A Note on Tristano from Stanley Crouch

(This is a digression from the Tristano post.)

The most powerful black jazz critic of our era is unquestionably Stanley Crouch.  He has reservations about the Tristano school. 

When I sent  him this post to look over he wrote back right away:

As you know, I do not accept the idea that jazz advances itself by following new directions, harmonies or rhythms from European classical music.

I was reminded of a time I played a set at Smalls with Ben Street and Nasheet Waits with Stanley sitting right there at the bar. Afterwards, when I went over to say hi, he looked me in the eye and said,

Forget Lennie Tristano.

before moving on to say something complimentary.  I starting laughing and asked why he said that.  He responded by saying my intro to "All the Things You Are" sounded like Tristano to him.  This was fair:  it would be natural for me to "Tristano-out" on those changes. 

If I sound like a little bit like Tristano sometimes, that is perfectly ok with me. (I also am repeatedly inspired by European classical music.) But I never mind a powerful black man telling me like it is, and Stanley is someone who has learned his convictions honestly, through passionately listening to jazz for a half-century. 

He also knows these records.  Those that want to dismiss Stanley as short-sighted should try it person, when he can cite Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh and The New Tristano and Live At the Half Note chapter and verse. 

Stanley is also quoted in Shim, Chamberlain, and Hamilton, and his comments are always on point.  He is the critic, for example, that repeatedly insists that Wayne Shorter comes out of Tristano and Marsh. I think he doesn't really like that aspect of Shorter's music, but he's probably right about the influence. 

I was happy that Stanley consented to read my post and give me some comments.  From his email:

I think it is also important to contemplate the quality of the Tristano sound, which I think is also a rejection of what you call "African diaspora." You have cited that famous Marsh/Tabackin story. I think that, ironically, the reason that they loved Young and Parker so much was because their tones were doorways to white nationalism! Lee Konitz has told me many times that though Tristano never said it, he always got the impression that his intent was to create a style of jazz that was, for lack of a better word, white. In overall aesthetic terms, there is nothing actually wrong or out of line in this decision because so much of modern art in the twentieth century was about using one's ethic cultural background as an aesthetic element of fundamental importance. Picasso did it, so did Joyce, Faulkner, Ellison, and Bellow. Those additions can provide nuances that made the aesthetic artifact more complex rather than less. The question then is whether the "expressive" timbral elements of instrumental jazz, all of which can be traced to blues, folk, and work song singing, comprised for Tristano an academy that he rejected.

What separates Tristano from those other artists I listed is very simple: they added their ethnic particulars , mixed them in instead of removing as many of the fundamental technical accomplishments as possible while claiming attachment to the things that they were erasing. I once heard Tristano on the radio saying that when he was told by someone that what he was playing was not correct, he responded by saying, "Maybe it's not right but I want to improvise." There it is: he wanted to improvise and what resulted was the opening of a door to all of those people who are incapable of swinging, cannot play the blues and don't like to be told by their rhythm sections what to do. A perfect attitude for the improvised but European-derived stuff that people call jazz today. The less presence it has of the Negro, the more "advanced" it is. That doesn't matter: blues and swing will always be here.

At the same time that he showed how much he preferred machines to flesh and blood musicians, one Tristano fan who promoted him in Canada told me that Tristano once said, "You think I sound good now, eh? Get me a Miles Davis rhythm section and you will really hear me play then! You have no idea! "

In other words, he could imagine himself sounding great with a bass player and drummer who were as deep in the bucket as you can imagine. This kind of contradictory stuff is quite common and it almost always has something to do with having been hurt by someone at some time or by a succession of someones at a given moment of time. Being condescended to by mediocre black musicians--who can be the most condescending of all because anything out of the ordinary threatens their supposed importance in the convention--had to get on Tristano's nerves. His intelligence was vast; he was a literate and sophisticated thinker, which far too many black musicians were not; and Roy Haynes said that he had a sensitive, contemplative nature away from the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd.

One of the things that black people have long complained about is being talked down to by some mediocre white people who would be in no important place at all unless racism empowered them. It is not hard to imagine the same thing going on in the mind of a brilliant white man who is being dressed down by some black people overwhelmed by musical cliches and the "hip" minstrelsy of the late forties and early fifties. Tristano was also a sturdy man and would have probably had to put his feet in the behinds of many if he hadn't been spared the gladiatorial knuckle game because he was blind. I think he would have come out well whenever it was necessary to set aside the notes and knock someone upside the head.  After that happened a few times, people would have left him the hell alone.

Finally, Lennie Tristano found his own way as did Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. Finding your own way is the hardest thing to do in the arts and maybe even in life, but they all did it and that is the most important statement about the Tristano school. It was started by a great original and it produced two great originals. As for influencing the whole of jazz, there was little of that but the most dynamic influence can be heard in Wayne Shorter's playing with Miles Davis at the Plugged Nickel: Listen to those "Rhythm" changes, which deeply influenced Branford Marsalis and Joe Lovano, to name two who can play and who can probably sing and or play every Shorter solo recorded that night. When it's time for what you do to come around, life will send the people to handle the job. That was one of Wayne Shorter's.

Stanley's suggestion early on that Tristano was actively trying to reject black music (at least in terms of sonority) is interesting.  That would connect to Barry Ulanov's theories of jazz (discussed in the Art Hodes post).  With the material in An Unsung Cat, that theory takes on some serious weight with Marsh, but really only after Marsh was disgruntled and embittered in the 70's.

I don't personally think Tristano was rejecting black music, but the point is what black musicians think about it. Apparently there is a theory, held as common currency in Stanley's circle of close musician friends, some of them quite young and black, that Tristano's hatred of Monk is not because he thought that Monk was no good as a pianist.  When Stanley cited the interview where  Tristano said that Monk was the dumbest piano player he had ever heard, one black musician responded:

   "Lennie Tristano plays too much piano to believe that. That's about something else."

Stanley's explanation: 

Tristano heard himself in the line of Earl Hines, Art Tatum, and Bud Powell, all classically trained players who would have impressed a classical musician, but that Monk's creation fof a decidedly Afro-American technique and his use of space (even though it had to be derived from Basie) was too challenging to Tristano and too original. It went beyond notes and chords into the very unique range of sound Monk could draw from the instrument.   

One could draw from that attitude that Tristano would have hated plungers, which were so bent on reproducing the version of the black singing and speaking voice that came out of the blues. But the inevitable contradiction comes because Tristano was so proud of his own blues  playing on "Requiem," easily the greatest blues performance to come out of the Tristano school because it had almost nothing else with which to compete.
 

It is very telling that even today, these are the kind of All In the Mix issues we are still dealing with. 

Very special thanks to Stanley Crouch for contributing to this discussion.  Stanley's wonderful response to the Obama race speech is here.