Lennie Tristano - His Life and Music - Part 3

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

In our continuing look at Lennie Tristano’s life and music, let’s turn once again to Barry Ulanov’s liner notes to three of Lennie’s albums all of which have been issued individually to CD and are also contained in the comprehensive The Complete Atlantic Recordings of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz & Warne Marsh [Mosaic Records MD6-174].

Barry [1918-2000] was the son of violinist Nathan Ulanov who served as concertmaster for Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra. He graduated from Columbia University in 1935 and while there he wrote about Jazz and Jazz concerts including some early coverage of Billie Holiday’s Café Society performances.

He served as the editor of Metronome magazine from 1943-1955 and wrote articles for Downbeat from 1955-1958. He was an early fan of bebop and championed Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. He was also an early and lifelong supporter of Lennie Tristano who wrote the composition Coolin’ Off with Ulanov “ … as a personal testament to the affinity that many Jazz musicians had with Ulanov.”

An erudite man, Barry taught at Juilliard, Princeton and Barnard College [1951-1988]. During his later years, he concentrated on explorations of religion and psychology, topics from which form the basis for many of the books he wrote and co-authored.

The more esoteric and intellectual forms of Jazz also had a particular appeal to Ulanov - he was one of the first to write about the Alec Wilder Octet - and the complexity of Lennie’s music fit in nicely with this orientation. 

Barry wrote liner notes to three of Lennie’s albums, the first of which was Tristano [Atlantic LP 1224].

ORIGINAL LINER NOTES TO

THE LENNIE TRISTANO QUARTET (ATLANTIC SD-2-7006)

“Tracing the history of jazz is an unusually satisfying occupation. For no matter how one pursues the subject, with great intensity or with wandering attention, the documents one examines, such as this collection of the Lennie Tristano Quartet, are live performances and never merely notes on paper. This is an art that is always present, always alive before us, whether the performance in question dates from yesterday or last year or fifty years ago. That is the extraordinary fact about this improvised music which the present collection demonstrates wonderfully well.

These Tristano performances date from that marvelous moment in the mid-1950s when bop had been absorbed by every lively jazz consciousness. The cliches of the swing years were in abeyance. Simply to get a beat was no longer enough. The endless parade of two- and four-bar phrases, hooked to chunky syncopations, had been temporarily halted. Musicians were free to go where their minds — or glands or hearts or muscles or nerves — led them. Tutored by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and the other brave souls of bop, the new jazz musicians erupted in flashy cadenzas, 100 notes to the bar, and zealous imitations, where they could manage them, of Bird's melodic flights.

Lennie Tristano, himself a constant innovator in jazz, was fascinated by the bop procedures and especially by what somebody like Charlie Parker or Fats Navarro could do with them. Bop entered his music. His music entered bop — when he had a chance to play with musicians in the bop movement, as he did when he and his sometime student and longtime collaborator Lee Konitz joined with Gene Ramey and Art Taylor to make up the Lennie Tristano Quartet.

Gene Ramey had worked with Bird in the Jay McShann band. Like Parker, he was a musician formed in Kansas City, where Count Basie's original bass player, Walter Page, taught him his instrument. In New York, he had recorded with Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver and Fats Navarro, among others, and worked with Bird and Art Blakey and innumerable small bop bands. He was echt bop. Art Taylor, a younger musician, had developed as a drummer in his native New York, most importantly in association with his near-contemporary and fellow New Yorker, Bud Powell. From Bud, most gifted of bop pianists, he had picked up that feeling for eccentric changes of time and accent, without losing the long rhythmic line, which made him a natural drummer for Lennie Tristano.

Lee Konitz was as ardent a Parker follower as any of the hoppers or Lennie, with the additional impetus that came with being so accomplished on Bird's own instrument, the alto saxophone. By the mid-1950s he had put in his time with the big band — Claude Thornhill and Stan Kenton, to be exact — had fronted his own small combinations, and had found, with particular help and understanding from Lennie Tristano, what was unmistakably his own voice. Like Bird, he had an easily recognizable sound, reedy, distinctly enunciated, carefully put in place, but never so carefully that the beat was lost. His loyalty to Lennie, which brought him back again and again to play with him, sprang not only from close friendship, but from an understanding of the Tristano jazz feeling and thinking which matched Lennie's sympathy and respect for him.

