Lennie Tristano Personal Recordings 1946-1970: The contrafacts

(Mosaic/Dot Time MD6-272)

When it comes to repertoire, in jazz there's a common device known as "contrafacts", a name coined by James Patrick in 1975 to describe the replacement of the melody from a song by a different one while maintaining the underlying chord progression, as in, for instance, "How High the Moon" becoming "Ornithology" (see this Wiki list for more examples). Patrick's article (published on the Journal of Jazz Studies, vol. 2, no. 2) dealt with the compositions of Charlie Parker, who popularized this device, although it must be said that it was used in the Swing era: one example is "A Smo-o-o-oth One", based on "Love Is Just Around the Corner". Besides artistic considerations, note that this bit of trickery allowed the composer of the new melody to copyright the whole composition, and receive the appropriate royalties, even if the chord progression had been "borrowed".

Musicians' quotes: Tristano on the ego, the id, and jazz

In 1964, when asked what he thought of [John] Coltrane, [Sonny] Rollins, and [Miles] Davis, Tristano answered, "All emotion, no feeling." He replied to "How do you distinguish between the two?" with: "Well, say I believe there is no real hysteria or hostility in jazz, their stuff is the expression of the ego. I want jazz to flow out of the id. Putting it another way, real jazz is what you can play before you are all screwed up; the other happens after you're screwed up."

(Ira Gitler, Masters of Bebop,
a re-print of Jazz Masters of the '40s, Da Capo, 2001, p. 243)

Tristano's method

Saxophonist Ted Brown, a former student of Lennie Tristano, explains the main points of Tristano's approach to teaching jazz.

For more on Tristano's method and the teaching of jazz in general, the relevant chapter on Eunmi Shim's biography is mandatory.

Around 2007 we suddenly had three volumes about Tristano, each of them with their own approach to Tristano and each of them pretty much mandatory. Eunmi Shim's is a scholarly biography, with excellent chapters about the music and Tristano's teaching methods, Peter Ind's is a passionate and atmospheric first-hand account of his experiences with Tristano, and Fayenz & Brazzale's, in Italian and including a CD with recordings from 1945-55, is a concise and to the point introduction to Tristano as a person and as a musician.

That year I did a long article with reviews and extracts from those three books, which you can now read, in Spanish, on line at Cuadernos de Jazz.