Background

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.

Education

Lennie started on 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.

Career

During his early years as a professional performer and teacher, Tristano worked in and around Chicago, achieving his first measure of critical attention and attracting his first important students, Konitz and composer/arranger Bill Russo.

In 1946, Tristano moved to New York, where he made something of a big splash, performing with many of the leading musicians of the day, including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. The influential critic Barry Ulanov took an extreme liking to Tristano's music and championed his work in the pages of Metronome magazine; Tristano was named the publication's Musician of the Year for 1947. Tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh began studies with Tristano in 1948, and when Bauer and Konitz came back aboard, he had the core of his great sextet. In 1949 -- with the addition of bassist Arnold Fishkin and alternating drummers Harold Granowsky and Denzil Best -- Tristano, Bauer, Konitz, and Marsh recorded what was to become the basis of the band's collective legacy, the Capitol album Crosscurrents. The Capitol sessions spawned many of Tristano's best-known works, including the title track, and of course, the freely improvised cuts "Digression" and "Intuition" (these latter recorded without a drummer). The recordings synthesized the Tristano approach: long, rhythmically and harmonically elaborate melodies were played over a smooth, almost uninflected swing time maintained by the bassist and drummer. Counterpoint, which had been mostly abandoned by post-New Orleans/Chicago players, made a comeback in Tristano's music. Tristano's written lines were a great deal more involved than the already complex melodies typical of bebop; he subdivided and multiplied the beat in odd groupings, and his harmonies did not always behave in a manner consistent with functional tonality. The complexity of his constructs demanded that his rhythm section provide little more than a solid foundation. Tristano's bassists and drummers were not expected to interact in the manner of a bop rhythm section, but to support the music's melodic and harmonic substance. Such restraint lent Tristano's music an emotionally detached air, which to this day has been used by unsympathetic critics as a sledgehammer to pound him.

In 1951, Tristano founded a school of jazz in New York, the first of its kind. Its faculty consisted of many of his most prominent students, including Konitz, Bauer, Marsh, and pianist Sal Mosca. His public performances became fewer and farther between; for the rest of his life, Tristano was to concentrate on teaching, mostly to the exclusion of everything else. He shut down his school in 1956, and began teaching out of his home on Long Island. Thereafter he would play occasionally at the Half Note in New York City. Recordings became scarce. He made two albums for Atlantic, Lennie Tristano and The New Tristano. A compilation of odds and ends entitled Descent into the Maelstrom was released on Inner City; its title track documents Tristano's experiments in multi-track recording of the piano. He toured Europe in 1965; his last public performance in the U. S. was in 1968.

Until his death in 1978, Tristano continued to teach.

Achievements

• Tristano was a remarkable musician. Tristano was Metronome's musician of the year in 1947. He was elected to Down Beat's Hall of Fame in 1979. In 2013 Tristano was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for Crosscurrents, an album of recordings from 1949. He was added to the Ertegun Hall of Fame in 2015.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Lennie Tristano - Continuity

    (Tracks 1-4 by the Lennie Tristano Quartet recorded live a...)

  • Lennie Tristano Quintet - Live at Birdland 1949

    (Tracks 1-5 by the Lennie Tristano Quintet - Recorded in p...)

  • Chicago April 1951

    ((2-CD set) 14 previously unreleased tracks of pianist Len...)

  • Manhattan Studio

    (Lennie Tristano recorded these tracks himself playing tri...)

  • Live in Toronto 1952

    (Lennie Tristano Quintet recorded live in UJPO Hall, Toron...)

  • Intuition

    (4 CDs. a comprehensive guide to the groundbreaking work o...)

  • The Essential Keynote Collection 2: The Complete Lennie Tristano
  • These Foolish Things
  • Lennie Tristano

  • book

  • Jazz Lines: Lennie Tristano Piano
  • New Tristano
  • Lennie Tristano/The New Tristano

Views

Quotations: "If you feel angry with somebody you hit him on the nose – not try to play angry music", he commented; "Express all that is positive. Beauty is a positive thing. "

Personality

Around 1923, he started losing his sight. Although his blindness has been attributed to his birth during an influenza epidemic or to a severe case of measles, the cause is unknown.

In Ind's view, Tristano "was always so gentle, so charming and so quietly spoken that his directness could be unnerving. " This directness was noted by others, including bassist Chubby Jackson, who commented that Tristano had almost no tact and would not worry about being rude or making others feel incompetent. Some of his students described Tristano as domineering, but others indicated that this impression came from his demanding discipline in training and attitude to music.

Writer Barry Ulanov commented in 1946 that Tristano "was not content merely to feel something, (. .. ) he had to explore ideas, to experience them, to think them through carefully, thoroughly, logically until he could fully grasp them and then hold on to them. "

Tristano "had seemingly small but extremely flexible hands, which could expand to a phenomenal degree", allowing him to reach large intervals.

Quotes from others about the person

• Pianist Mose Allison commented that Tristano and Powell "were the founders of modern piano playing, since nearly everyone was influenced by one or the other of them. " Albright cited Tristano as an influence on the pianists Paul Bley, Andrew Hill, Mal Waldron, and Taylor. After Tristano's death, jazz piano increasingly adopted aspects of his early playing, in Ted Gioia's view: "younger players were coming to these same end points not because they had listened to Tristano (. .. ) but because these developments were logical extensions of the modern jazz idiom. "
  
  Fellow piano player Ethan Iverson asserted that, "As a pianist, Tristano was in the top tier of technical accomplishment. He was born a prodigy and worked tirelessly to get better. "

Connections

Tristano married in 1945; his wife was Judy Moore, a musician who sang to his piano accompaniment in Chicago in the mid-1940s.

Tristano married again in the early 1960s. His second wife was Carol Miller, one of his students. They had a son, Bud, and two daughters, Tania and Carol. The couple divorced in 1964, and Tristano later lost a custody battle with his ex-wife over the children.

Father:

Michael Tristano

He was a pharmacist.

Mother:

Rosemary Milano

Daughter:

Tania

Daughter:

Carol

Son:

Bud

Spouse (2):

Carol Miller

Spouse (1):

Judy Moore

References

• The Masters Of Bebop: A Listener's Guide by Gitler Ira (2001-01-01) Paperback
• Jazz Visions: Lennie Tristano and His Legacy (Popular Music History) by Peter Ind (2005-09-01)
• Lennie Tristano: His Life in Music (Jazz Perspectives) by Eunmi Shim (2007-03-28)