the sax solos in the meditative version of I Can’t Get Started, sans piano, which all three musicians, Warne and Lee and Billy, produce; and in the same way, Ronnie Ball, chording, solo, with the saxists and alone, makes his every note a handsomely organized whole in his one appearance in the album in a middle-tempo figure of his own devising called, suitably enough, Ronnie’s Line.

The longest of the tracks is devoted to Oscar Pettiford‘s blues Don’t Squawk. Oscar sets tempo, mood, line and almost everything else on his bass; then the saxists and Sal, in an unusual groove for them, carry on in relaxed, almost torchy fashion. It’s not what you would expect from these musicians, but it adds a pleasant variety and change of pace to the outing and shows Lee and Warne at ease in an unfamiliar, if time-honored setting.

Throughout the set, there is another contribution to be noted: the now efficient, now enthusiastic, now covert, now capricious drumming of Kenny Clarke, who has proved himself, in person as on this record, a remarkably adept drummer for musicians of the Tristano school. In his case, too, it is a matter of time and – rara avis among those who ply the hides and cymbals – sound, sound which he controls and varies as much as he does his accented and accentless drumming to fit the individual pieces. Such an understanding of the drumming trade makes one realize how much musicianship can be brought into this most responsible corner of the jazz group.

There is much, then, to listen for and to hear in this collection: tones and timing and moving solos, figures that show much craftsmanship in the planning and the execution, but most of all, as I hope I have made clear, continuity. When you have had your fill of just plain listening for pleasure, play it all again, a track at a time, paying particular attention to the way each of the performances makes its way from the first measure to the least, adding variations and developments, repeating, changing, achieving either a balanced symmetry through repetition or a kind of wry asymmetry through changes, but almost always moving forward – like a train that must arrive on time or the mails in the old days – to its inevitable conclusion. This is the jazz thinking of the musicians of a brilliant contemporary school, and a most satisfactory kind of thinking it is, at least to those of use who are convinced that along with the show of feeling with which jazz and jazzmen have always been abundantly endowed a substantial amount of thought can go comfortably, fittingly, and pleasingly.