Lennie Tristano
The next step after bebop....
The jazz musician’s function is to feel. You have to be influenced by all great musicians, no matter what instrument they play, because the essence of jazz is feelings, it’s not really the notes, it’s the feeling behind.
- Lennie Tristano
In 1991, my mom and I went to England to visit her family. While we were there, we ventured across the channel to the Netherlands for the North Sea Jazz festival in Den Haag.
While we were there, we rode the trains to all corners of the Netherlands, riding bikes and walking around the small villages. Then it was back to England for a few more days. We stayed at my mom’s sister’s house near Heathrow airport. It was easy to get to London on the train from there. One day I went down to my favorite record store Ray’s Jazz Shop on Shaftesbury Avenue.
In the window was this Lennie Tristano Trio three 78rpm record album:
At the time, I did not know that much about Lennie Tristano and I had never heard any of his music; however, I had been reading about him from time to time in The Wire magazine. Back then, it was not easy to locate Tristano’s music. He was not played on the radio and few record store carried any of his new or used records. So when I saw this album, I bought it. These recordings are Tristano’s first, and it was the start of my fascination with his music. He recorded them in October 1946, shortly after arriving in New York City, and again in May 1947. They were issued first on the Keystone Recordings label and then again a couple years later by the Mercury label, who bought Keystone after they went bankrupt in early 1948. At that time, when bebop was de rigueur, the Tristano Trio was something altogether different - ahead of their time. Tristano was looking to the future, not interested in bebop – he was looking for “the next step after bebop.”
In her book, Lennie Tristano, His Life in Music, Eunmi Shin writes about Tristano, “He emerged as an original voice in the New York jazz scene in the 1940s; during this period, a time of growing awareness of historical evolution in jazz, he was considered a prime representative of ‘progressive jazz’ by many critics and musicians. A pioneering individualist, he transgressed the boundaries of jazz as well as conventional style categories of jazz history through a succession of innovations.”
For example, in 1949 he made the first free jazz recordings that predated the free jazz movement by a decade. Then in the 1950s he broke new ground in jazz recording technique by the use of multitracking. However, what I like most about Lennie Tristano is his strength of spirit.
Born in Chicago in 1919 with weak eye sight, by the age of nine or ten he was completely blind. At the age of eight, he attended the Illinois School for the Blind in Jacksonville, just west of Springfield, Illinois.
About the school, Tristano recalled, “The place does one of two things to a student - either it makes an idiot out him, or a person. I was lucky enough to fall into the second group. In Master in the Making, Barry Ulanov wrote about the school, “The school accepted all manner of blind children, babblers, the feeble-minded, the imbecilic, and the idiotic.” In this troubling environment, Tristano rose to the challenge, graduated, and in 1938 attended the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. One of his teachers at the Illinois School for the Blind took him to the Conservatory and told the school, “…pay particular attention to this boy, because he’s going to do everything faster than you’re used to.” He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Music Performance in June 1941, completing the degree in three years. He stayed on for another two years to take graduate courses.
In 1943, Tristano began teaching at the Axel Christensen School of Popular Music in Kimball Hall on 25 E. Jackson Blvd. in Chicago. Kimball Hall, formerly known as the Kimball Building, is the current home of the DePaul College of Law. It was gifted to DePaul University in 1955 by the Frank J. Lewis Foundation. At that time, it was the largest gift received by the University.
Some of the earliest Tristano recordings were made in 1945, first with Earl Swope’s band and then some solo recordings. Here is one of his earliest, What Is This Thing Called Love?, recorded in Chicago in 1945 or 1946.
Eunmi Shim points out about this song, “…he displays his ambidexterity by reversing the conventional role of the hands: his left hand improvises while the right hand accompanies with chords. Equally noteworthy is that he starts out improvising without starting the melody of the tune, a practice he continued in his later trio and solo recordings.”
The reception of Tristano’s music was cool, at best. He was primarily viewed as a musician’s musician rather than a club attraction. As a result, by 1944 teaching was an important part of his life. Some of his early students were Lee Konitz, Bill Russo, and Cy Touff. By then, he had moved lessons to his apartment on Aldine Street.
