(Reprinted from the August 2020 issue of Downbeat magazine)
On Lennie Tristano: The Duo Sessions (Dot Time Records), pianist Lennie Tristano wends his way through the liminal spaces bridging bebop, cool jazz, and free improvisation. This historic album’s 16 tracks, recorded after Tristano’s final public appearance in 1968 but never released, reveal not only how intuitively he parsed these musical languages but how skillfully he crafted improvisational relationships with like-minded musicians.
Each of the musicians in this case—saxophonist Lenny Popkin, pianist Connie Crothers, and drummer Roger Mancuso—elicited a different musical response from the master improviser. Thus, the respective duo recordings depart from each other in subtle ways, even as they build on the musical pillars of Tristano’s precedent-setting arrangements for quintet.
On the six titles with Popkin, Tristano disrupts the vertical structures when comping against the tenor player’s dancing, discordant solos; his attenuated walking bass lines and pounding chords only allude to harmonic congruity (as on “Out Of A Dream”). But his own nimble solos, with their liquid, chromatic runs (“Melancholy Stomp”), would suggest that any seeming incongruity derives from the narrowness of the view, not the vision.
With the Crothers tracks, Tristano takes on the only four-handed piano composition he ever recorded (“Concerto: Parts I and II”). The two pianists are so interactive that it’s difficult to tease out the individual contributions; you can’t tell which of them is tinkering with melodicism while the other is churning out rhythmic block chords and jarring harmonic extensions. Attribution aside, the intense mental rapport here verges on the telepathic.
Finally, the eight cuts with Mancuso, the second half of the release, spotlight Tristano’s delightfully inventive contrafacts, built atop the drummer’s sturdy polyrhythms. Tunes like “Palo Alto Street,” a twist on the standard “It’s Alright With Me,” and “Home Again,” an undisguised corollary to “Indiana,” tickle the imagination and satisfy the mind.
Lennie Tristano: The Duo Sessions: Out of a Dream; Ballad; Chez Lennie; Inflight; Ensemble; Melancholy Stomp; Concerto: Part 1; Concerto: Part 2; Palo Alto Street; Session; Changes; My Baby; Imagery; That Feeling; Minor Pennies; Home Again. (70:25)
Personnel: Lennie Tristano, piano; Lenny Popkin, tenor saxophone (tracks 1-6); Connie Crothers, piano (tracks 7-8); Roger Mancuso, drums (tracks 9-16).