Lenz – born in Frankfurt in July 1938 – started out on the guitar before picking up the double bass during his national service in the late-1950s. He cut his teeth playing the post-war jazz clubs around the city, sharing bandstands with American GIs.
In 1961, Lenz joined forces with famed trombone star Albert Mangelsdorff. Alongside Heinz Sauer, Günter Kronberg and Ralf Hübner Lenz was part of a quintet that turned out boundary pushing albums like Tension.
But it was his trip to Poland in 1965 that sealed his place in history.
Joining Roman Polański film composer the pianist Komeda (who died in 1969) who had by then made his name with his music for the brilliant psychological thriller Kinife in the Water, avant garde trumpeter Tomasz Stańko (who died in 2018), alto saxophonist Zbigniew Namysłowski (who died in 2022) and drummer Rune Carlsson (who died in 2013), Lenz in the depths of winter entered the Warsaw Philharmonic to record Astigmatic in December 1965.
If you’ve heard the record, you’ll know exactly why it matters. Many critics list it in their greatest jazz albums lists.
Komeda’s music was cinematic, heavy with Slavic melancholy, and full of unpredictable, shifting structures.
Lenz’s brilliant, flexible timekeeping provided the exact gravity the music needed, balancing the wild, open improvisations with Komeda’s meticulous themes. It still sounds advanced today more than 60 years on.
Lenz during the 1970s was in the Kurt Edelhagen Big Band and with Peter Herbolzheimer’s Rhythm Combination & Brass. By the late 1970s, he stepped out as a leader in his own right with his group Springtime. He also taught from 2001 to 2006 at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart and was a recipient of the Hesse state jazz prize.