After doing some arranging for the Woody Herman band, and with encouragement from Woody’s bassist Chubby Jackson, Tristano moved to New York.
When Tristano arrived in New York in 1946, bebop was ascending. It was an amazing time for music in New York City. It was a time when Gil Evans was adopting bebop music into the Claude Thornhill Orchestra and the Stan Kenton and Boyd Raeburn Orchestras were drawing inspiration from the modern classical composers like Stravinsky and Bartók. Gil Evans was even endorsing the music of John Cage and Harry Partch. So when I think about the early music of Lennie Tristano, I try to cast my mind back to New York City in 1946, without the biases I have from knowing the changes that would take place in Jazz over the next two decades.
Although modern composers like Hindemith and Ives made perfect sense to Tristano, perhaps his biggest influence was Bird. I think what Tristano thought he was doing was merely an extension, to him a very logical extension, of what he heard Charlie Parker playing in his quintet.
I think Gerry Mulligan sums up well the feelings that he, Gil Evans, and Tristano had at the time, “What it was, was a bunch of people who appreciated Bird, were influenced by Bird, loved what Bird was doing, and we each applied the lessons from Bird in different ways. But it was because we loved what was going on, it wasn’t inaccessible to us….”
Later, in the fall of 1947, the Tristano Trio recorded again. You can already hear a different more refined sound on Supersonic:
This sounds a lot like Sun Ra to me, but Tristano recorded it a full decade prior to Sun Ra’s first records.
Recorded in January 1949 for the New Jazz label, which would soon become Prestige, here is a recording from Tristano’s first quintet session with Lee Konitz on alto sax:
With this song, I feel Tristano is now starting to hit his stride and Lee Konitz’s playing is sublime.
In March of the same year, the Tristano Quartet became a Sextet by adding tenor man Warne Marsh. Their Capitol Records sessions is a seminal part of jazz history. Here’s Wow from that session, and you can clearly hear the “Tristano Sound” - listen to the 20 second mark and dig that unison playing that is so typical of Tristano School. Incredible.
Also recorded at these Capitol sessions was the first free improvisation songs Intuition and Digression. Tristano identified these two songs as “collective improvisation on a much higher plane.” Billy Bauer, the guitarist from the session recalls, “Lennie would say, ‘You start it! Play anything you want to play.’ No key, no tempo, no nothing! Whoever felt like comin’ in or droppin’ out; spontaneous, not premeditated sounds; no arrangement.” Here is Digression:
Even more than these two songs, Tristano’s 1953 solo recording Descent Into Maelstrom bridges the gap to free jazz music of the next two decades:
More groundbreaking innovations followed in 1954 when Tristano recorded another seminal album for Atlantic, where he again employed, along with the earlier Descent Into Maelstrom, the first use of recorded multitracking. Here’s Line Up from that album:
These were pioneering uses of recording techniques, unprecedented in the realm of jazz. However, more importantly to me, it sounded cool. Like many of these Tristano songs, the more I listen to them, the more I like them.
Here is one more for the road. Those of you who have been following my journey know I’m a sucker for the tune These Foolish Things. Here’s the Tristano Quartet’s version recorded live for Atlantic in June 1955 at the Sing Song Room of Manhattan’s Confucius restaurant. It features a swinging quartet with Lee Kontiz on alto, Gene Ramey on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. I think Taylor pushes Tristano in a way he seldom allowed drums to push him.
Lennie Tristano was an important thinker, who provided a crucial link between the modern jazz of the 1940s and the freer forms of the late 1950s and on. While some might argue that his work was more intellectually stimulating than inviting; in the end, it’s just about the sounds and if we’re at a place in our musical journey that these sounds can find a home or not. No doubt, his challenging music was hampered by technological limitations of the time; however, his tremendous strength of spirit led to innovations that changed the nature of jazz forever.
It’s fitting that I’m sending this out on 3/19, Lennie Tristano’s birthday. I did not plan this, but through some strange twist of fate, it just worked out that way. I guess Lennie Tristano’s spirit is still alive and at work….
Next week on that Big River called Jazz we’ll dig our paddles into the music of one of Lennie Tristano’s students, the great Warne Marsh.
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Until then, keep on walking….
Thank you very much for this!