What one hears in these performances again and again is mutuality of feeling and closeness of thought. Some of it comes in lines prepared beforehand, taking familiar tunes, jazz standards, the blues, the bop anthems, and converting them into fresh statements for alto or piano or both. Some of it comes in spontaneous exchanges between the horn and the keyboard, between the bass and the two solo instruments, or between the drums and the alto and the piano in those split choruses which go back to the very beginnings of jazz for their ritual structure. Everywhere, the mutuality is evident. The playing hangs together because the musicians are at ease with each other in, of all unlikely-sounding places for such a get-together, the Sing Song Room of the Confucius Restaurant in New York City, an environment to which at least a nominal respect is paid in the third track of the first side, the very un-Oriental-sounding CONFUCIUS BLUES.

The titles of Tristano performances are not insignificant. They may be obscure or lost in some personal experience that Lennie or his musicians had forgotten by the third or eighth performance of a particular tune or line. But they say something. APRIL, for example, is typical musicians' shorthand for a standard tune, in this case I'LL REMEMBER APRIL. PENNIES IN MINOR describes precisely what Lennie has done to the venerable PENNIES FROM HEAVEN, transposing it to a minor key and giving it a whole new identity. In LENNIE-BIRD, the bringing together of Tristano and Parker habits of jazz formulation around the most often-repeated chord sequence of the bop years, that of HOW HIGH THE MOON, is properly celebrated. In BACKGROUND MUSIC, Warne Marsh's conversion of ALL OF ME, the title becomes ironic, whatever Warne's intention or the circumstances that gave rise to the title: it is very much Lee and Lennie to the foreground, each at his best in solos of particular clarity and fullness of development. But then irony is very much a matter of intention and the ironic mode is one that Lennie very much cultivated.

There are ironies off and on in these performances. It is almost impossible to find any good jazz altogether without them, and so there are anti-sentimental asides, a snicker or two at the expense of romantic phrases in THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER YOU or MY MELANCHOLY BABY or SWEET AND LOVELY, an extra-melodramatic rumble in the BLUES. But the prevailing tone here is not mocking, not satirical. The ironies are essentially those that go with the jazz territory. There is much more serenity here than irony. Wit is in the service of good humor. Lennie's fancy here has turned to love of his music and his musicians and the result is that a good time is had by all, not least the listener.

Lennie is at his sunniest and most compelling in these performances. From the very beginning — APRIL — he steps out in straight clear clean lines, setting up Lee's solo with block chords, thinking his own solo line through in handsome melodic weavings that prepare the way splendidly for Art Taylor's drum splits and a tidy concluding statement with Lee. In MEAN TO ME, his fiddling's with time and tempo are set forth with an intaglio precision, cutting in and out of a better-than-average tune with a splendid deliberateness. In the BLUES, he moves handsomely back and forth, between block chords and single-note lines, taking short phrases, lengthening them, doubling back on them, varying, adding, shifting register along with chord and texture along with tempo, and never, no matter how brief the phrase, losing sight or sense of the long line.

The long line is all. It is superbly demonstrated in the minor but not melancholy version of PENNIES. This is Lennie at his most unstoppable, with that great transforming baroque intensity that makes the theme no one part of the line but the whole line itself, from the first note of Lennie's solo to the last, and maybe even more, from the very first note of the whole performance to the last, including every drum beat, every bass plucking, everything that everyone contributes, Lee, Lennie, Gene, Art. This is, I think, a masterpiece, and one of Lennie's most enduring statements, very much in all the jazz traditions, with all the necessary spontaneity, lifting, swinging rhythm, and alongside all that and against it a fullness of preparation before the fact, a fine fresh line, a positively philosophical approach to a jazz shootout.

There is more of the same kind of Tristano piano in the elegant ornamentation of 's WONDERFUL, in the scalar extensions of BACKGROUND MUSIC in which Lennie maneuvers a jazz way between the baroque procedures of Bach and the modern-medievalist procedures of Hindemith, and in the meticulous inspections of OUT OF NOWHERE'S every phrase in the set of variations on the original that Lennie called 317 E. 32ND. In fact, the authority and drive and charm that Lennie could exert at the piano are evident even in his pointings for Gene Ramey's bass in MEAN TO

ME, THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER YOU and MELANCHOLY BABY, and in his multiple exchanges with Art Taylor's drumming, which becomes melodic and linear as Lennie's Piano becomes percussive and all the more linear.

