Parenting & Family Quote by Lee Konitz

Konitz drops this little memory like a casual name-check, but it’s really a quiet snapshot of how jazz knowledge gets made: not in textbooks, not in press releases, but in hallways, stoops, and neighbors’ apartments. “Bernstein grew up in my building” isn’t trivia, it’s a claim about proximity. Talent doesn’t just appear; it’s incubated inside scenes, inside cities, inside earshot.

The compliment - “a very, very fine player” - is deliberately plain, almost under-sold. Konitz isn’t mythmaking; he’s doing musician-to-musician validation, the kind that carries weight because it refuses hype. Repetition (“very, very”) reads like speech, not rhetoric, which is part of the authority: this is an elder talking, not a brand polishing a story.

Then he pivots to the real point: “when he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on.” That line frames jazz as a living, local ecosystem you have to physically approach. “Came by” signals apprenticeship-by-presence: showing up, listening, asking, absorbing the vibe before you ever earn a seat at the table. It’s also a gentle reminder that jazz, for all its virtuosity, is social intelligence - knowing “what’s going on” means catching the unspoken rules, the repertoire, the attitudes, the timing.

Underneath, there’s generosity and gatekeeping at once. The door is open, but only if you knock, and only if you’re hungry enough to climb the stairs.