“A great many people are going to be surprised by this set” reads the opening statement of the liner notes on Lennie Tristano’s 1955 self-titled album. Indeed, the pianist’s first album on Atlantic Records caused a controversy among critics and listeners alike. It is also a milestone recording in its incorporation of overdubbing and tape speed manipulation in the context of jazz music. Today the technique of overdubbing is second nature to recording artists and sound engineers. You record layers of musical performances one over another until you are satisfied that all the ingredients needed for the song are there. However back in the early 1950s this technique was still in its infancy, with multi track equipment not in existence.
Tristano was not the first jazz musician to attempt this feat. Back in 1941 Sidney Bechet, one of the most important figures in early jazz history, recorded no less than six instruments in a novelty recording that included ‘The Sheik of Araby’ and ‘Blues of Bechet’. Bechet later said: “I started by playing The Sheik on piano, and played the drums while listening to the piano. I meant to play all the rhythm instruments, but got all mixed up and grabbed my soprano, then the bass, then the tenor saxophone, and finally finished up with the clarinet”.
Tristano’s music had long been revered for its unique style of improvisation and incorporation of complex harmonies and rhythms. The ‘Tristano School’ became both a musical style and a teaching method by the pianist himself, sought-after by many musicians who became major artists in their own right. Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh came from that school and later became part of Tristano’s group. In 1951 Time magazine dedicated an article to Lennie Tristano, titled “The Schoenberg of Jazz”. In it the pianist said: “Our harmonies are strongly impressionistic. Melodically, I’ve tried to go beyond bop, which adheres largely to the given harmonic structure; we don’t restrict ourselves to the chord when we play melody. Our rhythms are superimposed one on the other. Sometimes I play three different rhythms at once, while the other boys are each playing separate ones.”
Tristano had dipped his toes into the art of overdubbing a number of times in the early 1950s. His first attempt came in the fall of 1951 with the tracks “Pastime” and “Juju”. The recordings were assisted by engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who used to come to Tristano’s Manhattan studio with a portable tape recorder. Using the in-house tape recorder that Tristano used for his own recordings, the two overdubbed recordings, creating the effect of two Tristano’s playing at the same time. A Downbeat magazine reviewer mistook the recording technique for Tristano’s ambidexterity.
Tristano repeated the process in 1953 with the recording of a piece titled “Descent into the Maelstrom”, described in the liner notes as an “Improvised conception from Edgar Allan Poe’s story.” It is a piano solo, or should I say, piano solos. The improvisation, fusing bebop jazz technique with modern classical music and avant-garde, predates free jazz pioneers such as Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Tristano likely saw no commercial hope for it and kept it in the vaults, until it was released late in the 1970s.
Over the next two years Tristano continued the experimentation in his home studio. His self-titled album in 1955 included four tracks that generated much discussion in the music press, likely due to the larger distribution and sales of Atlantic Records compared to his previous releases. Two of the four tracks, “Line Up” and “East Thirty-Second”, are trio pieces with Peter Ind on bass and Jeff Morton on drums. They are based on well-known jazz standards, “All of Me” and “Pennies from Heaven” respectively. On both tracks Tristano uses two studio techniques: overdubbing and tape speed. The bass and drums accompaniment were slowed down, allowing Tristano to then overdub his improvised piano solo, mostly played with a single hand, and then the full recording was speeded up. If you hear something odd in the timbre of the piano sound, that is the effect of recording at half speed and then speeding up the tape.
The next track captured Tristano’s immediate musical reaction to the devastating news of Charlie Parker’s death in March 1955. The legendary also saxophone player was Tristano’s musical hero. Tristano met Charlie Parker in 1947, a year after he moved to New York City, and had the opportunity to play with in various jam sessions and performances. He repeatedly praised Parker’s innovative approach to harmony and improvisation. He talked about the circumstances around the recording of the track “Requiem”, after he received a phone call from Dizzy Gillespie breaking the news about Charlie Parker’s death: “The night that Diz called me, of course I took it really hard. I was alone in my studio and I did something I rarely did, which was to just sit down and play the blues. And I’d been doing that for three or four hours. I had one of those old battle-ax Ampexes. All you had to do was push a button, and you’re in business.”
“Requiem” is a simple blues tune played with one hand providing the chords and the other improvising on a blues scale. However, towards the end of the piece one can hear a third line. Tristano later said that he overdubbed that tremolo effect to honor, “Bird’s profound sense of humor.”
Tristano’s most ambitious experiment with overdubbing came with the tune “Turkish Mambo”. Nothing in the tune resembles music from Turkey or the style of the mambo. The title is a fond reference to the Ertegun brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi, founders of Atlantic Records. Nesuhi, who led the jazz division of the label, trusted Tristano’s artistic musical experimentations, even though he realized their uncommercial prospect. He let the pianist release recordings he made on his own in his private studio, believing in his art.
