Sydney music writer John Clare finds the championing of pianist Lennie Tristano by a former collaborator too dogmatic and lacking an appreciation of the different ways art is produced.
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Jazz Visions: Lennie Tristano
And His Legacy
by Peter Ind
(Equinox)
Reviewed by John Clare
Many years ago I walked in the long dusk of an English summer. The sky was baby blue but the world darkened at ground level, and the thought occurred to me that some feelings were too subtle to be called emotions. I meant that we associated emotions with romantic feelings, or with anger, loss and pain. The pianist and composer Lennie Tristano was in England then, for the first and last time, and arguments raged as to whether there was any emotion, any drive or swing, any jazz qualities, in his playing.
It is only now that I associate my unremarkable thought with Tristano, who said at some other time that his music was about feeling and that if he wanted raw emotion he would go to the emergency ward. I thought this was a sensationalist statement which treated a huge audience who loved raw, emotional music as ‘peasants’, a term frequently used at the time. The peasants included me. If I wanted raw emotion in musical form I went to Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, George Jones et al. The lyrical clarity of Tristano’s music, its light exhilarations, its delicate scurries and bracing severities, its complexity and intensity, were equally important to me, but one thing did not cancel the other.
Double bassist Peter Ind, a student and colleague of Tristano’s, is far more partisan. Tristano was right! Absolutely!
Tristano himself seems to have been as dogmatic as Ind. His blindness perhaps reinforced a general perception that he was remote and coldly intellectual, even rudely opinionated on occasions. Ind adds dimensions to this cut-out figure that are not unknown but certainly bear repeating. Yet this could have been a more fascinating book than it is. Ind arrived in New York, playing in the band on the Queen Mary in 1949. At this time the ‘modern jazz’, of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie – sometimes called bebop or bop – was supplying new sounds, rhythms and dissonances for an accelerating world. No sooner was this stuff heard – embraced ecstatically or rejected angrily – than Lennie Tristano’s variations and extensions appeared, adding controversy to controversy. Thelonious Monk supplied another strain, recorded quite comprehensively by Blue Note, but largely ignored by listeners and critics until well into the 1950s.
A look at some of the tune titles gives a taste of how different this was to much jazz or romantic popular music before it: Hallucinations, Dance Of The Infidels, Oblivion (Bud Powell), Well You Needn’t, Off Minor, Criss Cross (Thelonious Monk), Crosscurrent, Wow, Intuition, Digression (Lennie Tristano). Monk and Tristano were the movement’s mystery men. As Ind points out, painters and writers were drawn to this music. But there is no reported conversation with or verbal sketch of any of these figures. A much more vivid impression of the time is given in Bird: The Legend Of Charlie Parker, edited by Robert Reisner (Da Capo). In the late 1950s, painters were drawn to a new wave of musicians, such as Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman. In one interview (quoted here) Tristano dismissed their playing – and he included Sonny Rollins – as ‘an expression of the ego’ rather than ‘…flowing from the id.’ Ind neither elaborates nor questions this claim.
The terms ‘id’ and ‘ego’ are indications of Tristano’s interest in Freud. Ind suplies the intriguing information that he, and inevitably a number of his acolytes or disciples – as they were disparagingly called by these who were contemptuous of Tristano’s apparent guru status within his circle) – were also interested in the problematical Wilhelm Reich. Ind’s brief summary of Reich’s ideas leaves out those that seem quite loopy (the sky is blue due to blue ‘orgone energy’, for instance). Ind is at his best in describing Tristano’s teaching role – showing his kindness as well as his ‘guileless’ bluntness – and in injecting some reality into perceived notions of the musical milieu. He contradicts those writers who have represented the era as being divided into black and white factions.
Tristano was of course a great advocate for Charlie Parker, and he also held up black and white players in earlier styles as examples to his students. While many critics have emphasised the fiery qualities and indeed the raw emotion of Roy Eldridge’s playing, Tristano had his students learn the trumpeter’s solos and study them as models of construction.
Tristano is almost always right in Ind’s book. This is a no warts portrait – or perhaps it is more the case that the warts are transfigured into ruthless honesty, guileless directness, etc. Ind’s assertion that, after a period of acclaim, Tristano was terribly under-appreciated, is justifiable but becomes tedious with repetition – particularly as Ind has himself conceded that Tristano deliberately restricted his output – and in one chapter it is extended into an encyclopaedic moan about unrecognised artists (with no mention of the great artists who were recognised in their lifetimes), that new stars eclipse the old, that promoters go for the drawcards, that music has become commercialised. I can agree with some of it – for instance that jazz today too often features a star in front of a band rather than a band creating music as a band but enough is enough!
