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Forum member Pamos recommended the book Black Music by Leroi Jones, which I have been enjoying. Reading his interview with Don Cherry I came across this jarring bit on improvisation guru Lennie Tristano.
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06-04-2024 02:19 PM
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Ah yeah. I remember that. Disappointing, to say the least.
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I wasn't immediately able to find the Downbeat article. It could always be incorrect.
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Difficult to take such things out of context.
1) First of all Amiri Baraka did not want to be called LeRoi Jones anymore in later years after having taken the name Amiri Baraka. Jones was a slaveholder name for him.
2) AB was a controversial person as well. From Wiki:
"Baraka's poetry and writing have attracted both high praise and condemnation. In the African-American community, some compare Baraka to James Baldwin and recognize him as one of the most respected and most widely published Black writers of his generation, though some have said his work is an expression of violence, misogyny, and homophobia. Baraka's brief tenure as Poet Laureate of New Jersey (in 2002 and 2003) involved controversy over a public reading of his poem "Somebody Blew Up America?", which resulted in accusations of antisemitism and negative attention from critics and politicians over his assertion that the US and Israeli governments had advanced knowledge of the September 11 attack."
3) Lennie Tristano was no racist. He jammed with Bird, Klook, Max, Roach, Dizzy etc.etc. and was well respected by them.
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I mean, it is Don Cherrys words, presumably. But in his more social-political writing, Amiri Baraka was pretty controversial.
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Better yet, Miles Davis on Don Cherry:
"But I didn't like what they (Ornette and Don Cherry) were playing, especially Don Cherry on that little horn he had. It just looked to me like he was playing a lot of notes and looking real serious, and people went for that because people will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype.
They want to be hip, want always to be in on the new thing so they don't look unhip.
White people are especially like that, particularly when a black person is doing something they don't understand."
"3 Shades of Blue" p.312.
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Amiri Baraka's other opinions notwithstanding, this is the best piece of music writing in the history of music journalism:
From the liner notes to Live at Birdland.There are three numbers on the album that were recorded Live at Birdland, Afro-Blue, I Want To Talk About You, and The Promise. And while some of the non-musical hysteria has vanished from the recording, that is, after riding a subway through New York's bowels, and that subway full of all the things any man should expect to find in some thing's bowels, and then coming up stairs, to the street, and walking slowly, head down, through the traffic and failure that does shape the area, and then entering "The Jazz Corner Of The World" (a temple erected in praise of what God?), and then finally amidst that noise and glare to hear a man destroy all of it, completely, like Sodom, with just the first few notes from his horn, your "critical" sense can be erased completely, and that experience can place you somewhere a long way off from anything ugly. Still, what was of musical value that I heard that night does remain, and the emotions ... some of them completely new ... that I experience at each "objective" rehearing of this music are as valuable as anything else I know about. And all of this is on this record, and the studio pieces, Alabama and Your Lady, are among the strongest efforts on the album.
Speaking of that other thread with the links between language and music. I'd wager Baraka/Jones was deliberate in the way he separates clauses and parentheticals in what is essentially one long run-on sentence. It's kind of polyrhythmic and very very "Coltrane."
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I'd like to read the actual quote from Lennie Tristano. I searched for Tristano Downbeat interviews but didn't come up with anything.
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I found four or five Lennie Tristano Down Beat interviews but not the one Don Cherry talked about.
Originally Posted by supersoul
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Published in this Down Beat magazine it was an interview with Archie Shepp and not Don Cherry. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
Forum member Pamos recommended the book Black Music by Leroi Jones, which I have been enjoying. Reading his interview with Don Cherry I came across this jarring bit on improvisation guru Lennie Tristano.
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Ah right Originally Posted by Bop Head
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I’m not sure about the provenance of the quote. Possible Archie Shepp misremembered the publication. There were loads of widely circulated jazz publications, for example, that were out of print long before anyone would’ve had much interest in archiving them.
The Tristano school did have a pretty complicated relationship with other jazz musicians though. This is some useful context:
Tristano at 100 | DO THE M@TH
Theres an interesting anecdote at the end where Lee Konitz is upset that Ray Brown accuses him of saying something pretty insulting. Iverson credits Konitz (he probably didn’t say that exactly) but also immediately finds the thing Ray Brown was probably remembering and he remembered the content correctly, if not the insulting phrasing.
So that’s possibly instructive here. Not to mention Jones/Baraka was writing for downbeat at the time and the article was published in Downbeat, so one can possibly assume that the editors of Downbeat didn’t think the publication was being represented unfairly in Shepps telling.
