 I was already familiar with Lee Konitz when I was 17. I knew him from Birth of The Cool and the early recordings with Lennie Tristano. His fresh, original lines excited me. But many years would pass before he caught my attention again. It must have been the mid-eighties when I was in a jazz bar in Dortmund, the 'Jatz', and heard his duo record with Michel Petrucciani. It went through me like a lightning bolt. I especially liked the piece I Hear A Rhapsody. What a sound and such carefully constructed lines! He was one of my heroes after that and I bought every one of his records that I could get. I met him personally for the first time in 1985 in Essen. I was playing the first part of a double concert with the Remy-Filipovitch-Quartet and Lee was playing the second half with his quartet. We had an interesting conversation then. When we played together for the first time in Dortmund in 1986, it was a dream come true. I accompanied him with Gunnar Plümer (bass) and Christoph Haberer (drums). We played tours and concerts in this line-up for a few years in Germany and Switzerland.We also played at the festival in Madrid in 1988 and recorded a CD - S'Nice. Eventually Lee and I began playing more as a duo. Our first duo concert in Göttingen was not entirely successful. I made the mistake that many musicians make when playing duo with Lee for the first time: I played too much. He told me, ''You don't have to give me the beat, I've got it in me.'' We talked a lot about music in general and improvisation in particular and discovered that we shared the same playing ideal: that the music should always sound like we just invented it and that a piece should sound different at every performance. A definite highlight of our duo collaboration was our performance at the 1995 Frankfurt Jazz Festival – CD, The Frankfurt Concert. Lee knew all the standards, but in his last 25 years he always played the same ones, drawing from a repertoire of about 25 pieces. He once told me, ''Frank, if I live to be a hundred, I'll still be able to play new lines every day on All The Things You Are.'' In the recording of our concert from the LOFT in Cologne, which is documented on this CD, Lee begins with Alone Together, has the audience sing the keynote, whistles and sings and plays around the melody on the saxophone. Lydian Adventure is my solo improvisation, with occasional echoes of All The Things You Are and my piece Lydia. Out of the Deep is our version of How Deep is the Ocean. On Body and Soul, Lee begins one of his famous solo cadenzas at the end, but then breaks it off, for reasons that are no longer clear. But I find this version to be inspired and worthwhile, even without the cadenza, and I worked on the ending in the studio with Christian Heck. Unfortunately, it's not totally satisfying, but that's all I could get out of it. You're a Weaver of Dreams segues into a free improvisation that leads to Subconscious-Lee, Lee's famous take on What is This Thing Called Love. Thingin' is based on All The Things You Are, with the harmonies set a tritone lower at the middle section. It's You is Lee's variation on It's You Or No One.
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