Lennie Tristano
Crosscurrents

Beauty will not save the world.

No, Beauty will not illuminate our souls, will not clean History from mud, will not ignite us with light, will not grant us hopes of redemption. Art will not offer us a way out and Beauty will not fill our lives.

It will only help us bear it better.

November is a shitty month, it’s cold even when the sun is out. And it was a beautiful sunny morning, that early November day when C. was taken away.

“School isn’t for her, we’ve decided it’s better if she goes to work.” Her mother tells us this, eyes lowered so as not to see, in our eyes, that we understand what that “work” really means. I, on the other hand, stare straight into the eyes of my colleagues and the principal, just to watch them turn those words—which are a sentence for C.—into an absolution for themselves.

I think back to C.’s eyes, which seemed to never really look at you, and I recall those of Leonard “Lennie” Tristano, whose gaze went dark forever when he was nine. So Lennie, a son of paisà who came from Aversa to Chicago, was sent to a “special needs” school, where there was no worry distinguishing between blindness, deformity, or delay. But his mother decides she’ll teach him how to play piano, and damn, the kid’s got talent! One of his teachers catches on and points him to the Chicago Conservatory, where Lennie sticks around just a couple of years. Because, in the meantime, Lennie has discovered Art Tatum—and jazz.

Aversa, halfway through the last century, was little more than an asshole stuck between Naples and Caserta, and today, even as it pretends to be a city, it remains a place you’d never go unless you *really* had something to do there. But in Aversa there’s a Lennie Tristano street and a “Lennie Tristano” Jazz Club. I’ve been there and even played there, in a previous life.

Moschiano and Taurano, on the other hand, are still two fetid orifices you couldn’t even find on a map unless you know where to look. Somewhere out there between Moschiano and Taurano, they’re showing C. how to do that “work” she’s been destined for.

I swallow the “fuck you” scraping my throat, and go back home; I put “Crosscurrent” on the record player.

And I turn up the volume.

“Crosscurrent” isn’t even a Lennie Tristano record, truth be told. Half is his stuff, with his sextet, and on the other side, someone at Capitol decided to stick a Buddy De Franco concert—who isn’t exactly one of the first jazz names you’d think of—and who, with Lennie, makes a duo as mismatched as cabbage with a snack. But on that first side, there’s “Wow”, “Yesterdays”, “Digression”, and above all, “Intuition”. So the second side sits there, gathering dust while I keep dropping the needle on the first one over and over.

Sure, if you don’t know him, Lennie, I’d suggest you start with “Lennie Tristano” where, besides including some of his most beautiful compositions (like “Requiem”, where he mourns “Bird’s” death), our guy also—in 1956!—invents the first experiments with tape manipulation in jazz history. Like on “Line Up”, where Lennie first has the rhythm section record by itself, slows it down, plays his parts over it, and then returns everything to normal speed; or in “Turkish Mambo”, where the piano tracks are played separately and then assembled during editing. Something purists and guardians of jazz orthodoxy would call heresy, so someone screams scandal because they can’t see the difference between creation and artifice.

But they’re the same ones who’ll be screaming again, 14 years later in 1970, when Miles Davis and Teo Macero (another guy I’ll have to tell you about someday) throw “Bitches Brew” in their faces. And many of them are still squawking.

And I bet quite a few would have screamed scandal if they’d come into my classroom while I declaimed, with utmost seriousness: “Cambiando canottiera/ho deciso/di metterla leggera/Mutando mutande/debbo ricordarmi/di non metterle bianche/perché con le mutande bianche/si vede subito/la rosa dei pantaloni”. That day, while someone was lounging between the desks, someone threw me: “professore ma ti piacciono solo i poeti morti?”, “e tristi” added another right away. So I pulled a book with “Freak” Antoni’s poems out of my bag (so they could see that this stuff was, in fact, in a book—but lying, because Roberto’s dead too and truth be told, I do really love only dead poets).

C. was laughing too. Hiding it, with a hand over her mouth.

I turn up the volume.

“Lennie Tristano” was released in ’56 and damn if Lennie was “ahead”! “Cerebral”, “cold”, “aloof” is what the deaf and the stupid still call him today. The jazz of that slicked-up paisà was seen as white men’s stuff, fussing with the cerebrality of 20th-century music and the beating heart of mother Africa. And so, while everyone was starting to get off on modal jazz, Lennie was building his improvisational interweaves on counterpoint and comping with two hands.

They called it “cool jazz”, and Lennie got pissed, because his music burned with fire—anything but “cold”!—and anyone could have understood it if they’d just listened to that abyss of lava that is “Descent into the Maelstrom”, except “Descent into the Maelstrom” only had the guts to be released in ’78.

