Billboard : 3/24/1956
Score of 77

Pioneering modernist Tristano has his first album in several years. As expected, there are some strikingly original ideas advanced, but there’s nothing to scare off the less-than-intellectual listener. In fact, the “new” Tristano displays plenty of emotion and swingin’ drive as well as his typically clean technique and articulate flow of ideas. No question about it, he can wail. Five standards were cut at a café appearance, and these feature Tristano disciple Lee Konitz on alto sax. The others are studio sides, some of which were double-tracked by the pianist. Line Up is a fine demo band.

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Audio
Jean Shepherd : June, 1956

Tristano is a sort of demigod among modern musicians and rightly so. He is, like Bach, much more talked about and referred to than listened to. This was mainly because he is one of the least recorded major jazz figures of the past ten years. For some unexplained reason, many relatively unimportant musicians are able to flood the market with records while a man of the stature of Tristano remains largely unknown to the vast bulk of record buyers. He is here heard in company with Lee Konitz, his long time associate, in a session recorded on the stand. I’ll venture to say that there is hardly a serious jazz musician around who hasn’t already put in his order for a copy of this one. And for good reason. Listen to it.

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Saturday Review
Whitney Balliett : 04/14/1956

A masterful pianist and jazz musician, Tristano reveals here, in two solo numbers, two trio numbers, and five sides recorded recently in a New York restaurant with Lee Konitz, G. Ramey, and A. Taylor a lyricism and fire that are more obvious than in most of his earlier work. Listen, particularly, to Requiem, Turkish Mambo, and the two fragmentary trio sides, which have some intriguing double taping. An essential record.

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Down Beat : 04/18/1956
Nat Hentoff : 5 stars

Lennie Tristano‘s first LP in several years is an absorbing. The first four tracks were recorded by Lennie at his own private recording studio. On the first, he superimposed his piano over a previous tape of bassist Peter Ind and drummer Jeff Morton after he adjusted to his satisfaction what they had done. The second has paired piano lines. On the third he taped three lines, one on top of the other. On the fourth he did what he had done in the first. The last five tracks were recorded at the Sing Song room of the Confucius restaurant last summer with Lee Konitz, Gene Ramey, and Arthur Taylor.

Throughout there is every evidence of a Tristano who has continued to grow and deepen. He is still very much his own man, a man who is driven to continue searching to find and challenge more of himself in his music. He plays authoritatively with a propulsive, intensely alive forcefulness (see tracks one and four, for example.) Anyone still suspecting his ability to communicate emotion should hear the naked power in the Requiem blues he plays for Charlie Parker. On the ballad sides with Lee, there is a richer, deeper though never ornamental lyricism than Lennie has shown on records before. And always, there is his imaginative resourcefulness, an imagination, however, that works organically, for there is never the touch of patchwork in any Tristano performance. It all comes from inside the development of the music – and the man. Konitz is lucid, logical, unfailingly interesting, and increasingly emotional.

Two footnotes: dig the further possibilities of multirhythms as explored by Tristano in Turkish Mambo. Secondly, Barry Ulanov states in connection with Lennie’s adjusting the bass and drum take before superimposing his piano to it: “The great day for jazz will be when rhythm sections – one or two or three musicians large – will be able to think and play and beat that steadily, with such regularity and rapidity and imagination, that it will be possible to record alongside them instead of over them.” It’s true Lennie has problems finding the exactly right rhythm section for him, but that’s no reason to maintain that there aren’t rhythm sections for others that can very successfully be recorded alongside instead of over. The situation rhythm-section-wise in jazz is far from that bad. There’s always a need for more firstrate rhythm men, but let’s not put down the strong nucleus of them we have.

The recorded sound Lennie gets in his studio excellent. Confucius sound is good but could have been better.

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Liner Notes by Barry Ulanov

A great many people are going to be surprised by this set. It presents a Lennie Tristano far removed from the figure of their – and the critics’ – imagination. Uncompromising he may be, as has been noted many a time, in the public prints and in private discussions. But remote, inaccessible, recondite he is not, except in the sense that any first-rate artist has ideas to offer which are necessarily his own and nobody else’s and hence so fresh, so crisp, so inspired as to seem – or sound – altogether new and quite thoroughly removed from any familiar thinking – or playing-pattern, No, there is nothing really obscure about Lennie’s playing here, nothing really beyond the grasp of anybody with any feeling for, or fairly considerable listening experience in, jazz.

This is jazz, no mistaking it for anything else. It meets all the requirements: it is improvised, brilliantly adding ideas to ideas all the way through; it swings, rapturously, whether up or middling-up or slow in tempo; it offers, both in Lennie’s playing with bass and drums and with Lee Konitz and rhythm, that delicate internal tension, that collective creativity which is the special identifying mark of the real thing in this music.

