The Record Changer
Ross Russell : April, 1949
The Parent Style

The shadows of three great jazz musicians lie heavily over the contemporary scene. They are Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young and Charlie Parker. In our recent examination of bebop brass instrumentation it was shown how the modern style had evolved along a line of great trumpet players from Louis Armstrong to Roy Eldridge, emerging in the bebop idiom with the ascendancy of Dizzy Gillespie. In that article certain references were made to Lester Young, whose tone and phrasing, even though on saxophone, were studied and adapted to brass instruments by the earlier boppers.

When we come to examine bebop reed instrumentation we find the influence of Lester Young even more dominant. In fact, modern reed playing stems almost solely from “Pres,” the most revered of the swing musicians.

The new individual voices of Swing – Goodman, Wilson, Eldridge – had brought – about an improvement of technique, sophistication, refinement and involvement of line. Teddy Wilson had refined the punching orchestral piano of Hines; Eldridge elaborated the fantastic style of the later Armstrong period. Benny Goodman was a clarinetist who phrased in the Chicago tradition of Noone and Tesschmaker, but he went far beyond his models in musicianship.

Great changes had come to be associated with these musicians but they had not actually introduced a new way of playing jazz. The challenge sounded by Lester Young marks a division point in jazz history. Most of the critics and musicians of the past fifteen years fall into two groups: the traditionalists who hold with the old models – the classic jazz of Armstrong, Hawkins and Goodman; and the “moderns” who have followed the path of Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. An understanding of this schism will simplify the appraisal, not only of music, but jazz criticism since 1935.

Like Wilson and Eldridge, Lester Young represents virtuosity, harmonic maturity, delicacy and complexity. But these qualities are not acquisitions with Young – they are integral in his playing. He is the first to make a clean break with the past and create a style which is actually unique. With Morton, Armstrong and Parker, figures that loom in their respective eras, Lester Young is one of the four chief innovators of jazz. A musician of less stature than Armstrong, Young is none the less comparable to Louis in historical importance.

Lester was the first to junk the machine-gun style of Hawkins, with its reliance on eighth note-dotted sixteenth patterns. This is the phrasing method of Sedric, Berry, Webster, Wilson, and Young’s Basie section mate, Herschel Evans. Lester used more notes and less notes than his predecessors, but abundances were balanced against bareness within the structure of his solos.

In his solo on Lady be Good (small band version), Young employs a bare ten notes for the first four-bar section. A classic stylist would have doubled the amount. These ten notes are set with lapidarian skill in the rhythmic and melodic framework. The opening phrase, so succinctly stated, leads to longer and complex improvisations upon the melody, the whole of which is a masterpiece of economy, subtlety and logic.

Lester’s musical thought flowed, not within the accepted confines of two or four-bar sections, but more freely. He thought in terms of a new melodic line that submitted only to the harmony of the original as it reworked the melody into something fresh and personal.

Harmonic sense that enables a jazzman to improvise readily is a talent. Melodic vision of Young’s quality is a mark of genius. His example and that of the Basie band restored to the jazz language a tool which had been dulled by improper usage.

Lester Young’s chord and bar changes are arranged with such adroitness that the listener is frequently not aware of them until after they have fallen. Lester’s method is to phrase ahead – to prepare for and gracefully lead to into the next change several beats before its arrival. To be able to move so freely, in and out of the harmonies with an ear so keen and a step so sure, to always come out on the right note and the right beat – this is a mark of genius. Jazz had known nothing like it since the first daring improvisations of Louis Armstrong.

As an innovator of harmonic change Lester employed the light polychrome orchestral palette of the Debussyians. Lester’s spirit was pleased by the sound of the sixth and ninth intervals which he adjacent the dominant and tonic notes. It was typical of his subtle and inquiring nature to play just off what the ear expected and thereby extend musical structure on a horizontal plane.

Lester added variety to the melodic line, but he knew well how to balance the parts. He is complex, but he is never complicated Wild crescendoes are contrasted with hammering repetitions, iridescent multi-note passages with sections where notes are massed like blocks. Short statements lead to long flowing sentences. Lester’s solos are replete with dips and soaring flights, surprises, twists, hoarse shouts and bubbling laughter. The holes, and like Basie Lester leaves many, are deliberate and meaningful. The dry bite of the attacking notes, the fatness of the slurs and periods – all are parts of the deliberate style of a master
virtuoso of the tenor saxophone.

Like all of the giants, Lester possesses a tremendous beat. He is one of those rare musicians who can swing an entire band. The massive swing of the Basie orchestra became even more exciting when Lester soloed. Very often, when he had the first solo, as on Taxi War Dance, Young would divest the opening statements of all but their rhythmic elements. Here Lester underlines the first and third beats, giving greater emphasis to Jo Jones’ high hat accents, which fall on two and four. In rhythmic language this solo develops a 4/4, a 2/4 and a 1/3 pattern simultaneously and results in that of any contemporary. No one before him, neither Armstrong, nor Morton, nor Hawkins, had created melodic line as rich in rhythmic interest as did Lester Young.

New Orleans bands achieved this rhythmic complexity collectively. The quality deteriorated during the following period when jazz emphasized romantic and individualistic tendencies. Lester Young, the arch romantic, recreates this quality in an individual style.

