Sunday, January 10, 2016
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Intuition - Lennie Tristano
Uploaded on Aug 1, 2011
Lennie Tristano and Wayne Marsh along with the rest of sextet invents free jazz in 1949, preceding Ornette Coleman by 10 years. The first and some of the best free jazz around.
Saturday, December 13, 2014
Lennie Tristano: Chicago 1951
Reprinted from http://jazzwax.com
One of the most important live recordings of the Lennie Tristano Sextet with Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh has just been released. The material has never before been issued, and the sound is superb, capturing the group's cool sound at its peak and at a critical moment in jazz history, just a year before Lee Konitz would join the Stan Kenton Orchestra. The only live recording that comes later than this one with Lee and Marsh features six tracks captured in Toronto in July 1952, and the sound is foggy and distant. [Photo above of Lennie Tristano by William P. Gottlieb]
The new recording—Lennie Tristano: Chicago, April 1951—has been issued by Uptown, Robert Sunenblick's label. I don't know how Bob finds these recordings, but all jazz fans owe him a debt of gratitude. This two-CD recording is a remarkable document.
Tristano, who was blind, began recording with alto saxophonist Lee Konitz and tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh in 1949 for Capitol and Prestige, introducing the cool jazz sound in small group format. In 1950, the sextet recorded live in New York, and the only other recording of Lee an Marsh with Tristano was the Toronto concert in July '52 at UJPO Hall. This new album provides a sparkling April 1951 recording, with 14 glorious tracks. The lineup for the Blue Note gig included Willie Dennis (tb) Lee Konitz (as) Warne Marsh (ts) Lennie Tristano (p) Buddy Jones (b) Mickey Simonetta (d). Dennis, like Konitz and Marsh, was a Tristano student.
Two months after this recording, notes Bob Blumenthal, who wrote the albums superb 24-page liners, Tristano opened a school in Manhattan, attracting young players and veteran musicians interested in learning Tristano's novel approach to improvisation and composition. Konitz in '52 would go on to star in Kenton's band, continuing to record with Marsh throughout the early '50s in live and studio sessions for Atlantic, Imperial and Liberty before Marsh formed his own group. [Photo above, in the foreground, from left, Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh and Lennie Tristano]
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
JazzClip: Lennie Tristano (1965)
Reprinted from http://jazzwax.com
On the evening of October 31, 1965, pianist Lennie Tristano performed solo at the Tivoli Gardens Concert Hall in Copenhagen. The event was captured for Danish television using multiple camera angles. Several additional Tristano concert performances were recorded on the same tour of Scandinavia and Europe. And that was it. The blind pianist performed publicly for the last time in 1968 and spent his last ten years teaching. [Photo above of Lennie Tristano in 1949]
As writer Ted Gioia has noted, Tristano did not have a manager in 1965 and told an interviewer during this tour that playing jazz was only possible if one were "making a living some other way." A bebop protagonist and cool jazz pioneer, Tristano's modern-classical approach to jazz was overlooked by labels in the '50s. By mid-decade, with the launch of the 12-inch LP, most record companies wanted brighter, more easily understood jazz for an ever-expanding at-home market.
Tristano was always an acquired taste—particularly in 1965. While most ears yearned for melody, Tristano preferred masking standards with a brutish, deconstructivist approach that left show tunes platforms for his intricate chord-driven explorations. [Photo above of Lennie Tristano by Roberto Polillo/CTSIMAGES]
This 1965 concert broadcast on Danish television not only represents a rare opportunity to enjoy Lennie Tristano playing solo piano, but it is one of his last recorded public appearances. Tristano was notoriously difficult to persuade to perform in later years, but he made a trip to Europe where he took part in a televised Berlin Piano Summit (as one of six featured all-star pianists) and came to Denmark the following day for this program. Tristano's dense altered chords in a deliberate "Darn That Dream" don't seem all that radical decades later, while his inventive reworking of the swing favorite "Lullaby of the Leaves" is a treat. The blind pianist is not one for a lot of theatrics, he simply turns and offers a slight smile to his enthusiastic audience after each selection. This vintage video is remarkably well preserved, photographed in black-and-white with excellent sound. ~ Ken Dryden
Recorded live in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1965.
Solo performer: Lennie Tristano.
1. Darn That Dream
2. Lullaby Of The Leaves 05:59
3. Expressions 09:07
4. You Don't Know What Love Is 13:12
5. Tivoli Gardens Swing 19:08
6. Ghost Of A Chance 22:11
7. It's You Or No One 25:54
8. Imagination 29:20
9. Tangerine 35:50
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Lennie Tristano....
Birth: 1919 03 19 - Chicago, IL
Death: 1978 11 18 - New York, NY
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 very 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, 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 1928-38, 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 Lennie Popkin and Richard Tabnik, and drummer Carol Tristano -- the pianist's daughter -- carry on his work into the next century.
Chris Kelsey, All Music Guide
