Lennie Tristano Biography
|
|
Leonard Joseph Tristano, 19 March 1919, Chicago, Illinois, USA, d. 18 November 1978, New York City, New York, USA. Encouraged by his mother, Tristano learned piano and various reed instruments while still a very small child, despite steadily deteriorating eyesight (he was born during a measles epidemic). By the age of 11 he was completely blind but, overcoming this handicap, he studied formally at the American Conservatory in Chicago, graduating in 1943. Before graduation he had already established a reputation as a session musician and teacher, including among his pupils outstanding talents such as Lee Konitz and Bill Russo. He also made a handful of records with Earl Swope. Based in New York from 1946, he worked with Charlie Parker and other leading bop musicians and attracted considerable attention within the jazz community, even if his work was little known outside (his first recordings were not released until many years later). In New York Tristano continued to teach; Warne Marsh was one of his important pupils from this period. The extent of his teaching increased so much that by the early 50s he had founded the first important jazz school in New York, a development that kept him still further away from the wider public. By the mid-50s he had returned to private teaching and although he made a few recordings and some public appearances, including a mid-60s tour of Europe, he lived out the remaining years of his life in undeserved, but presumably intentional obscurity. An exceptionally original thinker, Tristano’s work follows a path that, while related to the development of bop, traces different concepts. He was an early experimenter in playing jazz free from traditional notions of time signatures, but the results were very different from the later free jazz movement developed by Ornette Coleman and others. Among the lessons Tristano imparted to his pupils were those of strict precision in ensemble playing, complete command of the instrument and the ability to play complex shifts of time signature within a piece. He also lay particular significant stress upon listening - ‘ear training’. In his own playing he preferred a pure sound and line, devoid of emotional content, and persuaded his pupils to follow this example so that, in Brian Priestley’s words, their performances would ‘stand or fall on the quality of their construction and not on emotional coloration’. Despite this almost puritanical attitude towards jazz, Tristano’s teaching encouraged detailed study of solos by emotional players such as Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge and Charlie Parker. Clearly, Tristano was a powerful influence upon the many musicians he taught and through them upon countless more, especially through the work of such pupils as Peter Ind and Konitz, himself an important teacher.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
|
