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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

The Prez Centennial

August 27, 2009 by Doug Ramsey

Lester Young was born 100 years ago today and died in his 49th year in March, 1959. Billie Holiday called him the president of the tenor saxophonists. His nickname became Prez, and he called nearly everyone else Prez. There is an endless list of musicians who played as they did mostly because of Young. It includes soloists as various as Parker, Artie Shaw, Paul Quinichette, Paul Desmond, Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon and young w:horn.jpgBrew Moore, to name a few of hundreds. Moore carried his discipleship so far as to declare, “Anyone who doesn’t play like Lester Young is wrong.”
Among Lester’s stylistic children are virtually all of the Brothers who came through the Woody Herman band, starting with the tenor players of the first Four Brothers section–Zoot Sims, Stan Getz and Herbie Steward–and continuing with Al Cohn, Bill Perkins, Gene Ammons, Richie Kamuca, Dick Hafer, and on and on and on. No one could count the grandchildren and great-grandchildren because Young’s inheritors are players of all instruments, whether or not they are aware of their gifts from him. His way of playing is part of the lingua franca of jazz.
Here are a few observations in a book I wrote called Jazz Matters:

In the early 1930s, Lester Young was removed from the Fletcher Henderson band for not playing like Coleman Hawkins. But from his first recordings with Count Basie in 1936, Young’s lightness, buoyancy, rhythmic daring and harmonic subtlety established him as a hero of forward-looking musicians. He provided an evolutionary step between Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker in the freeing of the jazz soloist from the arbitrary restrictions of time divisions. In his solos, Young flew weightlessly over bar lines. He saw deeply into chord changes. He helped lay the rhythmic and harmonic keystones of bebop.

Young was drafted in 1944, even though he was in bad health and admitted he had used marijuana for the past decade. The Army confiscated his horn, refused to let him play in the camp band, and later arrested him on drug charges. He was dishonorably discharged, but first he was imprisoned for ten months at an Army base in Georgia, an experience with devastating emotional consequences. In spite of his experience in the military, his attempts to recover from its dehumanizing effects, and his efforts to build his own withdrawn world of sweetness and love, Young was capable of playing tenor sax with inventiveness, relaxation and swing never achieved by any other jazz soloist.

Although Louis Armstrong may have been the first soloist to erase bar lines and smooth out jazz improvisation with long, logical, flowing passages, Prez is the man who brought total relaxation to the process and yet managed at the same time to extend the boundaries of rhythmic propulsion. No one had ever done more swinging while creating beautiful ideas.

YouTube does not allow us to embed their video of Lester as featured soloist with the Basie Band at the Randall’s Island jazz festival in 1938. He is in the silent film but the sound track dubbed in is one of his great solos with Basie on “I Got Rhythm” chord changes. Click here to see and hear him.
Toward the end of his life, Young’s oblique approach to melodies and his ultra-relaxed rhythm could create the impression that he was having trouble finding his way. To the contrary, his habit of lagging behind the beat was the product of assurance and of comfort with his surroundings. There are wonderful instances of that in this new compilation of latterday Lester. But there is no more memorable example than in his 1957 reunion with Billie Holiday, whose deep friendship and musical empathy with Young went back to the 1930s. Creating just twelve uncomplicated bars of music, Prez finds the essence of beauty and the blues. This is the famous “Fine and Mellow” from the 1957 CBS-TVprogram The Sound of Jazz. Ben Webster has the first tenor saxophone solo, Lester the second.

Here is the complete rundown of soloists in that piece.
Billie Holiday (with Doc Cheatham obligato)
Ben Webster
Lester Young
Holiday (with Cheatham)
Vic Dickenson (trombone)
Gerry Mulligan (baritone saxophone)
Holiday
Coleman Hawkins (tenor saxophone)
Roy Eldridge (trumpet)
Holiday

lester-in-paris.jpg

Lester Young, 1909 –

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Comments

  1. Deborah H says

    August 27, 2009 at 7:41 am

    I know showing jazz on television has never been very successful, but it kills me that so few people will ever see the videos of these wonderful jazz performances.
    Jay Leno has a new show starting this fall and my greatest wish is that EVERY night, he would feature a jazz artist. Wouldn’t that be fantastic!
    (Do you know anyone at NBC?)

  2. Bruno Leicht says

    August 27, 2009 at 10:26 pm

    Thanks, Doug, for this insightful and touching piece for celebrating the one and only president.
    I hope you don’t mind this quote of a vintage email to you:
    “When Pres appeared on my radar (I was around 22), it was like scales falling from my … ears. The radio man, the late Dieter Zimmerle, from Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR, Stuttgart, now SWR) played some of his most significant recordings, and he only had 30 minutes broadcasting time for his portrait of Lester Young. 30 minutes which changed my musical life. I’m pretty sure that it was an anniversary broadcast to Pres’ 35th obit in 1984.
    When I heard his solo on “Lady Be Good” for the very first time at all, his beautiful backgrounds to Lady Day’s vocal on “A Sailboat In The Moonlight”, or his later, heartbreaking album “Laughing To Keep From Crying” (Mr. Zimmerle played “Gypsy In My Soul”), it was like a revelation for me. I give Pres the credits for my successful entrance exam at the Cologne Musikhochschule, because I learned from Lester’s playing that many notes or technical fireworks aren’t important. Telling a story, that is!

  3. Tim says

    August 28, 2009 at 12:22 pm

    Killer, Doug, that was killer. Most beautiful thing I’ve heard this week. Thank you so much for featuring it.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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Monday Recommendation: DIVA At 25

The DIVA Jazz Orchestra 25th Anniversary Project (ArtistShare) It has been a quarter of a century since Buddy Rich’s manager and relief drummer Stanley Kay found himself conducting a band whose drummer was young Sherrie Maricle. Intrigued by her playing, Kay set out to find whether there were other women jazz musicians of comparable talent. […]

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Monday Recommendation, Keith Jarrett Trio: After The Fall

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Monday Recommendation: Gerard Kubik, Jazz Transatlantic

Gerhard Kubik, Jazz Transatlantic, Vol. I and Vol. II (University Press of Mississippi) The first volume of Kubik’s work is subtitled, “The African Undercurrent in Twentieth–Century Jazz Culture;” the second, “Jazz Derivatives and Developments in Twentieth-Century Africa.” The descriptions indicate the depth and scope of the Austrian ethnomusicologist’s research, which has taken him to Africa […]

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Monday Recommendation: Magris In Miami

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Monday Recommendation(s): Three From ECM

Andy Sheppard, Romaria (ECM) The title tune, written and first recorded by the Brazilian Renato Teixeira, was made still more famous by the singer Elis Regina’s 1977 recording. It has been a beloved standard song in Brazil for four decades. British saxophonist Sheppard and his quartet hew to the spirits if not the letters of […]

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More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

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