Lennie Tristano (Album)

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Lennie Tristano
Studio album by Lennie Tristano

Publication
(s)

1956

Label (s) Atlantic Records

Format (s)

LP, CD

Genre (s)

jazz

Title (number)

10

running time

46:34

occupation

production

Ahmet Ertegün

Studio (s)

New York City

chronology
Descent into the Maelstrom
(1952) 		Lennie Tristano New York Improvisations
(1956)
Lennie Tristano, ca.1947.
Photograph by William P. Gottlieb .

Lennie Tristano is a jazz album by Lennie Tristano . It contains solo and trio recordings of the cool jazz pioneer made in 1954 and 1955 in Tristano's apartment, as well as recordings of a club session in a quartet with the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz , which were recorded on June 11, 1955. The album was released on Atlantic Records in 1956 .

The album

The pianist's debut album begins with the brittle "Line Up" sounding in a trio, with bassist Peter Ind and drummer Jeff Morton preparing the track with their accompaniment; Lennie Tristano then played his improvisations on it later in his home studio. “Martellato attack, strictly linear non-legato playing without the use of the pedal to reconcile”, wrote Mátyá Kiss about the unemotional playing Tristanos in “Line Up”. In addition, the piece is faded out hard. In the similarly designed trio piece "East Thirty-Second", the piano part was only created afterwards using the playback process. In response to Charlie Parker's death in March of this year, Tristano composed a “Requiem” for solo piano; “The prelude, laid out in an early romantic manner and marked by deep sorrow, is followed by a solemn blues with deliberately simple accompanying chords of the left hand.” According to Kiss, the mood that Tristano creates in this blues raises serious doubts about the pianist's assessment as "cold" ; Barry Ulanov feels reminded of Robert Schumann's characters at the introduction .

The solo recorded piece with the misleading title “Turkish Mambo” is, according to Kiss, a “complex structure, completely unsuitable for dancing, in which six different time signatures replace and overlap”. The piece can only be heard with both hands in the bass region of the piano; Tristano actually recorded “Turkish Mambo” as a duet with himself, adding the upper part later.

The five interpretations of jazz standards in a quartet that Tristano recorded with Lee Konitz, bassist Gene Ramey and drummer Art Taylor in the New York club “Sing-Song Room” of the Confucius Restaurant in the summer of 1955 have a completely opposite mood . Alto saxophonist Lee Konitz as a Tristano student integrates the bebop and "Parker's lessons seamlessly into his feather-light sound derived from Lester Young ". Lennie Tristano's solos derive “elegantly and twice distilled” from the original standard material.

The cover photo by Burt Goldblatt is a portrait of Tristano, whose harsh shadows leave a large part of the face in the dark.

Impact history

When it was released in 1956, the Tristano album was controversial; This was mainly due to the previously unusual technology used, as Lennie Tristano used the overdubbing piano and the manipulation of the tape speed as stylistic means.

Ira Gitler describes in his book The Masters of Be-Bop that the use of overdubbing and manipulating the speed of the tape caused an uproar among the jazz audience of the time. Tristano had already begun such experiments in 1951 when he was working with additional piano tracks, which the sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder further edited and which were then added to Tristano's recordings of "Ju Ju" and "Pastime". Tristano later said that when these recordings appeared, not a single critic would have asked about the multi-track technology.

After the release of the Atlantic album Lennie Tristano , this use on the tracks "Line Up", "Turkish Mambo" and "East Thirty-Second" was lively criticized. Tristano defended his decision: “If I use multiple tracks, I don't feel like a charlatan. Take “The Turkish Mambo”. There was no other way to bring the different rhythms together as I feel them ”. On the question of tape speed, he added, “I don't care what people think about the fact that I changed the speed on“ Line Up ”and“ East Thirty-Second ”. What interests me is that the result sounds good ”. The involved bassist Peter Ind was later inspired to use the same technique on his album Looking Out .

The music magazine Jazzwise added the album to The 100 Jazz Albums That Shook the World list .

