Lennie Tristano

All Music Guide:

The history of jazz is written as a recounting of the lives of its most famous (and presumably, most influential) artists. Reality is not so simple, however. Certainly the most important of the music's innovators are those whose names are known by all -- Armstrong, Parker, Young, Coltrane. Unfortunately, the jazz critic's tendency to inflate the major figures' status often comes at the expense of other musicians' reputations -- men and women who have made significant, even essential, contributions of their own, who are, for whatever reason, overlooked in the mad rush to canonize a select few. Lennie Tristano is one of those who have not yet received their critical due. In the mid-'40s, the Chicago-born pianist arrived on the scene with a concept that genuinely expanded the prevailing bop aesthetic. Tristano brought to the music of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell a harmonic language that adapted the practices of contemporary classical music; his use of polytonal effects in tunes like "Out on a Limb" was almost Stravinsky-esque, and his extensive use of counterpoint was (whether or not he was conscious of it at the time) in keeping with the trends being set in mid-century art music. Until relatively recently, it had seldom been acknowledged that Tristano had been the first to perform and record a type of music that came to be called "free jazz." In 1949 -- almost a decade before the making of Ornette Coleman's first records -- Tristano's group (which included Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, and Billy Bauer) cut the first recorded example of freely improvised music in the history of jazz. The two cuts, "Intuition" and "Digression," were created spontaneously, without any pre-ordained reference to time, tonality, or melody. The resultant work was an outgrowth of Tristano's preoccupation with feeling and spontaneity in the creation of music. It influenced, among others, Charles Mingus, whose earliest records sound eerily similar to those of Tristano in terms of style and compositional technique. Mingus came by the influence honestly; he studied with the pianist for a period in the early '50s, as did many other well-known jazz musicians, such as Sal Mosca, Phil Woods, and the aforementioned Konitz and Marsh.

Tristano was stricken permanently blind as an infant. He first studied music with his mother, an avocational pianist and opera singer. From 1928-1938, he attended a school for the blind in Chicago, where he learned music theory and developed proficiency on several wind instruments. Later, he attended Chicago's American Conservatory of Music, from which he received a bachelor's degree in 1943. During his early years as a professional performer and teacher, Tristano worked in and around Chicago, achieving his first measure of critical attention and attracting his first important students, Konitz and composer/arranger Bill Russo.

In 1946, Tristano moved to New York, where he made something of a big splash, performing with many of the leading musicians of the day, including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. The influential critic Barry Ulanov took an extreme liking to Tristano's music and championed his work in the pages of Metronome magazine; Tristano was named the publication's Musician of the Year for 1947. Tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh began studies with Tristano in 1948, and when Bauer and Konitz came back aboard, he had the core of his great sextet. In 1949 -- with the addition of bassist Arnold Fishkin and alternating drummers Harold Granowsky and Denzil Best -- Tristano, Bauer, Konitz, and Marsh recorded what was to become the basis of the band's collective legacy, the Capitol album Crosscurrents. The Capitol sessions spawned many of Tristano's best-known works, including the title track, and of course, the freely improvised cuts "Digression" and "Intuition" (these latter recorded without a drummer). The recordings synthesized the Tristano approach: long, rhythmically and harmonically elaborate melodies were played over a smooth, almost uninflected swing time maintained by the bassist and drummer. Counterpoint, which had been mostly abandoned by post-New Orleans/Chicago players, made a comeback in Tristano's music. Tristano's written lines were a great deal more involved than the already complex melodies typical of bebop; he subdivided and multiplied the beat in odd groupings, and his harmonies did not always behave in a manner consistent with functional tonality. The complexity of his constructs demanded that his rhythm section provide little more than a solid foundation. Tristano's bassists and drummers were not expected to interact in the manner of a bop rhythm section, but to support the music's melodic and harmonic substance. Such restraint lent Tristano's music an emotionally detached air, which to this day has been used by unsympathetic critics as a sledgehammer to pound him.

In 1951, Tristano founded a school of jazz in New York, the first of its kind. Its faculty consisted of many of his most prominent students, including Konitz, Bauer, Marsh, and pianist Sal Mosca. His public performances became fewer and farther between; for the rest of his life, Tristano was to concentrate on teaching, mostly to the exclusion of everything else. He shut down his school in 1956, and began teaching out of his home on Long Island. Thereafter he would play occasionally at the Half Note in New York City. Recordings became scarce. He made two albums for Atlantic, Lennie Tristano and The New Tristano. A compilation of odds and ends entitled Descent into the Maelstrom was released on Inner City; its title track documents Tristano's experiments in multi-track recording of the piano. He toured Europe in 1965; his last public performance in the U.S. was in 1968.

Until his death in 1978, Tristano continued to teach. A later generation of his adherents continues to work and thrive in New York to this day. Musicians like pianist Connie Crothers, saxophonists Lenny Popkin and Richard Tabnik, and drummer Carol Tristano -- the pianist's daughter -- carry on his work into the next century.