Tristano was interested in odd time signatures, making it difficult for him to find a suitable rhythm section. Interviewed by Nat Hentoff for Downbeat magazine in 1956 he said: “I need in a rhythm section people with feeling for simultaneous combinations of time—people who are able to perceive 5/4 and 4/4 at the same time. I’ll probably be doing more and more of that. Working with 7/4 and 6/4 and the double times of those—5/8, 6/8, 7/8, and maybe sometimes 9/8. Occasionally, I’ve played something and tried to figure it out afterward, and have maybe done some 13/8”.
Making matters worse from a playability perspective, he decided to overdub himself playing odd time patterns. But he did not stop there. On each overdub he played a different time signature, resulting with a piece that had rhythm tracks in 7/4, 3/4 and 5/4 all overlapping each other, and then a melody track in 4/4. No wonder he could not find a rhythm section for these types of compositions. It is difficult enough to maintain a single odd time meter when you are improvising, but mixing different odd time meters simultaneously is seldom attempted regardless of musical genre. As you listen to this track it becomes very difficult to pin down where the ‘one’ is, the start of a bar or the cyclic phrase of the rhythm. Tristano had to use a steady audible beat to accomplish this recording, and you can hear that click (a metronome on top of the piano?) throughout the track.
Tristano never achieved the goal of a attaining a steady group of musicians that he could perform and record with. When asked once what are his requirements from a rhythm section, he replied: “I want time that flows. I want people who don’t break the rhythm with figures that are really out of context. What figures are used should be in the context of what’s happening, so as not to break continuity. A lot of drummers interpolate figures that break the line. All of a sudden, the line stops, and he plays a cute figure on the snare drum or tom-tom. Some bass players do that, too. They break time to play a figure that doesn’t fit with what’s already happened and is happening. With rhythm sections I’ve played with, I don’t have the feeling of a constantly flowing pulse no matter what happens. As soon as I feel the pulse being interrupted, my flow is interrupted whether I’m playing or resting, because it’s all the same thing.” He definitely had his own internal sense of musical time, and combined with his complex harmonies and odd time signatures, few musicians found it easy to accompany him.
Following the release of his self-titled album early in 1956, some critics and listeners found Lennie Tristano’s studio experiments a heresy. To them jazz can only be considered authentic when all instruments are played at the same time, no overdubbing or tape gimmickry involved. Tristano was unapologetic about his approach to music recording. In the same Downbeat interview he addressed the issue: “If I do a multiple-tape, I don’t feel I’m a phony thereby. Take the ‘Turkish Mambo.’ There is no way I could do it so that I could get the rhythms to go together the way I feel them. What I care about is that the result sounded good to me. My point is that it’s the music that matters.” He also expanded on the topic of a single musician trying to record multiple parts as a solo artist: “When I sit down to do something, I can hear and feel what I want. Instead of trying to have three or four people on hand so I don’t have the ‘stigma’ of multi-track recording, there are some things I’d rather do myself because others are not capable of doing with me.”
Tristano definitely broke ground with that album, although sadly he never became a celebrated jazz innovator and for many jazz fans he is still mostly unknown. Jean Shepherd, writing for Audio Magazine in 1956, said: “For some unexplained reason, many relatively unimportant musicians are able to flood the market with records while a man of the stature of Tristano remains largely unknown to the vast bulk of record buyers.”
Jazz musicians today may be aware of the Lennie Tristano School, a concept of jazz composition and improvisation that can be heard in recordings by Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, who played with Tristano in the 40s and 50s. For a taste of that school of thought, listen to their album also recorded in 1955 and released by Atlantic, ‘Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh’. The controversy over the first Tristano album made the label more cautious with the second album. Jazz critic Barry Ulanov wrote in the liner notes to the album “The New Tristano”, released in 1962: “Some idea of the extent to which this collection is a unified display of feeling may be gathered from the fact that everything he plays except one track comes from one tape”.
Tristano was not the last to overdub himself playing multiple piano parts. Bill Evans used the concept in 1963 with another milestone record, “Conversations with Myself”, recording three piano tracks. No doubt the spirit of that 1956 recording by Tristano was there. When asked about his influences, Bill Evans said: “Above all Bud Powell and the thoughts of Lennie Tristano. I am indirectly influenced by Lennie Tristano through Lee Konitz, he is at top of my list and Warne Marsh, but only by album listening”.
Another fan of Lennie Tristano’s music comes from the freer side of jazz. Sax player Anthony Braxton wrote in the liner notes for his 1989 album “Eight (+3) Tristano Compositions” 1989: “And the music… what can I say? There was something special about Mr. Tristano’s melodic world – plus his lines were so unique in the same way Bird’s lines were. Mr. Tristano’s solos had a unique nature and conception to it.“ I like the next quote best, because it leaves aside all the complexity that one can hear in Lennie Tristano’s music and focuses on the real reason to listen to him. It comes from Albert McCarthy, who wrote in Jazz Monthly magazine in 1957: “It is curious that many modernist critics have dismissed his work as too cerebral, yet I find his playing warmer than that of many of his contemporaries.”
Sources:
Lennie Tristano, His Life in Music, By Eunmi Shim
Multitaping Isn’t Phony: Tristano, article by Nat Hentoff, Downbeat magazine May 1956
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