Art & Creativity Quote by Lee Konitz

Konitz’s brag here is almost suspiciously modest: a jazz musician insisting there was “no ego involved” is like a chef claiming they never taste the sauce. That tension is the point. In a genre built on soloing, reputation, and the delicate politics of the bandstand, “100 percent music” isn’t a neutral description; it’s a line in the sand. He’s naming an ideal that’s both aesthetic and ethical: the moment when the players stop performing their identities and start negotiating sound.

The phrase “no attitudes” reads like a veteran’s sigh at the messy sociology that often rides shotgun with improvisation: the posturing, the pecking order, the need to be heard even when the music doesn’t need you. Konitz came up in an era when jazz carried heavy baggage about authenticity and belonging, and he was a white musician in a Black art form. So “no black and white” isn’t naive colorblindness as much as a plea for the bandstand to be governed by listening, not by the scoreboard of history or the anxieties it produces.

“Pure music” is his utopian shorthand for a rare kind of trust: when musicians treat improvisation less like self-expression and more like shared problem-solving. The subtext is that purity isn’t a default state; it’s a hard-won truce. Konitz isn’t denying that ego and race exist. He’s describing the fleeting, almost miraculous intervals when they stop driving the arrangement.