I enjoyed the technical analysis of Tristano’s contribution, but these are the sections many readers will skip. Also, Ind seems never to have considered something very obvious – that radical simplification can be as important in the development of an art as increased complexity.
The book is worth reading for the times when you sense you have drawn closer to Tristano. It is an important book, but also a taxing one (taxing for me because I think he is wrong) when Ind mounts one of his hobby horses. Let us tackle some of these.
In Ben Sidran’s Talking Jazz, Dizzy Gillespie says he has been listening to an Aretha Franklin performance in which she does things that ‘defy analysis’. On one level art is the manipulation of certain abstract elements: weight, mass, volume, colour, texture, motion, etc, translated into pigment, rhythm, harmony, perspective and so on, according to idiom. Some art is very literal, yet even there have these elements great rhetorical importance. Many systems of organising the elements have been developed, and these have opened up great possibilities. Depending on our temperament and imagination, our training can also inhibit us, make us glib or
standardised, close us off to other possibilities of expression and organisation – for instance, approaches that we may find in some folk music, early ‘primitive’ blues or radical free departures. What we can forget in academic study is that art aims to have an effect, to express, and it will sometimes achieve its effects outside the system.
I say this simply as a basis for disagreement with Ind’s dismissal of so many post-Tristano things. When Ind pronounces certain Tristano performances as unsurpassed, he is most likely right, but is the aim necessarily to surpass? He means, so often, that Tristano has extended harmony and rhythmic displacement further than anyone in jazz can hope to surpass or even match. And so? The German composers took harmonic extension to its logical conclusion well before Lennie Tristano, and when we get to the latter-day Frenchmen, Messaien and Boulez, rhythmic complexity has been given a right going over.
Ind’s judgments are made on the basis of Western systems derived from the formulation of the tempered scale, which made it possible for instruments to change key without retuning, and which opened the way for the marvels of architectural/harmonic sophistication of Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, etc. But in any artistic change or development some expressive elements are lost, which is why we have devoted ‘early music’ groups, ‘roots music’ enthusiasts and so on.
Charles Mingus said of Ornette Coleman, ‘I don’t think this guy could play a major scale in tune, but he’s making all of us sound like we’re playing cliches.’
Ind’s view is that things ran down from the peaks of bebop and Tristano in the late 1940s/early fifties, but so much wonderful music then emerged in which Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Coltrane and others used the accumulated knowledge in a freer way, combing it with physically felt rhythms, with chaotic momentum at times, and with hypnotic continuums. It had a wonderful life. It was colouristic, emotive, joyful, moody, meditative. The previous line of `progressive’ innovation did not always apply. Colour and feeling were the first things I heard in the very sound of Miles Davis, Coltrane, Dave Brubeck – specially Time Out and Time Further Out in the early 1960s – in Charles Mingus, the Modern Jazz Quartet – so sparkling and vivacious – in Jimmy Guiffre, in gospel choirs, classic rock and roll. Colour, texture, rhythm, dynamism. It was after all the sound of Lennie Tristano’s piano that first attracted me.
Interestingly, Ind includes Van Gogh in his catalogue of great artists who suffered for lack of recognition in their lifetimes, but in the great visual system that predated the systems of classical Western music – I mean so-called Renaissance perspective – Vincent was hit or miss, naive – perhaps deliberately – or simply incompetent. In the academy he was moved back to the rudimentary level. Yet he did indeed produce marvels of pictorial expression. Picasso, Modigliani and others displayed precocious technical mastery, but they abandoned elements of that in order to create spatial effects that borrowed in part from primitive tribal art and religious icons painted before the formulation of linear and aerial perspective. Irving Berlin could only play the piano in one key, but this duffer wrote many of America’s greatest popular songs.
Art is perhaps more mysterious than Ind – a superb and highly trained bassist – will concede. Artists use what they can do. Sometimes their decisions, their intuitions and visions are more important than the breadth of their skills. I think it serves Tristano better to place his undoubted greatness within this marvelous spectrum than to hoist him to some pinnacle above it.
This is an expanded and modified version of a review that appeared in the Sun-Herald‘s Sunday Extra section. Reprinted here with kind permission. Jazz Visions is available through Birdland Records, birdland.com.au (02 92676881)
**Photo: Lennie Tristano (courtesy www.ifnet.it)
