Given that it was the only record, Tristano was surprisingly modern jazz at that time! Do you think that record was an „accident“ or was it more something like „finally a jazz artist who is decent, white and sufficiently high-brow?“
Talking about commies – was this mostly a one-sided thing of Leftists embracing jazz? was the jazz mainstream of the fifties politically interested? vaguely related, how „intellectual“ was jazz at time, would people like Zoot Sims or Sonny Stitt read books 
? the way the story of jazz is told one often gets the impression that, naively put, it somehow started in the hands of people who just „did it“ and then in the course of the fifties and sixties was overtaken by people who had thoroughly developed views about politics, religion, life in general… hope the question makes enough sense to allow for an answer…
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