106 LEW TAIT tently in the texture of a single-line melody over the bass line, except toward the end where he introduces a chordal structure. The second side begins with “Scene and Variations,” a suite com- posed of three movements titled after his three children from the sec- ond marriage, Bud, Tania, and Carol.” Each in a distinctively differ- ent texture, these movements are variations on the harmonies of “My Melancholy Baby,” a reference to the fact that his children were very young at the time of the recording. According to Ulanov, baby Tania responded to the recording in an extraordinary way: “She listened, and listened, and listened, and then just got up and walked all over the place—never having walked before.”"5* After “Love Lines,” based on the harmonies of “Foolin’ Myself,” the album closes with “G Minor Complex,” built on “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” which is similar in style to “C Minor Complex,” both in a minor key. Thus Tristano completed a circle, from “C Minor Complex” to “G Minor Complex,” which he conceived as a unity along the lines of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier: “When I’m through . . . I’ll have the well-tem- pered complex." Tristano made other solo recordings in 1961, including three tracks titled “Take 1—Rehearsal from Recording Date,” “Take 2— Rehearsal from Recording Date,” and “Take 3—Rehearsal from Recording Date,” which were released in the 1970s."4° Tristano on Free Jazz of the 1960s jazz*+* of the 1960s differed in many respects from Tristano’s earlier free Improvisations from 1949, although there are common ele- ments, such as th@absence of a fixed harmonic and structural scheme. For example, in the 196es_rhythm sections took on a much more aggressive role; Cecil Taylorstated in 1961 that “counterpoint in rhythm sections must be the new reality.” Musicians also resorted to new timbres for expressive purposeSxand the shape of a perfor- mance was “often determined by the performers’ powers of endurance,”™} as opposed to the contrapuntal Structure and orderly presentation in Tristano’s examples. It is also signiffsant that the free jazz movement occurred during a period of heightenedacial tension and the civil rights movement. Tristano’s denunciation of the r96os free jazz movement shduld beHew ork, 1951-1978 17 understood in both musical and social terms. From a musical point of view, he believed in the internal structure and logic of music, as evi- denced by his 1949 recordings, which, grounded on close contrapuntal interaction between the musicians, conveyed a clear sense of structure. As 1960s free jazz lacked such qualities, he considered it random and chaotic. Art Blakey echoed Tristano’s view: “The thing some of those freedom musicians are trying to do I heard Lenny Tristano do that sort of thing years ago, but it had a direction. It made more sense to me than what they’re doing now with just everybody going. That’s one of the easiest cop-outs.”# Tristano also disapproved of the reflection of negative emotions and politics in free jazz, which ran counter to his belief in the autonomy of art. He stated in 1965: “One of the great things about jazz is there is a lot of joy in it—in spite of what some people think. Some of our musicians are using jazz almost as you might use politics—as a weapon or a tool. I don’t feel that way. I don’t feel that you should put too much ego into music. If you feel angry with somebody you hit him on the nose—not try to play angry music.” "45 In a different interview from 1965 Tristano, reasserting the aes- thetics of art for art’s sake, relegated free jazz to a sociological devel- opment associated with the black power movement: “Do you know people like LeRoi Jones and James Baldwin? Well, they are people who are the hip ones in writing. And they make speeches and they talk about free form, but I think they use that as a propaganda point.”*4° He argued that expressing hostility was not art, viewing hostility as “the result of repressed anger”: “You can express hostility by punch- ing somebody in the mouth. If someone stands up and makes a lot of funny noises and puts the audience on, to me that’s some kind of soci- ologic scene. It’s not music.” He also stressed positive qualities in jazz: “Beauty is a hard word to define, but I don’t think beauty includes anything that’s negative. That’s the way I feel about art. Express all that is positive. Beauty is a positive thing.” In a 1969 interview Tristano again denounced the use of free jazz: “From the jazz Muzak extreme, the other side of the coin is free form playing, which is mostly gibberish. . . . This seems to be more con- cerned with expressing emotion rather than sound and time and the other elements of jazz. If it portrays anything, it is hostility, which I find quite meaningless. One can experience that in other human situa- tions, so why sit down and listen to it?”'7 Interestingly, Tristano108 LEW TAIT made a distinction between emotion and feeling: “For my purposes emotion is a specific thing: happiness, sadness, etc. But when I listen to the old Count Basie band with Pres, it is impossible to extract the par- ticular emotion. But on a feeling level it is deep and profoundly intense. Feeling is practically basic to jazz.” This dichotomy was based on Freudian psychology, according to which emotion and feeling, respectively, emanate from ego and id, Accordingly Tristano consid- ered the music of John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Miles Davis to be “alll emotion, no feeling”: “Well, say I believe there is no real hyste- ria or hostility in Jazz. Their stuff is an 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’re all screwed-up; the other is what happens after you're screwed-up.”*45 Tristano thought that the free jazz movement stemmed from racial politics, which legitimized black musicians’ ownership of the music. This point is illustrated by Cecil Taylor, who made an issue of ethnic- ity, stressing that African American heritage was essential to jazz. In a 1961 interview, he explicitly drew a color line: “[T]he greatness in jazz occurs because it includes all the mores and folkways of Negroes dur- ing the last so years. No, don’t tell me that living in the same kind of environment is enough. You don’t have the same kind of cultural difficulties as I do.”