| At eight o’clock on Friday evening May
13 of this year after two hours of more orthodox recording, five men grouped
themselves around two microphones and began to make permanent the most
audacious experiment yet attempted in jazz. The men were Lennie Tristano,
Billy Bauer, Arnold Fishkind, Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. The experiment
was to create a spontaneous music out of skill and intuition which should
be at once atonal, contrapuntal and improvised on a jazz base. The microphones
were provided by Capitol Records.
Logically enough Intuition was the name Lennie gave the first side of the four recorded between eight and nine that night Not logically but perhaps understandably. Capitol was bewildered by and uncertain about what it heard. As a result, two of the sides were erased from the recording tape and the remaining two those chosen as the best of the four were put aside with their date indefinitely postponed. And yet these adventures in jazz intuition may very well be the high point of all of jazz until now, possibly the breaking point which will send jazz far away from its too well tested paths and far along the speculative road which every art form has had to follow to achieve greatness. Intuition, both the record and the procedure which it names is the inevitable development of Lennie Tristano last three or four years of laboratory, living-room and lounging -pajama experiment. You can hear its growth from the coda’s of the six sides made for Keynote through the two sides (Speculation and Through these Portals) and the many it didn't through Subconscious Lee and Judy to four sides Capitol did release. You can hear the individual melodic lines lengthen first Lennie’s and Billy's in the trio performances on Keynote, then Lee’s then Warne's with Arnold’s bass part taking on more and more individual life. You can almost see the lines pair off, the counterpoint take shape. You can't miss the evolution from other men’s chords from established chorus lengths from familiar sounds to the individual freedom and group interdependence of intuition ail accomplished event at the most conservative level without ever relying on other men's devices. Now then Lennie has the most robust and rewarding of working methods to add to his fine older patterns. METRONOME Magazine (September 1949) |