And in fact, while Lennie was alive, he only had three or four records released (amazing ones, and it goes without saying, they went unnoticed). And sure, his temper didn’t help—“Magnetic and disturbing”, that’s how Lee Konitz put it (he knew him well, as we’ll see)—Lennie spoke plainly and straight and didn’t seem to care whether others understood or not. “You don’t have to play jazz to earn your dignity as a Negro,” he told a journalist. “That guy better be careful about what he says,” they rushed to reply.

And you do need to be careful about what you say, or do—or even just what you wish you could do.

It seemed to me it was my duty to get an iron bar and smash C.’s “father’s” kneecaps. But luckily for me, I had no fucking clue where C.'s family’s house was, lost out there in that nowhere between the Moschiano and Taurano fields, because if I’d found it I bet, with that guy—used to going in and out of prison, at least twenty years younger than me—the smashed kneecaps would probably have been mine.

So I sit back comfortably, kneecaps intact, and listen to “Crosscurrent”.

And I turn up the volume.

First comes “Wow” with its breath-stealing accelerations, then that cold caress of “Yesterdays”, and then “Digression” and “Intuition”.

It was May 16, 1949, and Lennie, together with his students and sidekicks Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh and Billy Bauer, having found a certain Arnold Fishkin as bassist and a drummer whose name nobody really knows (and who wasn’t even there that day), put together a sextet that had already been recording Capitol studio sessions for a couple of days. On that May 16, Tristano decided to try some free improvisation. So Lennie sets, roughly, the tempo and the order of entries. That’s it. Things like harmony, key, tempo, melody or rhythm were left entirely up to chance and the musicians’ whim—they had to interact only based on what Lennie called “contrapuntal interaction.”

Tristano starts the recording, playing in 4/4 but adding phrases that give the others a perfect springboard to join in, then, at roughly 20-second intervals, each of the other four players comes in: first Konitz, who seems to be searching for a tonal center, then Bauer answers with a scale section and then dialogues with Tristano. Marsh starts at minute 1:09, then everyone except Fishkin shifts to a 5/4 tempo. And so the five of them put into practice that “contrapuntal interaction” before the piano, at 1:44, plays some fast scales and pulls the group back together until Tristano decides to end the piece.

Lennie would tell later: “As soon as we started playing, the engineer threw his hands up and left the control room. He and the head of A&R thought I was so idiotic that they refused to pay me for the tracks, let alone release them.” Apparently, there were four tracks recorded, but Capitol begrudgingly released only two (“Intuition” and “Digression”) the following year. Those who heard them, like Charlie Parker, Aaron Copland or the critic Barry Ulanov, fully realized how revolutionary that music was. Everyone else kept thinking Tristano’s music was too advanced and emotionally cold. Meanwhile, free jazz was born and nobody noticed.

But Lennie soon got sick of trying to explain his visions to all those idiots who didn’t know shit about music. So, little by little, he withdrew from the music world and discovered his true passion: teaching. From the mid-1950s, Tristano was probably the first to ever teach jazz. Lennie became a master, a school founder, with dozens of disciples and followers (including giants like Konitz, Marsh, Mingus, Satriani and many, many more) to whom he loved teaching not just music, but also literature, philosophy, and psychology.

Maybe that’s why Lennie feels like a brother to me? How many times have I pictured him teaching with those “strange” methods (for example, he’d have his students hum their favorite solo phrases and tried to explain the difference between “feeling” and “processing”). I like to believe that Lennie and I do the same job: teaching.

But the school where I teach loses P., B., H. and a thousand others along the way. And it looks away in the face of C.’s unworthy fate.

What good is a school that doesn’t save the Frantis? What good am I?

I turn up the volume.

Got it that Lennie had a shitty character? That’s another reason he feels like a brother to me. He doesn’t give a damn about being liked or successful, his music is fiercely anti-commercial and he doesn’t even pretend to try to be understood by the fools hanging around the music scene. Even his own students, who idolize him, struggle to talk about him and get gloomy recalling his often scathing critiques. Both his wives were gone pretty quickly, taking their kids with them. So, when Lennie had a stroke—in ’78, just 59 years old—he was alone at home and already forgotten.

And you know what month it was? November.

I turn up the volume.

And she gets pissed: hates jazz, hates “that” jazz (women hated jazz, for some reason, in a time made of moments and cryptic crossword weeks); she shuts the door, hard, bangs it just to make sure I hear.

I turn up the volume.

We’ll fight.

Afterward.