Master in the Making

8/14/2019 Master in the Making

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master in the making

IT WA S a hot August day in 1946, The tall windowsof the classroom facing Grant's Tomb were open tu

catch what little breeze would stray from time to timefrom Riverside Drive into our academic precincts.I was winding up my summer session course at Juil-liard in the Development and Theory of Jazz. Aftera few preliminary remarks, just as I was about tomark coda to the course with what I hoped would bea very firm dominant, the door burst open andChubby Jackson blew in. The meeting had been ar-ranged, but Chubby's arrival, as always, was a loudand pleasant surprise. After him came Billy Bauer,looking diffidently about him, carrying his guitar andamplifier. Then followed Arnold Fishkin, trudgingalong behind his bass, and behind him Judy and Len-nie Tristano.

A hurried, whispered conversation with Chubbyestablished some routine and the concert which con-cluded my lecture series was on. There, in a roomconsecrated to a very different tradition, the elementary jazz education of my students ended and mytutelage in the art began.

I didn't know it had begun then. I didn't realizethe full impact of this music and this musician untilthat following winter when, after three-and-a-halfmonths in California I met Lennie at LeonardFeather's house in a brief verbal bout, and then a fewweeks later encountered his music most forcibly onhis first released record, I Can't Get Started and Outon a Limb. When I heard those two sides, I knew thatthe first notes in a bright new era of jazz had beenstruck. Here were the long lines side by side, thecalculated but not contrived continuity, the improvised counterpoint crackling with suggestions of aton-ality, all strung together with a toe-snapping beat.Here was a full, fresh demonstration that jazz couldparallel the development of classical music in thetwentieth century without actually deriving from it.

Soon after that, Lennie and his wife came down tomy house and we started to discuss his music andmy work, the background and the foreground of jazzand jazz musicians, the futility of current musicalfashions and the fecundity of those we hoped wecould make current. A collaboration of sorts began,in the course of which, after countless comparingsof notes and notings of comparisons, we covered anastonishing amount of human knowledge and en-deavor. It became apparent that Lennie's was notonly an inquiring mind but an instructed one, that inthe realms of literature and philosophy, as in music,he was not content merely to feel something, that hehad to explore ideas, to experience them, to think them

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through carefully, thoroughly, logically until hec o u p fully grasp them and then hold on to them.

He took possession of Tolstoi'sWar and Peace

andDante's Divine Comedy as delightedly as a childseizes a 'n ew to y; he took them apart as eagerly as ayoung boy separates the parts of a clock; hespeculated about them as seriously as a Ph.D. candidate examines his thesis.

Over endless cups of coffee in his railroad tene-ment on East 73rd Street, where the Tristanos live d until last year they found a dwelling foin Flushing, Lennie listened and thought and talked.Padding about the apartment in slippers, his stocky,muscular frame clothed in pajamas (unless he was ex-pecting to go out and had reluctandy donned streetdress), he carried his conversations from his hack prac-tice room through his bedroom into his combinationkitchen and parlor. They usually began then, in 1937and 1948, as they do now, at one or two in the after-noon, and often carried into the hours he has foundmost fertile for his activities, those from midnightuntil six, seven, eight or even later in the morning.And as the conversations continued and the friendship grew, as I got to hear him play with CharlieVentura's band at the Three Deuces, with his owntrio at the same place, with his quintet at the RoyalRoost and his sextet at the Clique, I pieced togetherthe story of his life. Examine it and you find orderin chaos, art in affliction and the growth of mind andspirit which must lead to achievement, as indeed theydid for Lennie Tristano.

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LENNIE was born thirty years ago, at the heightof the paralyzing flu epidemic that followed the firstworld war, second son of four of a second-generationItalian family solidly ensconced in the great Italiansection of Chicago. True to Italian family form, he

went to a parochial school at the age of four, andspent a year and a half in the first grade after thenominal kindergarten period. "They just didn'tthink I learned easily. And I just didn't think I wantedto stay in the first grade forever. So I moved to an-other school." For three or four years, he went fromschool to school, his progress marked by increasingphysical difficulty and growing mental ease. At six,he suffered a serious attack of the measles. His sight,weakened at birth, grew dimmer. When he landedin his last public school in Chicago, at eight, he wasplaced in a class for handicapped childrenoneroom holding all forms of disability, all grades fromthe first of elementary school to the last of high. At

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As a tenorman, Lennie says, "I was somewhat influenced byChu Berry , but didn't imitate him. As a pianist, in 1944, I hadreached the point where I could rifle off anything of Tatum's and with scandalous efficiency."

The remaining Chicago years were lightened for Lennie byhis meeting with Judy Moore, a beautiful product of Racine,Wisconsin, who sang with him at the Zanzibar for severalmonths in 1945, and whom he married that July. The yearswere made heavy by the infrequent work and by the increasing puzzlement with which his music was greeted as he shook off influences and conventions and shaped his own striking style.On one date, which was scheduled to run three days, the mana

ger came up to him after his little band had played for a coupleof hours and said to him, "I don't want you to think this isanything personal, but everybody in the place thinks you stink.So I'll be glad to pay you for the three days now, if you'll quitimmediately." He says he drove another manager to a nervous

breakdown.. "He just got out on the middle of the floor, pulledsome hair out and screamed when he heard us play some thingsin three keys at once." A couple of other places at which he

played went into bankruptcy. "Voluntary, I'm sure, after hearing us," Lennie muses.

Chubby Jackson thought differently from the Chicago clubmanagers. He was planning a "monster" tour when the WoodyHerman band stopped off in Chicago in the late spring of 1946,and he prevailed on Lennie to come East that summer to joinhim. The tour never materialized. But a job in Freeport withArnold Fishkin and Billy Bauer did. Another brief spot on 52ndStreet followed. Lennie became a New York fixture, setting upshop as the brightest of the new jazz musicians, playing occasional engagements with his own groups, taking on an imposinglist of pupilsLee Konitz (who had worked with him earlier in Chicago), Warne Marsh, John LaPorta, Bud Freeman, BillyBauer, Arnold Fishkin (who left California to rejoin him inlate 1947), and lots of youngsters whose future may very well

be the future of all of significant jazz.

This is not the place to attempt a serious evaluation of Len-nie's music. I wil l be content if some outline of Lennie's sometimes rough, sometimes serene life may be apparent through thesentences and paragraphs, clauses and phrases, of this narrative. Because this man's creative imagination holds so muchfor American music, it is vital to understand its shaping forces,to make some telling appreciation of its breadth and its brilliance. With this understanding, lit should be possible to makemore sense of his music, which, after all, makes a sense all itsown when listened to, a sense which no words can adequatelyconvey. One particular aspect of his personality remains to be

described, an aspect tightly contained in a controversial pair of sides still to be released by Capitol. These I will leave, alongwith the rest of his achievement on! records, for fuller discussionnext month.

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Master in the Making

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