Artist: Lennie Tristano

Leonard Joseph Tristano was an American jazz  pianist, composer, arranger, and teacher of jazz improvisation. 

He played with leading bebop musicians and formed his own small bands, which soon displayed some of his early interests – contrapuntal interaction of instruments, harmonic flexibility, and rhythmic complexity. His quintet in 1949 recorded the first  free group improvisations. Tristano's innovations continued in 1951, with the first overdubbed, improvised jazz recordings, and two years later, when he recorded an atonal  improvised solo piano piece that was based on the development of motifs rather than on harmonies. He developed further via polyrhythms and  chromaticism into the 1960s but was infrequently recorded. 

Tristano started teaching music, especially improvisation, in the early 1940s, and by the mid-1950s was concentrating on teaching in preference to performing. He taught in a structured and disciplined manner, which was unusual in jazz education when he began. His educational role over three decades meant that he exerted an influence on jazz through his students, including saxophonists Lee Konitz and  Warne Marsh. 

Tristano studied for a bachelor's degree in music in performance at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago from 1938 until 1941, and stayed for another two years for further studies, although he left before completing his master's degree. Blind from glaucoma during his childhood, one of his aunts assisted him by taking notes for him at university. 

Tristano's interest in jazz inspired a move to New York City in 1946. Tristano met saxophonist Charlie Parker in 1947. They played together in bands that included bebop musicians Dizzy Gillespie, and Max Roach later that year for radio broadcasts. The pianist reported that Parker enjoyed his playing, in part because it was different from what Parker was accustomed to and did not copy the saxophonist's style. 

After1948 Tristano played less often in clubs, and added Konitz and a drummer to his regular band, making it into a quintet. This band recorded the first sides for the New Jazz label, which later became  Prestige Records. Later that year, Warne Marsh, another saxophonist student of Tristano's, was added to the group. 

With occasional personnel changes, the sextet continued performing into 1951. In the same year, the location for Tristano's lessons shifted from his home in Flushing, Queens to a Manhattan loft property,  part of which he had converted into a recording studio. This also served as the location for frequent  jam sessions with various invited musicians. The address became the title of one of his compositions – "317 East 32nd Street". 

At around the same time, Tristano started a record label named Jazz Records. It released "Ju-ju" and "Pastime" on a 45 record in 1952, before Tristano abandoned the project because of time demands and distribution problems. The two tracks were from a trio session with bassist Peter Ind and drummer Roy Haynes and contained overdubbed second piano parts added later by Tristano.

In 1952 Tristano's band performed occasionally, including as a quintet in Toronto. In the summer of that year, Konitz joined Stan Kenton's band, breaking up the core of Tristano's long-standing quintet/sextet, although the saxophonist did on occasion play with Tristano again. 

Tristano's 1953 recording "Descent into the Maelstrom" was another innovation. It was a musical portrayal of Edgar Allan Poe's story of the same title and was an improvised solo piano piece that used multitracking and had no preconceived harmonic structure, being based instead on the development of motifs. Its atonality anticipated the much later work of pianists such as Cecil Taylor and Borah Bergman.