Tristano/The New Tristano

Tristano, Lennie

album cover

The Musings of a Jazz Thinker

Everybody who followed jazz in the 1950s had an opinion about Lennie Tristano (1919–1978). He was hailed by some (including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, who mentioned this album several times) as a major conceptualist, a musician who gathered ideas from bebop and West Coast cool jazz into a cerebral sound. Others dismissed his compositions as cluttered schemes designed to show off runaway technique, and dismissed his playing as too detached—he could sound like a math professor solving elaborate equations. The common rap was that there was no heat, no "soul," in his playing.

It took a long time for the blind Chicago native to win widespread acceptance in jazz. Listening to this title, which combines two of his most significant releases, the chill becomes understandable. Tristano's elongated, almost babbling melody lines seem calculated; the solos that follow are equally thoughtful, yet visit harmonic zones not in common jazz usage. In the space of a single passage, he can sound like a visionary who's way ahead of the times and an iconoclast who's lost in his own reality.

With the perspective of time, those contrasts are exactly what make Tristano a treasure. Tristano/The New Tristano, which combines a 1955 release with one from 1962, includes live dates with his best quartet, the one featuring saxophonist Lee Konitz, as well as daunting and sophisticated unaccompanied jazz piano (several tunes find Tristano overdubbing multiple lines, a move that was itself controversial). The group had been together for some time; its previous albums, Intuition and Crosscurrents, are notable for their wily, journeying themes. Everyone involved knew exactly what Tristano wanted: a smooth and steady swing with no fireworks, and solos that sprouted ideas like weeds. Konitz (and many others) had to work to attain that stream of consciousness. Whenever Tristano sat down to play, it was just always there, instantly.

Genre: Jazz
Released: 1955/1962, Atlantic (Reissued 1994)
Key Tracks: "Requiem," "You Go to My Head," "All the Things You Are," "Deliberation."
Catalog Choice: Intuition; Crosscurrents (not available as of press time).
Next Stop: The Jimmy Giuffre Three: 1961
After That: Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
Book Page: 787