Lennie Tristano
Lennie Tristano

Release Date: 1956 | Tracklist

A quick online search through jazz’ best pianists will run you through pages of evident faces - Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, Count Basie. If you keep scrolling, somewhere at a point past human monuments and before half-deserved obscurities, you’ll stumble onto Lennie Tristano. The modestly-known and oft-debated piano man spent half of his life on the Chicago bebop circuit, and the latter half making small waves in New York City.

Tristano’s penchant for what at the time amounted to strangeness rather than innovation, cut a polarizing presence of him. On Lennie Tristano, he alienated critics with compositions that discarded harmonies in favour of monochromatic moods intensified by roving improvisations in rhythm. The atonal qualities he’d brought to the scene instantly split both listeners and aficionados, creating an argument of whether temperate, austere music can truly come from a passionate place.

There is an obviously frigid facet to Tristano’s compositions and playing, which at times creates a moment of aloofness, as if the pieces are reaching you through a far-off vacuum. That cold streak has routinely fuelled detractions about Tristano’s spot in the mausoleum of jazz greats. If one wanted to wax speculative, it could be said that the fact that Tristano taught music throughout the span of his life, starting to do so long before he was even a blip on the Greenwich Village scene, continuing even at the peak of his popular standings, seeped into and altered his sound. The pedantism that comes attached to the teaching process is almost expected to yield an innate detachment to the source material. At the same time, plenty have said that the hollow-point aspects of Tristano’s playing were a philosophical and aesthetic pick, an instant of singularity and foresight, and a precursor to the sort of synthetic abandon popular music would dive headlong into in the 80’s. Tristano also stirred misgivings at the time of release, due to Tristano overdubbing tracks and playing around with studio speed in order to carve out mood and atmosphere. These points, that would soon become main-fare of recording engineers, clashed against the organic tenets of improvisational bop. It’s been told that during a particularly contentious discussion on the inferior methods of tape-looping, Tristano sat down at the piano and played a Mozart piece, layering several lines and tripling the speed, to demonstrate that the effect could well be reached without studio machinations.

Regardless of it all, a retrospect view through musical standards and thresholds lifts Tristano past claims of dispassion. In the modern age, niche music need not sound overly hot and involved to walk a line of quality, nor does it need anything beyond vision and skill to fulfill its own ends. And by that measure, Tristano is a compressed trove of hoarded wealth, a man and his instrument in tight symbiosis, striding through aural stills, with just a rhythm section and some minimal brass to nudge it up the bracket.

Tristano’s body is shaped in two acts. The first, a quartet of songs that he’d recorded in his home studio, are a spare exercise in temper variations, the piano sitting at the forefront. On “Requiem” and “Turkish Mambo” especially, the bass and drums are reduced to a perpetually-decaying metronomic presence, doing nothing more than anchoring the keys to the ground, for fear of it all taking off into the ether. “East Thirty-Second” shifts gears, the trio locking into a hard bop groove, fast and nervy. But even in that instant, nothing usurps Tristano. The piano looms over the piece, temperamental and restless.

The second act, recorded as a live take at the Confucius Restaurant in Lower Manhattan, sees Tristano tackle a short set of standards, bumped up by Art Taylor on drums, and Tristano’s former student, Lee Konitz on alto sax. Konitz melds well into Tristano’s fold, rarely breaking out of the support frame, except for some flourish-heavy stretches on “You Go to My Head” and “All the Things You Are.” That feeling of mutualism builds towers of hermetic interplay between band members. Every piece of the second half exists as a self-enclosed point, too minimalistic and disciplined to become an obelisk, and far too unsettled and able to fade into the background.

The qualities that formed Tristano’s reputation - technique, intuition and insight, would eventually put an end to his career. In a way, he was an artist in the purest sense of the word, one that didn’t put much stock into either ambition, expectation or output. Music seemed to exist as sound in a shut room, and even at the zenith of his career, he would do little more than perform in various house band formations. He was notoriously averse to touring and promoting, and by the mid-70’s, had all but stopped performing, retreating back to teaching and putting up concerts for protégés. A few years later, he would die of a heart attack at the age of 59. What remains, among squabbles of detachment and sincerity, is a roomful of students who’d go on to change sound, scarce footage of snared magic, and a small handful of transcendence.

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