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I thought it was in the On Don Cherry chapter. Whoopsie.
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I have never listened to Lennie Tristano other than accidentally; very nice to have this little rabbit hole to run down this afternoon and find out more. The Ethan Iverson article was quite interesting.
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"Just because a Negro plays Jazz, it doesn't necessarily make him a man"... Surely Tristano could not have meant this in a racist way. Without knowing the context, we can twist this to mean anything.
My guess is that he meant it in the same way as something as innocuous as "Just because a white man has a degree, it doesn't make him a man"... or something?
OTH, we know that Lennie was a bitter man, and probably felt misunderstood and under appreciated (being blind didn't seem to help), and he was certainly known to court controversy. I often sensed that he had a superiority complex (probably started as some kind of an inverted inferiority complex?), but not because of being white. He held impossibly high standards for what he considered to be true improvisation, and he felt that most musicians (black and white) were not of his calibre in that regard.
He may have been pilloried by some black musicians for having such a stuffy or snobbish "European", overly intellectualised take on Jazz, and that also seems fair to me. Almost like imagining a white musician approaching Louis Armstrong and declaring "Look, you're just not doing this in quite the correct way!"
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Unfortunately it’s not really possible to untangle some of this stuff from the racial politics of the time.
Lennie dismissing the blues-orientation of a lot of black musicians probably wasn’t intended as a personal attack on anyone, but also there’s some tone deafness and lack of interest in the culture around him that you can’t really ignore. Maybe it’s not racist, it just applies mostly to black musicians — so the distinction isn’t really a terribly important one when the result ends up in the same place.
We’re getting quite caught up in whether or not Lennie meant this or even said it, etc etc etc, but I think this part of the Shepp quote is quite beautiful and profound and matters no matter what Lennie meant when he said what he said (or what Lee Konitz meant by being tired of the blues).
“I think a man should be rather careful with his words, especially when he’s criticizing the giver of a gift, you dig? A marvelous gift.”
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This thread reminds me of what is talking place here in the USA, with the WNBA and their newly arrived status in the media.
Some sports media talking heads are saying race isn't the topic, while others are saying, if you believe that race isn't the topic,,,, well,, that says a lot about you!
Delicate topics that often lead to a lot of unfounded assumptions, especially when money becomes involved.
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Well I think two things about jazz are true. The first is that it had very complicated racial politics. The second is that the complicated nature of the racial politics was evidence of its tendency to be significantly more integrated than the country at large. Simple racial politics in the 1940s always went the same way.
So it’s quite cool that jazz music was ahead of the game in some ways (very very par for the course in others, particularly where IP and financial benefits accrued), but we can’t hold on to that without reckoning with the complexity. Since the complexity was a product of the progress at the time.
I think in general I tend to appreciate things a bit more when I approach them as complex things without clean lines, though the clean lines would make things a bit easier.
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"The best book on jazz is still the collection of interviews by Art Taylor, Notes and Tones.". Originally Posted by pamosmusic
I stopped reading there.
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Why? Originally Posted by sgcim
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yeah, some really embarrassing shit there. ornette was terrible. ugh. Originally Posted by sgcim
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??? Originally Posted by djg
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Have you ever read the book? Originally Posted by Bop Head
Read the book, and you can find out for yourself
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Here is a section of Shim Eunmi's Lennie Tristano: His life in music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007, pp108-9), in which Tristano's remark is discussed.
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 ethnicity, 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 during the last 50 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.” 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 considered 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 musicians. 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.” [Bill Coss, “Lennie Tristano Speaks Out,” Down Beat, December 6, 1962]
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 others. It’s about time people realized jazz is an American thing, only possible 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 different 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: “During 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.”
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For what it’s worth — this says that Tristano’s dismissal of black musicians must be seen as a reaction to the black musician’s dismissal of white musicians.
No suggestion that the black musicians dismissal of white musicians might be a reaction to white musicians dismissal of them.
Im not sure we really need to get into an argument about who was more dismissed by whom in 1960s America.
And to Tristano’s specific point. If jazz is a product of the environment, it’s worth pointing out that America was either legally or de facto segregated in almost every corner at the time he was speaking ——— so black musicians might in fact have been products of an environment quite different than that of their white counterparts. And at that time, and in that place, that would have been a uniquely black experience, and one that a white musician wouldn’t have replicated regardless of their city of birth or status.
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