The New Tristano - Lennie Tristano

 

G Minor Complex

The New Tristano
Lennie Tristano
Recording Engineer: Lennie Tristano
Cover Photo: Lee Friedlander
Cover Design: Loring Entemey
Atlantic Records 1357
1962

Lennie Tristano is heard on this LP in unaccompanied piano solos. No use is made of multi-tracking, over-dubbing or tape-speeding on any selection. Lennie Tristano can also be heard on Atlantic LP 1224: Lennie Tristano

From the back cover: As much as possible, everything in this remarkable set of performances by Lennie Tristano is improvised. Lennie improvises with the time, with the time signature; Lennie improvises on the melodic line, on the chord progressions. Although each of the performances has a definite set of chords implicit in it, there is no fixed sequence in any one of them. Nothing is static. Improvisation is all.

Lennie calls what he does here "stretching out in the forms." Within the jazz forms, simple as they are, he has sought the utmost limits of spontaneity of the improvising imagination. He is never altogether unconscious of the progression. He is never enslaved to any sequence of notes or chords. He is almost completely free but not completely. That is part of the joy in it, he explains: "to see how far you can stretch out in a given frame of reference." The possibilities, he says, are "practically infinite, endless even in the most simple forms. You are constantly creating form on form, a multiplicity of lines, a great complex of forms."

The mathematics of this procedure can be deduced. If someone has "practically infinite" patience, he can sit down and copy out the notes Lennie plays. Or, with somewhat less perseverance, he can sit down with Lennie and discover what sort of exercises go into the preparation of such performances. There are, for example, the exercises for the left hand, one finger at a time, in which the single hand is divided up into lines. He will practice improvising with, say, two fingers assigned the bass line and three the melody, then with three on the bass and two on the melody, and so on and on until the fingers drop off from exhaustion or he has negotiated twelve choruses. For what it may be worth to those who want to try this out for themselves, it should be added that so far Lennie has lost no fingers; his hands are intact and so are his twelve- chorus exercises.

The point of all of this is to assure Lennie and the listener of no dissociation of technique and music. All his playing life, Lennie has been working to develop enough skill to express feeling "without be- ing hung up in the skill itself." It is possible to arrive at such control, such a combination of freedom and restraint, that one is never preoccupied with one's fingers as one plays, that one, in fact, is only barely conscious of what one is doing with one's fingers. At that extremely delicate peak of stability, where instability is just a finger's breadth away, one can give over entirely to feeling. That is exactly what jazz musicians have been doing, however high or low their individual peaks of stability, ever since the beginning of jazz (whenever that was). For jazz is an art of feeling and the jazz musician's greatest joy is to yield to his feeling if he has the equipment with which and to which he can surrender. Such a yielding is what we have here, a triumphant demonstration of the art of feeling.

In this most intimate art, this art of feeling, statements are usually highly personal. One has the choice  of exchanging sentiments with other musicians, with a horn or two or with a rhythm section, or of speaking for oneself alone. Inevitably when one enters a jazz dialogue, there are stiff constraints that stand in the way of an open and honest communication of feeling. Not only is there the formal deference that must be shown other musicians, but also a constant return to a melodic line and a rigid adherence to a fixed chord progression so that the improvising musicians may walk together on common ground. By comparison one can see the many advantages of a performance like this one of Lennie's, alone, without rhythm or any other support. Here all the usual meditative resources of the soliloquy are at his disposal as well as the new ones he has developed for himself, devices which permit him to express as many as five ideas at once and in his improvisations to follow the most elaborate involutions of his feelings.

The elaborations are prodigious. In most of these tracks, he works with multiple time patterns, setting 5/4 or 3/8 or some other time against a steady 4/4. But the 4/4 is not so much a fixed measure of four quarter-notes to a bar as a continuity of beats, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, without any bar-line restrictions. On top of this Lennie constructs a fresh contour out of triplets. He alters the basic structure by adding a fourth note to the triplet, borrowing one note from the second triplet to make four notes of the first one, borrowing two from the third triplet to make four notes of the second one, picking up a whole triplet from the next bar to add to the one left in the third, etc. The result is an astonishing contour made up of 4 on 3 (the altered triplet on the conventional triplet), on top of 5 on 4 (the time in one hand), on top of 4/4 (the basic beat). He does as much again with a triplet to which he had added two notes, creating a contour in fives that, if nothing else, is a breath-taking mathematic. al exercise. But it is much more. "I can never think and play at the same time," Lennie says. "It's emotionally impossible." The thinking is in anticipation of the performance. The exercise precedes a recording such as this one by weeks, by months, by years.

Some idea of the extent to which this collection is a unified display of feeling may be gathered from the fact that everything here except one track (the first on the second side) comes from one tape. The first that you hear is the first that Lennie played, the one he calls Becoming. It is a "sort of waking everything up myself, the studio, the tape recorders; a bringing together of all my forces." And so for four and a half minutes he flexes his fingers and articulates his ideas, in preparation for the monumental statement which follows. The appropriately named C Minor Complex is the most eloquent of jazz solos, a complex gathering of melodic lines and contrasting times and swinging beats out of a C minor progression into nearly six minutes of concentrated feeling that reminds one of nothing so much as the D minor Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue of Bach. After so much music, a pause is called for, a lengthy one, before going on to the tuneful ballad You Don't Know What Love Is and the middle-tempo Deliberation which follow.

The second side starts with a kind of suite entitled Scene And Variations, consisting of three sections, Carol, Tania and Bud, based on more or less the same chord progression, moving from a brilliant brief exam- ination of block chords, through a flurry of single-note patterns, to a driving line which does nothing so much as proclaim in precise accents its own linearity. It is not hard to understand, the response of Lennie's baby daughter Tania to these performances. She listened, and listened, and listened, and then just got up and walked all over the place never having walked before.

The set concludes with two typical Tristano performances. First there is an original ballad, Love Lines, handsomely compendious: Lennie makes his point, develops it a little, and stops; that's all he has to say. Then there is another minor-key gathering of lines and times and beats, G Minor Complex. "When I'm through," Lennie says, "I'll have the well-tempered complex." No better description exists of what Lennie Tristano has already achieved: The well-tempered complex: A marvelous multiplicity of forms swinging together in the service of feeling. – Barry Ulanov

Becoming
C Minor Complex
You Don't Know What Love Is
Deliberation
Scene and Variations
  a) Carol
  b) Tania
  c) Bud
Love Lines
G Minor Complex