Lennie Tristano

A blind pianist from Chicago, Lennie Tristano's unpredictable, improvised style went against the grain of 1940s jazz and made him a significant influence on what became known as "the birth of the cool". While never achieving the reputation and fame of his great contemporary Miles Davis, Tristano's rejection of extravagance and grandstanding in favour of more suppressed emotional styles wasn't to the taste of some jazz fans who thought his music cold, but proved to be an important bridge between bebop and free-form jazz. Blind from birth, he was first taught to play piano by his mother Rose Malano, an opera singer, and subsequently studied at Chicago's American Conservatory. He began playing bebop and in 1946 moved to New York where he worked with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach and gained the attention from the wider jazz world. He went on to lead his own bands, writing and recording his own compositions - most significantly eschewing drums on the improvisational 'Intuition' (1950) and 'Digression' (1954), both landmark pieces. They divided opinion but the Tristano Sextet toured with reasonable success and continued to explore new boundaries with a piece built around Bach's fugues and 'Descent Into Maelstrom' (1953), a musical portrayal of an Edgar Allan Poe story. In 1955 he signed to Atlantic Records, insisting on total control as he experimented further, paying tribute to his old friend Charlie Parker on the blues record 'Requiem'. He later concentrated more on teaching, where his bluntness was said to border on rudeness and insensitivity and withdrew from live performance completely in the 1970s with the onset of illness and emphysema brought on by a lifelong smoking habit. He died of a heart attack at his home in Jamaica, New York in 1978.

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