BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Description: Pianist, Composer, USA
Known For: In 2013 Tristano will be honored with induction into the Grammy Hall of Fame for the 1949 album Crosscurrents
Instruments: Pianist
Music Styles: Jazz
Location: IL, United States of America
Date Born: 19th March 1919
Location Born: Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
Date Died: 18th November 1978
Location Died: New York City, New York, United States of America
CONTACT DETAILS
Web Site:
Facebook:
Other Links: See bellow:
YOUTUBE VIDEO
BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Leonard Joseph Tristano (March 19, 1919 – November 18, 1978) was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and teacher of jazz improvisation.
Tristano studied for bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music in Chicago before moving to New York City in 1946. He played with leading bebop musicians and formed his own small bands, which soon displayed some of his early interests – contrapuntal interaction of instruments, harmonic flexibility, and rhythmic complexity. His quintet in 1949 recorded the first free group improvisations. Tristano’s innovations continued in 1951, with the first overdubbed, improvised jazz recordings, and two years later, when he recorded an atonal improvised solo piano piece that was based on the development of motifs rather than on harmonies. He developed further via polyrhythms and chromaticism into the 1960s, but was infrequently recorded.
Tristano started teaching music, especially improvisation, in the early 1940s, and by the mid-1950s was concentrating on teaching in preference to performing. He taught in a structured and disciplined manner, which was unusual in jazz education when he began. His educational role over three decades meant that he exerted an influence on jazz through his students, including saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh.
Musicians and critics vary in their appraisal of Tristano as a musician. Some describe his playing as cold and suggest that his innovations had little impact; others state that he was a bridge between bebop and later, freer forms of jazz, and assert that he is less appreciated than he should be because commentators found him hard to categorize and because he chose not to commercialize.
Tristano was born in Chicago on March 19, 1919. His mother, Rose Tristano (née Malano), was also born in Chicago. His father, Michael Joseph Tristano, was born in Italy and moved to the United States as a child. Lennie was the second of four brothers.
Lennie started playing the family’s player piano at the age of two or three. He had classical piano lessons when he was eight, but indicated later that they had hindered, rather than helped, his development. He was born with weak eyesight, possibly as a consequence of his mother being affected by the 1918–19 flu pandemic during pregnancy. A bout of measles when aged six may have exacerbated his condition, and by the age of nine or ten he was totally blind as a result of glaucoma. He initially went to standard state schools, but attended the Illinois School for the Blind in Jacksonville for a decade from around 1928. During his school days he played several instruments, including saxophones, trumpet, guitar, and drums. At the age of eleven he had his first gigs, playing clarinet in a brothel.
Tristano studied for a bachelor’s degree in music in performance at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago from 1938 until 1941, and stayed for another two years for further studies, although he left before completing his master’s degree. One of his aunts assisted Tristano by taking notes for him at university.
Later life and career
1940s
In the early 1940s Tristano played tenor saxophone and piano for a variety of engagements, including in a rumba band. He gave private music lessons from around the same time, including to saxophonist Lee Konitz. From 1943 Tristano also taught at the Axel Christensen School of Popular Music. He received press coverage for his piano playing from early 1944, appearing in Metronome ’s summary of music in Chicago from that year, and in Down Beat from 1945. He recorded with some musicians from Woody Herman’s band in 1945; Tristano’s playing on these tracks “is characterized by his extended harmonies, fast single-line runs, and block chords.” He also recorded solo piano pieces in the same year. Tristano also married in 1945; his wife was Judy Moore, a musician who sang to his piano accompaniment in Chicago in the mid-1940s.
Tristano’s interest in jazz inspired a move to New York City in 1946. As a preliminary step to moving there, he stayed in Freeport, Long Island, where he played in a restaurant with Arnold Fishkin (bass) and Billy Bauer (guitar). This trio, with an assortment of bassists replacing Fishkin, was recorded in 1946–47. Reviewers at the time commented on “the novel nature of the trio in the contrapuntal interaction between piano and guitar and the innovative harmonic approach reminiscent of the early twentieth-century composers”. Gunther Schuller later described one of their recordings as “too far ahead of its time” in its harmonic freedom and rhythmic complexity.
Tristano first met saxophonist Charlie Parker in 1947. They played together in bands that included bebop musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach later that year for radio broadcasts. The pianist reported that Parker enjoyed his playing, in part because it was different from what Parker was accustomed to and did not copy the saxophonist’s style. In 1948 Tristano played less often in clubs, and added Konitz and a drummer to his regular band, making it into a quintet. This band recorded the first sides for the New Jazz label, which later became Prestige Records. Later that year Warne Marsh, another saxophonist student of Tristano’s, was added to the group.
Tristano’s band had two recording sessions in 1949 that proved to be significant. The sextet recorded original compositions, including his “Wow” and “Crosscurrent”, that were based on familiar harmonies; reviewers commented on the linearity of the playing and its departure from bebop. Without a drummer, the other musicians also recorded the first free improvisations by a group – “Intuition” and “Digression”. For these tracks, the sequence in which the musicians would join in the ensemble playing, and the approximate timing of those entrances, were planned, but nothing else – harmony, key, time signature, tempo, melody or rhythm – was prepared or set. Instead, the five musicians were held together by contrapuntal interaction. Both tracks were praised by critics, although their release was delayed – “Intuition” was released late in 1950, and “Digression” not until 1954. Parker and composer Aaron Copland were also impressed. Numerous other musicians of the time, however, thought Tristano’s music too progressive and emotionally cold, and predicted that it would not be popular with the public.
The sextet struggled to find enough work, but did play at Birdland’s opening night “A Journey Through Jazz”, a subsequent five-week engagement at that club, and at various other venues in the north-east of the US late in 1949. They performed free pieces in these concerts, as well as Bach fugues, but found it difficult over time to continue to play with the freedom that they had initially felt.
With occasional personnel changes, the sextet continued performing into 1951.[36] From the same year, the location for Tristano’s lessons shifted from his home in Flushing, Long Island to a Manhattan loft property, part of which he had converted into a recording studio. This also served as the location for frequent jam sessions with various invited musicians. The address became the title of one of his compositions – “317 East 32nd Street”. At around the same time, Tristano started a record label, named Jazz Records. It released “Ju-ju” and “Pastime” on a 45 record in 1952, before Tristano abandoned the project because of time demands and distribution problems. The two tracks were from a trio session with bassist Peter Ind and drummer Roy Haynes, and contained overdubbed second piano parts added later by Tristano. Ind described them as “the very first overdubbed and improvised jazz recordings”. Early reviewers largely failed to realize that overdubbing had been used.Tristano’s recording studio remained in use, and was the scene of early sessions for Debut Records, co-founded by Roach and bassist Charles Mingus.
Tristano declined offers to perform in the 1970s; he explained that he didn’t like to travel, and that “if you want to do concerts, you must make a career. You see, a career means you spend most of your time doing concerts. I don’t want to do that.” He continued teaching, and helped to organize concerts for some of his students. Another album, Descent into the Maelstrom, was released in the 1970s; it consisted of recordings made between 1951 and 1966.
Tristano had a series of illnesses in the 1970s, including eye pain and emphysema (he smoked for most of his life). On November 18, 1978 he died of a heart attack at home in Jamaica, New York.
links: