Bassist Father Stan Fortuna, one-half of the Scola Tristano Duo with guitarist Peter Prisco, studied with Lennie Tristano a year before the jazz icon's death in 1978.
“First and foremost, Lennie wanted you to swing,” he remembers. “And number two, Lennie wanted every note, like, right in there.”
Tristano's legacy needs a bit of reviving. He was the subject of a fairly recent DVD release, Lennie Tristano: The Copenhagen Concert, but Netflix doesn't even carry it anymore. Unlike many of his protégées, he's hardly a household name.
Blind from the time he was an infant, Tristano gigged around Chicago and picked up a couple of students, including alto saxophonist Lee Konitz and composer Bill Russo. He moved to New York in 1946 and caught onto what Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were doing, but he kept his distance as well. He's often lumped together with some of the Cool Jazz crowd, but he doesn't really fall in that camp either. He recorded some tracks in 1949 with a sextet featuring Konitz and Warne Marsh, another Tristano student, two of which, “Intuition” and “Digression,” famously anticipated Ornette-style free jazz by a decade. (True, they dispensed with predetermined melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic modes, but they aren't exactly "free jazz.")
So who was this guy?
“Lennie taught the art of improvising, you know?” says Father Stan. Regardless of what instrument a student played, Tristano “wanted you to develop a language, to speak with great freedom and to speak effortlessly, and then to make it new each time.” Part of this process required students to engage in rigorous, close studies of the music of Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and especially Lester Young, to try to capture the essence of how they developed their own voice. His exercises were intended to help free them from the physical issues of playing an instrument, to minimize and ultimately obliterate the barriers standing between the person and the music.
Complete on >> http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/the-blood-of-the-lamb/scola-tristano-duo-at-bridge-street-live-on-dec-19-053317
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