Lennie Tristano

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Leonard Joseph Tristano (March 19, 1919 - November 18, 1978) was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and master of jazz improvisation. Tristano studied in Chicago for bachelor's and master's degrees in music before moving to New York City in 1946.

He performed with top bebop players and formed his own small bands, which soon displayed some of his early passions – contrapuntal interplay of instruments, harmonic flexibility, and rhythmic complexity.

His quintet, which was released in 1949, was among the first free group improvisations.

Tristano's innovations continued in 1951, with the first overdubbed, improvised jazz recordings, and two years later, when he produced an atonal improvised solo piano piece that was based on motifs rather than on harmonies.

He grew older in the 1960s via polyrhythms and chromaticism, but he was rarely recorded. In the early 1940s, Tristano began teaching music, especially improvisation, and by the mid-1950s, teaching was in place of performing.

He taught in a method that was unusual in jazz education when he first started.

His educational work over three decades meant that he had a direct influence on jazz, including saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. Musicians and commentators disagree on Tristano's merits as a performer.

Some describe his playing as cold and claim that his inventions had no effect; others argue that he was a bridge between bebop and later, freer forms of jazz, and that he is less appreciated than he should be because commentators are difficult to categorize and that he refused to commercialize because commentators found him difficult to categorize and that he did not choose not to commercialize, but that he did not want to commercialize.

Early life

Tristano was born in Chicago on March 19, 1919. Rose Tristano (née Malano), his mother, was also born in Chicago. Michael Joseph Tristano, Joseph Tristano's father, was born in Italy and migrated to the United States as a youth. Lennie was the second of four brothers.

At the age of two or three, Lennie began playing on the family's piano. When he was eight, he had classical piano lessons but later discovered that they had hindered rather than helped with his growth. He was born with poor eyesight, possibly as a result of his mother's 1918-19 flu pandemic during pregnancy. A bout of measles as young as six may have exacerbated his illness, and by the age of nine or ten, he was completely blind as a result of glaucoma. He began attending regular public schools, but he attended the Illinois School for the Blind in Jacksonville for a decade beginning in 1928. He played many instruments, including saxophones, trumpet, guitar, and drums, during his time in school. He appeared in a brothel at the age of 11.

Tristano obtained a bachelor's degree in music from 1938 to 1941, and stayed for another two years for further studies, although he did not complete his master's degree until 2007. Tristano's aunts helped him with his notes at university.

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Later life and career

Tristano played tenor saxophone and piano for a number of performances, including in a rumba band. He began giving private music lessons at the same time, including to saxophonist Lee Konitz. Tristano began his studies at the Axel Christensen School of Popular Music in 1943. He first received newspaper coverage for his piano playing in early 1944, first appearing in Metronome's recap of Chicago's jazz from that year and then in 1945's Down Beat. In 1945, he performed with some members of Woody Herman's band; Tristano's appearance on these tracks "is characterized by his extending harmonies, quick single-line runs, and block chords." In the same year, he also performed solo piano pieces. Tristano married in 1945; his mother, Judy Moore, was a pianist who played to his piano accompaniment in Chicago in the 1940s.

In 1946, Tristano's obsession with jazz led to a move to New York City. He remained in Freeport, Long Island, where he worked with Arnold Fishkind (bass) and Billy Bauer (guitar), as a first step toward moving there. This trio, as well as a few bassists that replaced Fishkind, was recorded in 1946-47. Reviewers at the time debated the originality of the piano-guitar counterpoint and the trio's journey to harmony. Gunther Schuller later described one of their recordings as "too far ahead of its time" in terms of its harmonic freedom and rhythmic complexity.

In 1947, Tristano met with saxophonist Charlie Parker. They performed together in bands that featured bebop musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach later this year for radio broadcasts. Parker enjoyed his playing, in part because it was different from what Parker was used to and didn't copy the saxophonist's style. Tristano played less often in clubs in 1948, and the band's name was changed to Konitz and a drummer, making it into a quintet. This band appeared on the first sides of the New Jazz label, which later became Prestige Records. Warne Marsh, another Tristano saxophonist student, was welcomed to the club later this year.

In 1949, Tristano's band had two recording sessions that proved to be highly popular. The sextet's compositions, including his "Wow" and "Crosscurrent"), were based on harmonies; reviewers focused on the playing's continuity and its removal from bebop. The other musicians also recorded the first free improvisations by a group, "Intuition" and "Digression." The timing of those entrances, as well as the approximate date, were planned for these tracks, but nothing else – harmony, key, time signature, tempo, melody, or rhythm – was prepared or set. Rather, the five musicians were held together by contrapuntal encounter. Both tracks were lauded by critics, but their unveiling was postponed – "Intuition" was announced late in 1950, and "Digression" not until 1954. Parker and composer Aaron Copland were both impressed. Several other musicians of the time, however, believed that Tristano's music was too progressive and emotionally cold, and that it would not be widely accepted by the general public.

The sextet struggled to find enough jobs, but they did appear at Birdland's opening night "A Journey Through Jazz," a five-week involvement at the club, as well as several other venues in the north-east of the United States late in 1949. They appeared in these concerts as well as Bach fugues, but they found it difficult to continue to enjoy the freedom they had felt at the time.