Rating of the album

Richard Cook and Brian Morton rated the recordings in the Penguin Guide to Jazz with the highest rating of four stars and consider it the pianist's essential album. In their opinion, the “central work” of the album is the title “Requiem”; With its use of overdubbing and multi-track techniques, as well as changes in speed, it influenced a. pianist Bill Evans on his solo album Conversations with Myself (1963). Even Brian Priestley raises in his biographical notes for Lennie Tristano in the Rough Guide - Jazz also produced the remarkable title "Requiem", the live recorded through pieces with Lee Konitz. In his liner notes, Barry Ulanov addresses the masterful balance of the fellow players in these quartet recordings.

In his review of the “Milestones of Jazz” series, Mátás Kiss mentions that the recordings with Konitz show the “other” Tristano, “always wrapped in an unshakable and animated, swinging rhythmic garment, here woven by Gene Ramey and Art Taylor”. Scott Yanow in the All Music Guide thinks the Tristano album is "great with a nice juxtaposition of the first and second half, with Tristano's rhythmic genius as an improviser on the one hand and a highly lyrical and swinging harmonics on the other". In 1997, The New York Times stated that the Tristano album was a masterpiece. The TV broadcaster Arte included the album in the series of “Jazz Recordings of the Century”.

Editorial notes

Edition Lennie Tristano / The New Tristano (Rhino / Atlantic R 271595), published in 1994, combines the only two LPs released during the pianist's lifetime. This edition was also part of The Complete Atlantic Recordings of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz & Warne Marsh , released in 1997. The first album Lennie Tristano was also released under the title Lines . The recordings were also released as a double LP under the title Requiem (Atlantic SD 2-7003), coupled with solo recordings from 1958 to 1962.

The titles

  • Lennie Tristano: Lennie Tristano (Atlantic 7567-80804-2)
  1. Line Up (Tristano) 3:33
  2. Requiem (Tristano) 4:51
  3. Turkish Mambo (Tristano) 3:37
  4. East Thirty-Second (Tristano) 4:32
  5. These Foolish Things ( Harry Link , Holt Marvell , Jack Strachey ) 5:43
  6. You Go to My Head (Haven Gillespie - Fred Coots) 5:19
  7. If I Had You (Jimmy Campbell, Reginald Connelly, Ted Shapiro ) 6:24
  8. " I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You " ( Bing Crosby , Ned Washington , Victor Young ) 6:00 am
  9. All the Things You Are ( Jerome Kern / Oscar Hammerstein ) 6:04

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The Atlantic album from 1956 was occasionally listed in jazz literature under the title "Tristano", possibly due to the different typography of the name in the cover design.
  2. ↑ See Tristano discography
  3. ↑ cit. after Kiss, p. 60
  4. ↑ Ulanov, liner notes.
  5. ↑ cit. after Kiss, p. 60
  6. ^ The program of the Lennie Tristano Quartet comprised a total of five sets; the other pieces were published on The Complete Atlantic Recordings of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz & Warne Marsh 1997 edition. See [1]
  7. ↑ cit. after Kiss, p. 60
  8. ↑ Quoted from Cook & Morton, 2nd Edition 1994, p. 1280.
  9. ^ Gitler, p. 237
  10. ↑ Gitler, p. 238.
  11. ↑ Tristano, cit. according to Gitler.
  12. ↑ The 100 Jazz Albums That Shook The World ( Memento of the original from July 11, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jazzwisemagazine.com
  13. ↑ cf. Cook & Morton, pp. 1465 f.
  14. ↑ cf. Priestley, p. 650.
  15. ↑ Tristano already played in 1947 in the Barry Ulanov's All Star Modern Jazz Musicians , initiated by Ulanov, with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie , John LaPorta , Billy Bauer , Ray Brown and Max Roach .
  16. ↑ cit. after Kiss; in: Rondo 2/2001, p. 60.
  17. ↑ link
  18. ↑ jazz; A Flurry of Boxed Sets Wraps Up the Year (Dec 14, 1997)
  19. ↑ cf. Priestley, p. 650.