I take nothing away from Lee when I say that it is Lennie's quality of mind that dominates these performances. Lee does lovely things with straight melodic statements, with bop phrases and Lennie's lines and his own. He makes his own authority handsomely clear in such a carefully crafted solo as he draws out of SWEET AND LOVELY and once again in the very different Birdlike bursts with which he greets Charlie Parker's line on INDIANA, DONNA LEE. He is everywhere he is needed, doing what most needs to be done, by himself, with the others, always the best of jazz friends and collaborators. But everywhere, it seems to me, we listen for, look forward to, wait for, settle back happily to hear again, the center of all these events, Lennie.

It is finally in jazz as in everything else the quality of mind that holds us and when it is of the stature of Lennie's mind, everything else that comes with it must, one way or another, serve it. We listen to hear how he will extend and develop and make new, the familiar tunes and chord progressions, the ancient ways of jazz and the new ones. We are held by that brilliant stubborn insistence on adding, adding, adding, until a statement is complete, or at least as complete as the short chorus forms of jazz will permit. We are fascinated by the way feeling comes at us from every measure of Lennie's music, disciplined by chosen limitations of melody and harmony, freed by a rhythmic imagination that, like Charlie Parker's, can observe the rules that bring musicians back together to keep performances in place and yet can escape into absolutely open territory where the only restriction is the fact of time itself. We are delighted that from time to time, as in these performances, Lennie was able to find musicians with whom he was so much at ease he could accept the discipline and feel the freedom which together make his music so moving.”

— Barry Ulanov 1981

Lennie Tristano - His Life and Music - Part 2

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

In our continuing look at Lennie Tristano’s life and music, let’s now turn to Barry Ulanov’s liner notes to three of Lennie’s albums all of which have been issued individually to CD and are also contained in the comprehensive The Complete Atlantic Recordings of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz & Warne Marsh [Mosaic Records MD6-174].

Barry [1918-2000] was the son of violinist Nathan Ulanov who served as concertmaster for Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra. He graduated from Columbia University in 1935 and while there he wrote about Jazz and Jazz concerts including some early coverage of Billie Holiday’s Café Society performances.

He served as the editor of Metronome magazine from 1943-1955 and wrote articles for Downbeat from 1955-1958. He was an early fan of bebop and championed Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. He was also an early and lifelong supporter of Lennie Tristano who wrote the composition Coolin’ Off with Ulanov “ … as a personal testament to the affinity that many Jazz musicians had with Ulanov.”

An erudite man, Barry taught at Juilliard, Princeton and Barnard College [1951-1988]. During his later years, he concentrated on explorations of religion and psychology, topics from which form the basis for many of the books he wrote and co-authored.

The more esoteric and intellectual forms of Jazz also had a particular appeal to Ulanov - he was one of the first to write about the Alec Wilder Octet - and the complexity of Lennie’s music fit in nicely with this orientation. 

Barry wrote liner notes to three of Lennie’s albums, the first of which was Tristano [Atlantic LP 1224].

“A great many people art; going to be surprised by this set. It presents a Lennie Tristano far removed from the figure of their — and the critics' — imagination. Uncompromising he may he, as has been noted many a time, in the public-prints and in private discussions. But remote, inaccessible, recondite he is not, except in the sense that any first-rate artist has ideas to offer which are necessarily his own and nobody else's and hence so fresh, so crisp, so inspired as to seem — or sound — altogether new and quite thoroughly removed from any familiar thinking — or playing-pattern. No, there is nothing really obscure about Lennie's playing here, nothing really beyond the grasp of anybody with any feeling for, or fairly considerable listening experience in, jazz.

This is jazz, no mistaking it for anything else. It meets all the requirements; it is improvised, brilliantly adding ideas to ideas all the way through; it swings, rapturously, whether up or middling-up or slow in tempo; it offers, both in Lennie's playing with bass and drums and with Lee Konitz and rhythm, that delicate internal tension, that collective creativity which is the special identifying mark of the real thing in this music.

And so it is to the jazz in this record that I suggest you listen, forgetting, if you can, any preconceived notions about what Lennie Tristano represents in modern music, anything you may have read about his personality, his ideas, his group, his students or teaching method or anything much besides, no matter how directly relevant it may seem to you. Isn't it, after all, in a man's painting, if he is a painter, in his poetry, if he is a poet, or in his music, if he is a composer, that one should look for his personality, his ideas, or anything else of any sizable significance? And isn't this particularly true of jazz, where a performer composes as he blows, if he is a genuine jazz musician, and therefore exposes himself more honestly than in most arts? And if it isn't true, then why bother — why bother painting or writing or composing or blowing in the first place? — and why bother looking or reading or listening in the second?