The sextet continued to perform into 1951 despite occasional staff changes. In the same year, Tristano's lessons moved from Flushing, Long Island, to a Manhattan loft apartment, part of which he converted into a recording studio. Several invited musicians would jam sessions at this location. "317 East 32nd Street" became the name of one of his creations. Tristano's debut of Jazz Records in the same year. The project was launched with "Ju-ju" and "Pastime" on a 45-year anniversary in 1952, but Tristano cancelled it due to time constraints and distribution difficulties. The two songs were from a trio session with bassist Peter Ind and drummer Roy Haynes, and Tristano's overdubbed second piano pieces were included later. Ind called them the first jazz recordings to be improvised and overdubbed. Early reviewers were often unaware that overdubbing had been used. Tristano's recording studio remained in use, and it was the scene of early sessions for Debut Records, which was co-founded by Roach and bassist Charles Mingus.

Tristano's band appeared on occasion, mostnotably in Toronto, as a quintet. Konitz joined Stan Kenton's band in the summer of that year, splitting up the stymie of Tristano's long-running quintet/sextet, although the saxophonist did occasionally perform with Tristano.

"Descent into the Maelstrom," Tristano's 1953 recording "Descent into the Maelstrom" was another innovation. It was a musical interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's tale of the same name, and it was an improvised solo piano piece with multitracking and no preconceived harmonic framework, being based instead on motifs' development. Its atonality was a precursor to the work of pianists, including Cecil Taylor and Borah Bergman.

The sextet of Tristano appeared at the first Newport Jazz Festival the following year. This may have been his first jazz festival appearance – he was afraid of commercials. In the summer of 1955, Marsh left the band.

In 1955, Tristano released his first album on Atlantic Records; he was given complete control of the recording process and what to expect. The eponymous album featured solo and trio tracks that continued with multitracking ("Requiem" and "Turkish Mambo") as well as increased tape-speed ("Line Up" and "East 32nd"). Some commentators and performers at the time, the use of overdubbing and tape manipulation was contested. "Requiem," a tribute to Parker, who died a short time earlier, has a deep blues feeling, a style not normally associated with Tristano. In biographer Eunmi Shim's words, Tristano's "use of chromatic harmony" and "East 32nd" earns him a role as a pioneer in expanding jazz improvisation's musical vocabulary.

Tristano's energies by the mid-1950s had shifted more toward music education. In 1956, he had to leave his Manhattan apartment; he built a new one in Hollis, Queens. After Tristano's base was relocated, several of his core students moved to California. Due to his infidelity and his divorce in the same year, he was physically more isolated from the New York music scene. He appeared in fewer concerts than before, but he performed in 1958 at Half Note Club, after the owners begged him to perform, in part by replacing their club's Steinway piano with a new Bechstein of Tristano's choosing. Later, they discovered that John Coltrane, Zoot Sims, and Tristano were the musicians most popular at their club in the late 1950s and early 1960s: "Coltrane brought in the masses, Zoot brought in the musicians, and Lennie brought in the intellectuals." The Quintet of 1959 appeared in Toronto again, this time at the Famous Door.

Tristano's second album for Atlantic was released in 1961 and then released the following year. The New Tristano, as was explained on the album cover, was mainly composed of piano solos, and no overdubbing or tape-speed manipulation was performed. Both left-hand bass lines provide structure to each performance as well as a counterpoint to right-hand playing; block chords, hazy harmonies, and contrasting rhythms also appear in the tracks; Tristano's other solo piano recordings weren't released until the 1970s.

In 1962, Tristano and his wife officially divorced. Steve, the couple's son who was born in 1952, saw his father only once after his initial separation in 1956. Tristano married again in the early 1960s. Carol Miller, one of his students' second wife, was his second wife. They had a son, Bud, and two daughters, Tania and Carol, as a couple. In 1964, the couple divorced, but Tristano lost a custody dispute with his ex-wife over the children.

The pianist reformed his quintet with Konitz and Marsh for a two-month appearance at the Half Note and shows at the Coq D'Or in Toronto. Two years ago, the quartet, which had lost Konitz, played the Cellar Club in Toronto. Tristano appeared at the Half Note Club until the mid-1960s and then toured Europe in 1965. His European tour featured him mainly as a solo pianist, and the playing was largely in the style of his The New Tristano recordings. In 1968, he performed with Ind and others in concerts in the United Kingdom; they were well-received, and Tristano returned the following year. In 1968, his last public appearance in the United States was in 1968.

Tristano declined invitations to perform in the 1970s; he said he did not like to travel and that the demand for a career-minded musician to perform concerts was not something he wanted to follow. He continued teaching and helped with the planning of concerts for some of his students. In the 1970s, Descent into the Maelstrom was released; it was a collection of recordings made between 1951 and 1966.

Tristano suffered from eye pain and emphysema during his lifetime (he smoked for the majority of his life). He died of a heart attack at home in Jamaica, New York, on November 18, 1978.

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