*5° Taylor mentioned Zoot Sims and Tristano as examples, relegating their music to a mere simulation of jazz: “I admire someone like Zoot Sims, because he accepts himself. He is unique. He tries to come to grips with everything, musically, not socially. But even Zoot, and Lennie Tristano, only simulate the feeling of the American Negro. . . . Jazz is a Negro feeling. It is African, but changed to a new environment. It begins in the Negro community, and it is the only place for Negro hero worship.” Other African American jazz musicians, notably Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, also consid- ered Tristano an imitator of black music, as discussed in the epilogue. In this context, Tristano’s criticism of the 1960s free jazz must be understood as a reaction to a dismissive attitude toward white musi- cians. In 1962 he stated: “No white man could ever get away with the things a Negro does today. So many people are exploiting the negative popularity of the Negro. It’s wrong, you know. A Negro may think jazz makes a man out of him, but nobody has a corner on music. Let’s be logical. There are Negroes and/or slaves all over the world, but nothing like jazz ever happened anywhere but here in this country.”**Hew ork, 1961-1978 109 In fact, he was provoked to such a degree that he declared: “There is nothing African about jazz. Jewish cantors and gypsys sound more like it than anything from Africa. You should realize that nowhere did it happen but here. . . . So you get to the point where you must realize this is an environmental thing. True, most of the great originators have been Negro. But that’s because of environment.” He continued: “If Charlie Parker had been born in China, he would have been a great musician, I’m sure; but he wouldn’t have invented bop. The good beat is in all folk music. The funky note is held by gypsys and so many oth- ers. It’s about time people realized jazz is an American thing, only pos- sible here, and that a persecuted minority should realize it does no good to affect another minority prejudice.” Tristano reiterated his position in 1964 when asked whether African Americans had any advantage, and whether there were differ- ent approaches between black and white musicians: “No! They have no innate ability in that respect, just because of the color of their skins. And as for the other, it’s been disproved hundreds of times. Roy Eldridge took the Downbeat [sic] blindfold test on that a few years ago and missed about 99% of his guesses on which color the musicians were.” Then in 1973 he explicitly expressed his frustration over what he felt as discrimination against white musicians: “[D]uring the forties and the early fifties, they didn’t talk about the fact that they thought genetically white people couldn’t play jazz, but they believed it. Now of course everybody talks about it, and in a very hostile, and what I would call a racist way. See, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that’s genetic.”153 When Tristano toured Europe in 1965, he perceived that some Europeans held the same prejudice, as he explained in 1973: “I went on a European tour about eight years ago. . .. And I really enjoyed it a lot. Ido have a feeling though that French people don’t think white people can play jazz... . [But I didn’t get that feeling in Denmark . . . Italy . . . [or] Sweden. Germany, I don’t know where those people are.”*54 Tristano continued, perplexed over the enthusiastic reception of Ornette Coleman’s violin performance: “But, while I was received well, Ornette Coleman in the Sports Palace broke it up, playing the funniest music I ever heard on the violin. I mean to me it was just com- pletely idiotic. And he got one of the greatest ovations I ever heard. So I don’t know where those people are. I think they’re just kind of asskissing the Americans. Money again.”110 Lee Aisa Tristano was resentful, in particular, that his contribution to free jazz was not being recognized, as he remarked in 1962: “It is a curious thing that everyone forgets we did it; but, after all, we were white.”*55 He also noted: “That was 1949, Intuition was completely improvised. No tune, no chords, we just sat down and played. What we heard and what we felt. 12 or 15 years later other people started to do the same thing and all of a sudden they were the avant-garde.”*5° However, he was interested in Coleman’s music enough to go to the Five Spot to hear him. Konitz, who went with Tristano, recalled that he seemed to acknowledge Coleman in some way.'7 Another Stint at the Half Note (1964) The quintet, which reunited Tristano, Konitz, and Marsh, broke up some time in 1960 with Marsh’s departure. In 1964, however, both Marsh and Konitz, who had lived in California for two years, came back to New York. Tristano formed a quintet with them and per- formed again at the Half Note, a job lasting seven or eight weeks.*5* With the rhythm section of Sonny Dallas on bass and Nick Stabulas on drums, the quintet was filmed at the club in June 1964 for a CBS- TV program Look Up and Live. In the summer of 1964 the quintet traveled to Toronto to perform at the Cog D’Or. Bob Blackburn, who interviewed Tristano, charac- terized him as “[s]oft-spoken, articulate, innocent of malice in his out- spoken opinions,” and as “a small, slight man with ridiculously stubby fingers, looking generally more like an unsuccessful accountant than a giant of modern jazz.”*© In this interview Tristano complained about jazz critics: “I don’t think jazz criticism is at a very high level nowadays. ... Most of .. . [them] are pretty inept. They don’t under- stand because they just don’t listen. Barry Ulanov, Leonard Feather, George Simon they used to listen. Some of them didn’t like me, but they listened.” In October 1964 Don Heckman wrote a detailed review of Tris- tano’s playing at the Half Note, evaluating it against the backdrop of the trends of the r96os. He first pointed out that Tristano’s music was basically diatonic and thus “diametrically opposed to” 1960s free jazz players, but at the same time he viewed it positively as an “artistically valid alternative for the jazz improviser that allows an unusually wide