After listening to these tracks, I think you'll agree with me that what you have heard is impression enough of the Tristano thinking processes and that, unquestionably, Lennie's ideas must seek musical outlet, must find jazz outlet, and we must pay attention, hard, earnest attention, and do so with every sort of listening ease.

Lennie has fooled with the tapes of EAST THIRTY-SECOND and LINE UP, adjusting the bass lines Peter Ind (on bass) and Jeff Morton (on drums) prepared for him to the piano lines he has superimposed upon them. But the mechanical adjustment of tapes is not what you hear. What comes through first of all and last of all is the jazz, uninterrupted and pulsating and overpowering jazz, with that kind of frontal motion which was Bach's in, say, the CHROMATIC FANTASY IN D MINOR, pushing through from beginning to end without any wasted accents or unnecessary halts or repetition. The great day for jazz will be that one when rhythm sections — one or two or three musicians large — will be able to think and play and beat that steadily, with such regularity and rapidity and imagination that it will be possible to record alongside them instead of over them.

Another kind of feat, not really of any mechanical or electronic interest except in the paired piano lines that merge and separate from time to time, is in the REQUIEM Lennie plays here, a heartfelt R.I.P. for the late Charlie Parker. The achievement is in the form, a kind of "prelude and blues'' structure, in which first of all Lennie sets a mood with unexpected Schumannesque figures and then, even as Charlie did, plays a rest into the blues. There is a tender deliberateness about this performance: it is a man thinking grief, feeling deprived, thinking and feeling in the logical medium for grief and deprivation in jazz: the blues.

More of the deliberate, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say the much-deliberated, makes its way into the three lines, played — and recorded — one on top of the other in the TURKISH MAMBO, which is not a mambo and certainly reveals not one iota or fez of Near Eastern influence but gains its title from Lennie's long, low bow in the direction of the brothers Ertegun, Ahmet and Nesuhi, for whom this album was put together. The times will probably be as hard for the listener to follow as they were at various times for drummers: one track proceeds from 7/8 to 7/4, another from 5/8 to 5/4, the last from 3/8 to 4/4. But one need not attempt to sort out the arithmetical delicacies with which Lennie titillates his mind and fingers and our head and feet to feel the exhilaration produced by the rhythmic point and counterpoint.

Similarly, one can get deeply involved in the intricacies of lines solo or lines duo in the remaining bands, those recorded with Lee Konitz in the Sing Song Room of the Confucius Restaurant, where they and several rhythm sections spent the summer of 1955 together (here it's Gene Ramey on bass and Art Taylor on drums). But better than such involvement, at least at first, I would think, is to let yourself go snapping your thumb and index finger, pecking head, or simply tapping foot — choose your own weapon — allowing the beat to make itself felt, just as Lennie and Lee do. Then look for the little details, listen for the richnesses of ornament, the fine parallel or disjunctive thinking, the developments together or apart which make up the masterful balance here of musicians who know and understand each other and are only too glad to show it in their playing together.

In THESE FOOLISH THINGS, it is the splendidly long line that Lee plays, Lennie's reflective musing, now single-line, now in block chords, and a finish together that puts a glistening coda on both their backs. In YOU GO TO MY HEAD, a longtime favorite of these musicians, it is Lee, thoughtful to a carefully organized conclusion, and Lennie in almost exactly the same groove, more directly following after his student than any place else on record. In A GHOST OF A CHANCE, the elegant touches — and elegant they truly are — are Lennie's, following the chord structure of the Victor Young tune with comparative orthodoxy, laying down counter-melodies, showing himself at his simplest to be the same sort of thoughtful and feelingful jazzman that he is in more complex creations. Last of all, in the romps at middle-tempos that only thoroughly experienced and rhythmically gifted jazz musicians can ever manage accurately and groovily, in IF I HAD YOU and ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE, it's a meshing of both solo gears, with Lennie's entrances in both the clues to the balanced mood (or mood of balance ) of both.

Balance all around is to be found in this collection: a trial balance of tempo and time and personality differences which accounts for the jockeying of tapes and changing of speeds and multiplication of piano lines in Lennie's solo tracks; a tested balance of soloists and tunes and tempos and personalities which accounts for the orderly procedure and unmitigated pleasure of the alto and piano solos and duos in the tracks Lennie and Lee play together. And all of it — and this I cannot insist upon too strongly — comes out jazz, real jazz, great jazz.”

— Barry Ulanov 1956