And so it is to the jazz in this record that I suggest you listen, forgetting, if you can, any preconceived notions about what Lennie Tristano represents in modern music, anything you may have read about his personality, his ideas, his group, his students or teaching method or anything much besides, no matter how directly relevant it may seem to you. Isn’t it, after all, in a man’s painting, if he is a painter, in his poetry, if he is a poet, or in his music, if he is a composer, that one should look for his personality, his ideas, or anything else of any sizable significance? And isn’t this particularly true of jazz, where a performer composes as he blows, if he is a genuine jazz musician, and therefore exposes himself more honestly than in most arts? And if it isn’t true, then why bother – why bother painting or writing or composing or blowing in the first place? and why bother looking or reading or listening in the second?

After listening to these tracks, I think you’ll agree with me that what you have heard is impression enough of the Tristano thinking processes and that, unquestionably, Lennie’s ideas must seek musical outlet, must find jazz outlet, and we must pay attention, hard, earnest attention, and do so with every sort of listening ease.

Lennie has fooled with the tapes of East Thirty-Second and Line Up, adjusting the bass lines Peter Ind (on bass) and Jeff Morton (on drums) prepared for him to the piano lines he has superimposed upon them. But the mechanical adjustment of tapes is not what you hear. What comes through first of all and last of all is the jazz, uninterrupted and pulsating and overpowering jazz, with that kind of frontal motion which was Bach’s in, say, the Chromatic Fantasy in D minor, pushing through from beginning to end without any waste accents or unnecessary halts or repetition, The great day for jazz will be that one when rhythm sections – one or two or three musicians large – will be able to think and play and beat that steadily, with such regularity and rapidity and imagination that it will be possible to record alongside them instead of over them.

Another kind of feat, not really of any mechanical or electronic interest except in the paired piano lines that merge and separate from time to time, is in the Requiem Lennie plays here, a heartfelt R.I.P. for the late Charlie Parker. The achievement is in the form, a kind of “prelude and blues” structure, in which first of all Lennie sets a mood with unexpected Schumannesque figures, and then, even as Charlie did, plays a rest into the blues. There is a tender deliberateness about this performance: it is a man thinking grief, feeling deprived, thinking and feeling in the logical medium for grief and deprivation in jazz: the blues.

More of the deliberate, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say the much-deliberated, makes its way into the three lines, played – and recorded – one on top of the other in the Turkish Mambo, which is not a mambo and certainly reveals not one iota or fez of Near Eastern influence but gains its title from Lennie’s long, low bow in the direction of the brothers Ertegun, Ahmet and Nesuhi, for whom this album was put together. The times will probably be as hard for the listener to follow as they were at various times for drummers: one track proceeds from 7/8 to 7/4, another from 5/8 to 5/4, the last from 3/8 to 4/4. But one need not attempt to sort out the arithmetical delicacies with which Lennie titillates his mind and fingers and our head and feet to feel the exhilaration produced by the rhythmic point and counterpoint.

Similarly, one can get deeply involved in the intricacies of lines solo or lines duo in the remaining bands, those recorded with Lee Konitz in the Sing Song Room of the Confucius Restaurant, where they and several rhythm sections spent the summer of 1955 together (here it’s Gene Ramey on bass and Art Taylor on drums). But better than such involvement, at least at first, I would think, is to let yourself go, snapping thumb and index finger, pecking head, or simply tapping foot – choose your own weapon – allowing the beat to make itself felt, just as Lennie and Lee do. Then look for the little details, listen for the richnesses of ornament, the fine parallel or disjunctive thinking, the developments together or apart, which make up the masterful balance here of musicians who know and understand each other and are only too glad to show it in their playing together.

In These Foolish Things, it is the splendidly long line that Lee plays, Lennie’s reflective musing, now single-line, now in block chords, and a finish together that puts a glistening coda on both their backs. In You Go to My Head, a longtime favorite of these musicians, it is Lee, thoughtful to a carefully organized conclusion, and Lennie in almost exactly the same groove, more directly following after his student than any place else on record. In Ghost of a Chance, the elegant touches – and elegant they truly are – are Lennie’s, following the chord structure of the Victor Young tune with comparative orthodoxy, laying down counter-melodies, showing himself at his simplest to be the same sort of thoughtful and feelingful jazzman that he its in more complex creations. Last of all, in the romps at middle-tempos that only thoroughly experienced and rhythmically gifted jazz musicians can ever manage accurately and groovily, in If I Had You and All the Things You Are, it’s a meshing of both solo gears, with Lennie’s entrances in both the clues to the balanced mood (or mood of balance) of both.

Balance all around is to be found in this collection: a trial balance of tempo and time and personality differences which accounts for the jockeying of tapes and changing of speeds and multiplication of piano lines in Lennie’s solo tracks; a tested balance of soloists and tunes and tempos and personalities which accounts for the orderly procedure and unmitigated pleasure of the alto and piano solos and duos in the tracks Lennie and Lee play together. And all of it – and this I cannot insist upon too strongly – comes out jazz, real jazz, great jazz.