Jazz Articles about Lennie Tristano

Lennie Tristano

by Peter Madsen
May 30, 2006

"It would be useless for me to play something I don't feel. I wouldn't be doing anything. If I played something that I'd have to impose on myself, I wouldn't be playing anything good." (Lennie Tristano - 1950)

“Everybody in this country is very neurotic now. They're afraid to experience an intense emotion, the kind of emotion, for instance, that's brought on by good jazz. There's more vitality in jazz than in any other art form today. Vitality ...

Lennie Tristano: Intuition

by AAJ Staff
February 24, 2004

Lennie Tristano has been dead since 1978, yet the blind virtuoso pianist remains among the most enigmatic, even paradoxical of jazz innovators. His music was considered cool and intellectual, yet Tristano himself was an intense, often passionate improviser capable of sustained swing. Although he recorded the pioneering free pieces “Intuition" and “Digression," which are included here, most of his music consisted of standards, albeit radically reharmonized. And although he often insisted on uninflected timekeeping from his rhythm sections, he responded ...

Betty Scott / Lennie tristano: Betty Scott Sings with Lennie Tristano

by Dave Nathan
February 1, 2002

This album compiles the output of five recording sessions vocalist Betty Scott had with one of the creators of modern pianism, Lennie Tristano. They were made in Tristano's Hollis, Queens studio beginning in 1965 with the last one in Jan 1974. There are two questions (at least) these sessions raised. First is “who is or was Betty Scott?." I could find no reference to her on the Internet or in any of the standard and nonstandard jazz vocal references at ...

Lennie Tristano/Lee Konitz/Warne Marsh: The Complete Atlantic Recordings

by C. Andrew Hovan
October 1, 1999

While the hard bop music of the 1950s and 1960s has seen a considerable revival and now prospers in the hands of scores of talented youngsters, other historical genres have not been so fondly remembered nor have fared as well. The cerebral music of pianist Lennie Tristano and his cohorts has been largely neglected by all but a few historians and the small number of surviving players that came under the spell of the iconoclast pianist during his brief period ...