Schoenberg of Jazz

In a smoky Manhattan bop-house called Birdland, a crowd of jazz fans gathered to hear a leisurely instrumental sextet skim through a performance that was neither Dixieland, swing, nor bebop. Not even a confirmed boppist could find a melodic phrase to sing "Ooble-dee-ah-de-coo" with, as the practice is nowadays; there was not even so much as a "Man, that's cool!"* Passionate disciples of blind Pianist-Composer-Theorist Lennie Tristano, 32, are much too conservative for such crudities.

The music Tristano and his group plays has no special name; Tristano just calls it "contemporary." Technically, it calls for improvisation so personal that each musician plays his own carefree melody in his own key, in his own rhythm, developing his own harmonies. In ensemble, the results strike most ears as plain noise, but the devoted are reminded of such comparatively restrained innovators as Bartok and Schoenberg.

Classical Drill. Says Tristano: "Our harmonies are strongly impressionistic. Melodically, I've tried to go beyond bop, which adheres largely to the given harmonic structure; we don't restrict ourselves to the chord when we play melody. Our rhythms are superimposed one on the other. Sometimes I play three different rhythms at once, while the other boys are each playing separate ones." The main idea: every man for himself.

Tristano, a Chicago boy, started improvising on the piano at four. His parents saw to it that he got formal lessons, but no one was impressed by Lennie's classical drill work, least of all Lennie. His eyes, weak at birth, became completely sightless after a bout with measles when he was ten. Lennie developed his musical ear in a school for the blind, graduated to Chicago's American Conservatory, where he took his B. Mus. "They thought my string quartet was 'refreshing,' " he says. "If they'd known it was really jazz, they'd have called it horrible."

Soundproofed Walls. After playing "commercial" jazz in Chicago clubs, Tristano moved to Manhattan, got a few jobs, soon began teaching. It was after bebop came along, in the early '40s, that Tristano's new ideas took form. He made a few recordings for Capitol; none sold more than a few thousand copies, but Lennie's name got around. Some records reached hep listeners in Europe, where he is now an advance-guard favorite.

His fans write glowing letters to him from all over the world. One fan who did more than write: Phyllis Pinkerton, 26, who came from Wisconsin to study with Lennie. When she inherited $10,000 recently, she invested it in Tristano, who rented a loft over an old garage, soundproofed the walls, installed recording equipment and a piano. There Tristano and members of his sextet teach some 35 pupils, will soon begin recording on their own label.

* A phrase, currently in highest fashion, which indicates the degree to which hot jazz has lost its temperature. The mid-'40s term: "Real gone"; 1930s: "Hot."

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