Lee Konitz was born October 13, 1927, in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Roosevelt University in Chicago and played alto saxophone in the Claude Thornhill band from 1947 to 1948 before settling in New York City. He first met pianist Lennie Tristano in 1946 and, over the following years, thoroughly absorbed Tristano's theories about harmony, rhythm, and "pure improvisation," a relationship that shaped his mature style. Between 1948 and 1950 he played in two seminal cool jazz projects: Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool nonet and the Lennie Tristano Sextet.

Konitz was repeatedly noted as one of the few major jazz saxophonists of the late 1940s and 1950s who did not sound imitative of the massively influential Charlie Parker, a genuinely independent voice within an era largely defined by Parker's shadow.

Konitz died April 15, 2020, in New York, of pneumonia with complications from COVID-19, at age 92, capping a jazz career that spanned roughly 75 years.

Konitz's light, dry alto tone and Tristano-derived harmonic approach positioned him as cool jazz's most durable independent voice, a saxophonist whose sound was never absorbed into Charlie Parker's dominant bebop vocabulary even as most of his contemporaries were.