Listening to Prestige Records project -- part 2

I've decided to take this by recording date, because with reissues, partial issues, compilations, anything else is too complicated. The major Prestige album series, the 7000 series, begins in 1955, but Prestige was around since 1949, first as New Jazz, then very soon after as Prestige. The Bill Coleman - Don Byas date was recordedon January 5, 1949, but the first to be actually recorded in Prestige's studios was a Lennie Tristano session,  on January 11 . I haven't been able to find out where those first sessions were recorded - the Rudy Van Gelder era came later. The company's offices were located on W. 50th Street, and grew from a record store Bob Weinstock owned next to the Metropole Cafe (my Wikipedia entry).

The date is listed as the Lennie Tristano Quintet, but Warne Marsh wasn't there for the January ll session -- it's Lee Konitz on alto and Billy Bauer on guitar, two Tristano mainstays. Shelley Manne is the drummer, but he'll be taking off for the West Coast shortly. Arnold Fishkind, here known as Arnold Fishkin, is on bass.

It's interesting to note where these guys came from. Billy Bauer had a swing and big band background, having played with Jerry Wald, Woody Herman, Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden -- as did most of the beboppers, really. That was their apprenticeship. Shelley Manne started in a big band, then played and recorded with a number of Ellington sidemen, as well as with Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas. Arnold Fishkind played with Jack Teagarden, Bunny Berigan, even Les Brown, who was more dance music than jazz. And even during the years of his association with Tristano, he was also playing with Charlie Barnet and Benny Goodman.

Tristano and Konitz came to modern jazz pretty much straight on. Konitz grew up admiring Benny Goodman, but his first big band job, as a temporary replacement for Charlie Barnet in the Teddy Powell orchestra, reportedly made Barnet bang his head against a wall in anguish when Konitz started playing. He was not cut out to be a swing musician. And Tristano really was always the cerebral, difficult modernist he's famous for being.

So in a way Bauer, Fishkind and Manne had to learn not to swing, or not to rely on swinging.

This session isn't as far out as Tristano's famous next session, in May of 1949, when the group was joined by Warne Marsh, and they recorded :"Intuition," arguably the first free jazz piece, played with no charts at all -- no prearranged melody, harmony, or rhythm.  But that came out on Capitol.

The Prestige session is represented on YouTube by "Subconscious-Lee," by its title a vehicle for Konitz, but it would be hard to explain that to a Billy Bauer fan. Bauer, whose ideas are as advanced as anyone's, still swings hard on his solo. Konitz has that cool sound that he would bring to the more famous Miles Davis nonet sessions.

Tristano has a reputation for being unapproachably difficult, that he's never really shaken. I'm only the 22nd person to like this cut on YouTube. Perhaps that comes from playing free jazz over a decade before Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, brought it into the mainstream. I've never felt he got the acclaim he deserved, and he's not remembered as much as some of his contemporaries, though he's good enough to be.

Played with Bird, Part 3

Here are the first two parts.

Peter Ind, still alive, still active in jazz, though not as a musician.

As a musician, mostly involved with Lennie Tristano, but in a review of Ind's book on Tristano, John Robert Brown gives us this.

In 1950, on another of his trips, and having already taken lessons with Lennie Tristano, Ind was invited to play the first set with the pianist's sextet at Birdland. New York was so alluring that in 1951 Ind, taking three double basses, went to live there. Soon he was playing alongside Elvin Jones, Duke Jordan and Lennie Tristano, and rehearsing with Gerry Mulligan and Neal Hefti.

Lessons with Tristano are described. The blind pianist had an exceptional ear, a powerful memory and interpersonal directness. His students were required to memorise famous jazz solos, sing them, then write them down. Extensive work on scales and arpeggios was required. There was an emphasis on learning melodies. Tristano comes across as a dominant figure, though paradoxically 'needing' his students, in a psychological sense.

Along with many others in the New York community of the time, Tristano was influenced by the psychologist Wilhelm Reich. Ind spends several pages describing Tristano's respect for Reich's writing, and how Ind would read aloud to Tristano from Reich's books. In 1947, following a series of articles in The New Republic and Harpers, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began an investigation into Reich's claims, winning an injunction against the promotion of his orgone therapy as a medical treatment. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defence. This involved sending the judge all his books to read! In 1956 Reich was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, and died while serving his sentence. Frustratingly, Ind spends several pages on Reich, but only gives us part of the fascinating and instructive story. I have since discovered (not from Ind's book) that Kate Bush's song Cloudbusting is based on a book by Reich's son, Peter.

Ind never met Reich. He met and played with Bird, but Ind, as an immigrant, 'felt wary of becoming too involved with anyone associated with narcotics, knowing that I risked deportation should I find myself so accused.' The bassist also accompanied Billie Holiday, but tells us nothing about the experience. He worked with Buddy Rich. Apart from remarking that Rich was 'the proverbial pain in the arse,' nothing is revealed.

I once interviewed Russian emigre jazz musician Valery Ponomarev about his first trip to NYC. I asked him what surprised him most. He said well, he knew about the jazz greats like Art Blakey and Horace Silver, but he was totally unprepared for the number of incredibly gifted jazz musicians who played in obscurity. So here's to Peter Ind, and all the others we didn't hear of, who made jazz what it is.