Lester’s insistence on the rhythmic priorities of jazz came as a tonic to a music which was drifting away from the drive of early New Orleans music. Lester did more than reaffirm these priorities. He replenished the stream polluted by the arrangers and thus made possible the even more complex rhythmic developments of the bebop style.

Lester Young’s work falls into two periods :

(1) 1935-40, when he was featured with Basie and recorded with the parent band, and with Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman and Billy Holiday.

(2) 1940 to the present, during which time he has concentrated mainly on concert and small band work.

During the first period Lester’s playing is notable for its freshness and abandon. Lack of inhibition does not mean that Lester was nervous or frenzied. He is the most relaxed of musicians. His notes flowed like water out of a tap and the source showed no signs of depletion.

Lester’s detachment was unshakable. He always seemed to be in a world of his own. Heard in person, in the midst of the happy jungle of Basie’s orchestral sound, or on record, Lester gave the impression of impassioned absorption. On records his solos glow with a radiance which is like the light from another planet. In the parlance of the times, he was “out of this world.”

The Lester Young style is essentially romantic. It is uninhibited and relaxed, sensitive, imaginative, deeply subjective. It is the very intimate communication of an artist who was voicing the ideas of the day in a language of the next decade.

Lester always sounds spontaneous. Less disciplined than Hawkins, he is none the less a musician whose product is orderly and structural. But these qualities – balance and unity of parts, clarity of concept – lie beneath the surface, under the luminous texture of notes. When Lester first appeared on the jazz scene he had command of a completely integrated style which has undergone little or no change since 1935. It was as if he had been planning a frontal attack on orthodoxy for years.

The roots of Lester’s style extend in many directions. On one side they are indisputably in the reed tradition of the early clarinetists who emphasized the melodic and lyrical qualities of jazz and thought in terms of the blues scale. Indeed, the Kansas City style speaks the language of the New Orleans clarinetists and such link figures as Eddie Barefield show how the reed style shifted from clarinet to alto or tenor saxophone during the ‘Twenties. Barefield’s feeling for phrasing contrasts and his fluid quality are to be heard consistently in Lester Young’s style.

But Lester draws equally from sources of a much different nature – Debussyian harmony, light intonation and the spiritual qualities which are attached to the white jazz tradition of Bix Beiderbecke and Bud Freeman, both of whom Young listened to during his early period. Beiderbecke’s search for the springs of hidden beauty, hypersensitivity and Bohemianism are reflected in Lester’s music. From Bud Freeman, a healthier exponent of Chicago jazz, Young draws clean technique, lightness of tone and a sense of chromatics. Occasionally Freeman’s work suggests the flights of exuberance that we find so frequently with Lester.

It is this synthesis of opposing attitudes and ideologies – the profound tradition of the blues combined with the infusions of European harmony and white romanticism – that gives Lester Young’s music its special appeal. The various materials are combined in a style which has no eclectic qualities, but is fused, integrated, and intensely personal.

From a historical point of view Lester Young’s influence was most effective during his Basie period. It was effective less on those of his own generation than on the young musicians learning their instruments and developing a style. Among those of his own generation the most important reedmen followers were Bud Johnson, Franz Jackson, Scoops Carey, Little Sax Crowder, all of whom turned up at various times with
Earl Hines’ band.

If Lester gained only occasional disciples among those of his own generation, his appeal to those of the next was transcendent. From the date of his very first record release with Basie, young musicians in all parts of the country began listening to jazz with a new attitude. Basie records were sedulously collected, the Young solos replayed, hummed, whistled, imitated. Appearances of the Basie band were de rigeur functions for the growing number of fans who sat at his feet on such occasions, “digging” every phrase played by the master.

As Dexter Gordon describes it: “Hawk was the master of the horn, a musician who did everything possible with it, the right way.

“But when Pres appeared we all started listening to him alone. Pres had an entirely new sound, one that we seemed to be waiting for. Pres was the first to tell a story on the horn.”

Of course, Coleman Hawkins and other saxophonists of the Hawkins school had “told a story,” and an important one, on their horns. Dexter Gordon is saying in clear language that the art of the older school, the jazz classicists if we like, no longer held valid for the insurgents of his generation. They were in revolt against the orthodoxy of the Armstrong-Hawkins school of jazz, with its powerful vibrato, emphatic periods, lusty intonation, rigid harmonies and severe solo architecture.

What they admired in Lester Young was his lighter and purer tone, his broader harmonic concepts, his greater extension of the solo line – with the resultant freedom from its bar divisions – his dreamier and more lyrical style. And of course, like all who appreciate great jazz of any kind, they recognized his transcendent qualities: his melodic gift, inventiveness and, above all, his tremendous swing.

Pres became a cult in the late ‘Thirties and its camp followers numbered dozens of musicians who were to take part in the changes of the next decade: Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Buddy Powell, Thelonious Monk, Gordon, Gray, Getz, Eager, Stitt, Roach, Clarke, Miles Davis, Leo Parker, J.J. Johnson, Chaloff, Christian, Benny Harris, Navarro. Practically every important new musician of the ‘Forties learned from Lester Young.