Wikipedia:

Leonard Joseph Tristano (19 March 1919 – 18 November 1978) was a jazz pianist, composer and teacher of jazz improvisation. He performed in the cool jazz, bebop, post bop and avant-garde jazz genres. He remains a somewhat overlooked figure in jazz history, but his enormous originality and dazzling work as an improviser have long been appreciated by knowledgeable jazz fans. In addition, his work as a jazz educator meant that he has exerted a substantial influence on jazz through figures such as Lee Konitz and Bill Evans.

Early life

Tristano was born in Chicago into an Italian immigrant family from Aversa. He was blind from infancy and studied piano and music theory from pre-teen years, graduating with a bachelor's degree from his home town's American Conservatory of Music in 1943.

Tristano's interest in jazz inspired a move to New York City in 1946. His advanced grasp of harmony pushed his music beyond even the complexities of the contemporary bebop movement, though Tristano was always explicit about acknowledging his enormous debt to Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. Other key ingredients in his style were Nat King Cole and Art Tatum, influences most audible in his early drummerless trio recordings. Though he and his followers remained at something of a slant to mainstream bebop, Tristano did on occasion play and record with bebop's preeminent figures such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and Tristano was a pallbearer at Parker's funeral. Often the "Tristano school" has been contrasted with bebop, however, by being labelled "cool jazz", though this risks lumping his music in with unrelated styles like the West Coast cool jazz of the 1950s.

Career

Among Tristano's most important earlier recordings was a 1949 sextet session with his students, saxophone players Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. After recording a number of conventionally structured compositions, Tristano had the group record "Intuition" and "Digression." Both pieces were completely improvised, with no prearranged melody, harmony or rhythm. These two songs are often cited as the first recorded examples of free jazz or free improvisation.

His 1953 recording Descent into the Maelstrom is especially significant: an experiment in overdubbing which in its harsh atonality anticipates the much later work of players like Cecil Taylor and Borah Bergman (who has specifically mentioned the piece as an important influence on his work).

Tristano released two important albums on Atlantic Records, which remain his best-known work. Lennie Tristano, from 1955, is famous for including innovative experiments with overdubbing ("Requiem" and "Turkish Mambo") and altered tape-speed ("Line Up" and "East 32nd"). The second side is a straightforward club gig in the company of Lee Konitz. "Requiem," a tribute to the late Charlie Parker, is notable for its deep blues feeling – a style not usually associated with Tristano. However, perhaps the most significant work lies in the composition "Line Up", a spiralling linear improvisation based on the changes to "All of Me".

The New Tristano (1962) remains a landmark in solo jazz piano. Though on this occasion no overdubbing was used, the music is just as densely conceived, especially the classic "G Minor Complex," an improvisation on the changes of "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To". Tristano's mimicking of a jazz bassist's accompaniment with his left hand on these recordings is distinctive and often imitated. The combination of this line with the dazzling line-spinning of his right hand also gives the music a contrapuntal flavour explicitly paying homage to Bach.

Tristano's distrust of jazz record labels and increasingly infrequent public performances meant that his recordings are comparatively scarce, and many of them are concert recordings of very variable fidelity. Some of his live performances were recorded and have been released, including those from the Half Note Club in New York from the 1950s, and concerts in Europe from the 1960s. He was one of the first musicians to start his own record label, Jazz Records, which is still in existence and is run by his daughter, the drummer Carol Tristano. The label Inner City released a compilation of various Tristano recordings, Descent into the Maelstrom.

Teaching

By the mid-1950s, Tristano focused his energies more on music education. He can be regarded as one of the first jazz teachers to teach jazz in a structured way, beginning in the late 1940s and continuing to his death in 1978.

Tristano approached each student individually and hence lessons were structured to meet the needs of each individual; however, each student was challenged in ways that would allow the student to find and express their own musical feelings, or style.

Tristano would often have his students learn to sing and play the improvised solos by some of best-known names in jazz, including Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. Solos were often learned by first playing them along with the original recording, from a phonograph record or magnetic audio tape, at half the normal speed, hence the pitch would drop by one octave. Eventually the student would learn the solo at normal speed. Tristano stressed that the student was not learning to imitate the artist, but rather should use the experience to gain insight into the musical feeling conveyed by the artist.

One of the key teaching tools used by Tristano was the metronome. In practicing fundamentals such as scales, the student would set the metronome at or near to its slowest setting and play the scales and arpeggios in a legato fashion covering the full range of their instrument with very even dynamics. Developing a strong awareness of the beat was a key element of his teaching philosophy.

A book by bassist Peter Ind, Jazz Visions: Lennie Tristano and His Legacy, was released in October 2005. The book documents and discusses Tristano's contributions to jazz music.