Lennie Tristano His Life in Music

316 ARSC Journal
the most successful as the reader has the benefit of the entire written transcription for a
quick and easy reference. This cannot be said with respect to other analyses. The lack of
the transcriptions of the entire performances (“Reflections,” “I Mean You,” “Ruby My
Dear,” and others), albeit understandably difficult to transcribe, makes an author’s argu-
ment much harder to follow and renders a more holistic understanding of these perform-
ances quite difficult.
Monk’s Music is a fine publication that tackles the issue of building Monk’s legacy
with a set of appropriate intellectual tools that define the complexity of the contempo-
rary world. Solis’s viewpoints are advanced by excellent writing and argued very compe-
tently. I hope that his versatile and timely approach to Monk’s music in particular, and
his innovative methodology to the subject in general, will set a precedent for other writ-
ers who embark on similar intellectual journeys. Reviewed by Dariusz Terefenko
Lennie Tristano: His Life in Music. By Eunmi Shim. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of
Michigan Press. 2007. 316pp (cloth). Photographs, Musical Examples, Bibliography,
Discography, Index. ISBN 978-0-472-11346-0. $32.50
Eunmi Shim’s exhaustively researched critical biography of pianist-educator Lennie

Tristano is as complete an account of his career and accomplishments as we are likely to
ever get. Organized into three parts, it covers Tristano’s life and controversial recording-
performing career, presents for the first time an in-depth look at the content and evolu-
tion of his teaching, and offers lucid musical analysis of several of his most important
recordings.
It has always been difficult to assess the historical significance of Tristano, a blind
pianist whose star rose during the second wave of bebop innovators and evolved well
beyond bop conventions prior to Charlie Parker’s death. He made relatively few record-
ings and stopped performing in public altogether for the nine years prior to his death in
1978. His teaching had a profound impact on his students, but few of them, with the
exception of saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, went on to have much of a pub-
lic career.
Tristano kept a low profile partly by design. He felt the economic conditions of mak-
ing jazz inevitably led to artistic compromise, that the music market place would force
him to dilute his ideas to survive as a performer. According to Arnold Fishkin, bassist in
an early Tristano trio, the pianist felt that playing the melody of a song was too commer-
cial! This is not a stance calculated to endear him to general audiences, so he performed
less and less frequently and chose teaching improvisation to make a living. Despite his
ambivalent-to-hostile stance on performing, Tristano did tour occasionally and play clubs
in New York. Shim has clearly done an enormous about of research detailing when and
where gigs happened and the somewhat mixed critical and audience reception of his dif-
ficult music. Besides his extraordinary musical ideas, he instilled the same distrust of
market forces in his students, and most of them elected to opt out of the club and record
label system, too. This has led to rather harebrained charges of a “Tristano cult,” that he
brainwashed and held a special power over his young pupils. Such was the force and
brilliance of his ideas that they have survived and in many respects overshadowed his
obscurity and sparse discography.
Book Reviews 317
And what a recorded legacy he left! In 1949, Tristano’s sextet with Konitz and
Marsh recorded two tracks, “Intuition” and “Digression,” the very first free group
improvisations, completely spontaneous music without any predetermined structure.
Tristano’s motives for improvising freely were different that those that evolved in the
1960s, and the impact of these sides has always been problematic. Shim’s discussion of
the session and its ambiguous place in the history of free jazz is exemplary. Tristano’s
self-titled 1955 Atlantic album is also remarkably innovative. On four tracks, he made
more extensive and sophisticated use of multi-tracking than any jazz musician before
him, and few have equaled since. In some of the best analysis in the book, Shim shows
how Tristano used the studio to further advance the ideas that most pre-occupied him –
counterpoint, polyrhythm and rhythmic counterpoint, dispensing with written material
in favor of pure improvisation, and the creative of superimposed structure over a basic
infrastructure.
She is similarly insightful in her treatment of The New Tristano, his 1961 solo
album. “The album exemplifies the intensification of Tristano’s linear conception and
rhythmic complexities,” Shim writes. “Although all recordings are based on standard
harmonic progressions, he superimposed his own superstructure on them by manipulat-
ing various elements at a higher level than short-term harmonic, rhythmic, and phrase
displacement. As a result, he was able to transcend the constraints of the barlines, pre-
scribed harmonic sequences, and structural divisions” (p.103).
Besides the thorough biography and sessionography, Shim’s major contribution to
jazz scholarship is her detailed description and analysis of the teaching methods to
which Tristano devoted so much of his life. He was a demanding teacher who developed
the first pedagogy derived exclusively from jazz improvisation. Many of the methods are
used to teach jazz performance today, while others were entirely unique to him and con-
cepts about jazz performance. He believed that the jazz musician’s function is to feel.
“Accordingly,” Shim explains, “he taught students to connect the aural training based on
feeling with an ability to play the instrument, so that they could play what there were
hearing, and hear what they were playing” (p.124). He emphasized instrumental funda-
mentals, discipline, consistency, and concentration. Students were not allowed to
advance until he felt they had mastered the material he gave them. His techniques were
intended to help students integrate all the elements of improvisation: ear training, har-
mony, rhythm, instrumental technique, developing melodic lines, and learning stan-
dards. Shim’s extensive interviews with students from all decades of Tristano’s teaching
career allow her to trace the development of his ideas, and assess their importance to
the history of jazz pedagogy.
Shim is not a sparkling stylist as a writer, but she is always clear. Her research is
thorough and the interviews she conducted for this book shed light on aspects of
Tristano’s teaching that have never been treated in print before. The chapters on his
teaching and her fair assessment of Tristano’s recordings make up the balance of the
book, as they should. Tristano was a difficult person in many ways, as well as a brilliant
one. By analyzing the ways in which his personality and philosophy worked both for and
against his historical legacy, she helps us hear his music more clearly for the tremen-
dous achievement that it is. Reviewed by Ed Hazell
Hazell, Ed, Review of "Lennie Tristano: His life in music" by Eunmi Shim. ARSC journal 39/2
(Annapolis, MD: fall 2008), 316-317.
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316 ARSC Journal

Eunmi Shim’s exhaustively researched critical biography of pianist-educator Lennie

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