Additional Background  Reading on Lester Young and his place in Jazz History:

The Parent Style – April, 1949

Lester Young interview – February, 1959

The Jazz Panorama – April, 1959

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Billboard : 04/13/1959

This set featuring the late, great Pres and Teddy Wilson, was cut early in 1956 on the East Coast and it features along with Pres, J. Jones on drums, and G. Ramey on bass. On this album, Pres, helped solidly by the always swinging Wilson, shows off the fine, warm horn quality that had such a major influence on the jazz world. He shines on such wonderful standards as All of Me, Love Me Or Leave Me and Prisoner of Love. There should be a steady sale of this Lester Young LP.

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Cashbox : 04/18/1959
Jazz Pick of the Week

The monumental and profoundly influential tenor sax of the recently deceased Lester Young is accorded the cooperation of pianist Teddy Wilson, no lesser a jazz figure, and with rhythm assistance from Jo Jones and Gene Ramey he swings through six numbers waxed in 1956. The tunes that receive the already immortal treatment are All Of Me, Prisoner Of Love, Louise, Love Me Or Leave Me, Taking A Chance On Love, and Love Is Here To Stay. Package will enhance the libraries of innumerable jazzists.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : June, 1959

There could scarcely be a better memorial to the late Lester Young than this set on which, spurred by Wilson, Gene Ramey, and Jo Jones – a magnificent rhythm section – he really swings out in clean, lifting fashion. There is none of the static mopery which marred so much of his recording during the past ten years. This is Lester Young showing why he had an influence on tenor saxophonists which was, if possible, even more pervasive than Charlie Parker’s on alto saxophonists. It is an unusually happy session with Wilson in excellent form and everything clicking effortlessly into place.

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New Yorker
Whitney Balliett : 04/18/1959

The Jazz Giants ’56 (Norgran MG N-1056) and Pres and Teddy: The Lester Young-Teddy Wilson Quartet (Verve MG V-8205) are among the last records the tenor saxophonist Lester Young, nicknamed the President, or Pres, made before his death, in March, at the age of forty-nine. (Although both were recorded three years ago, the second was released only recently.) They are, by and large, reminders that toward the end of his life Young had slipped into the melancholy position of no longer being able to outstrip his multitude of imitators. But, in a way, this doesn’t matter, for none of Young’s admirers, among them such celebrated men as Stan Getz, Paul Quinichette, Zoot Sims, Jimmy Giuffre, and Lee Konitz, have ever really mastered the basic quality of his style at its best—a perfect and nearly unique balance between tension and relaxation. Instead, they have either emphasized the heated side of his playing, sometimes to the point of wild caricature (Quinichette), or thinned out his seemingly bland aspects (Getz, Giuffre, Konitz) into a colorless, buzzing drawl. (These last three students of Young led tenor and alto saxophonists like Bob Cooper, Bud Shank, Lennie Niehaus, and Jack Montrose to become the chassis for a whole school of cool, vapid playing that, before it refined itself out of existence a year or two ago, was known as West Coast jazz.) As a result, Young’s imitators, who began appearing in the mid-forties, at a time when, curiously, Young was beginning to falter, have done a good deal of unintentional harm by producing an endless series of inferior images of his work, which have distorted both his invaluable contributions and the uncanny abilities he had at the height of his career.

Young, a slight, stooped, sleepy-looking man with a broad, static, caved-in face, who was apt to wear a wide-brimmed black porkpie hat and sombre, droopy coats, which gave him a sly and unexpected monkish appearance, was, of course, often his own best obfuscation. He frequently spoke a softly delivered language that confusingly referred to his employers as Pres and to his associates as Lady, and that used such expressions as “Have another helping,” which meant, when addressed to a soloist, “Take another chorus.” And in Count Basie’s band, from 1934 to 1940, he developed the distracting habit of veering his instrument to one side at a forty-five-degree angle, as if he were about to paddle a canoe. (Young’s career was a simple one. Before joining Basie, he had worked, astonishingly, in one of King Oliver’s last bands and with various Midwest groups, and from 1940 to the end of his life as the leader of small bands of his own.) These irregularities were carried over directly into his playing, which has never been surpassed, in jazz, for sheer obliqueness. This stemmed in part from his famous tone. It had a dry, sandy, failing sound, like someone coming down with laryngitis, which fell between an alto and a tenor saxophone, and which recalled his early models—Bud Freeman, who has the same sort of hoarse, whitish tone, and Frankie Trumbauer, who played the C-melody saxophone, a first cousin to the alto saxophone. (On the clarinet, which, unfortunately, Young played only infrequently, his tone—a pale, light, and slightly metallic one that resembled Pee Wee Russell’s with the kinks straightened out—was perfectly and inimitably suited to the instrument.) Added to this was the singular way he attacked his notes. He gave the impression of almost trying to avoid them, even when playing directly and intensely on the beat, by slurring them, sliding just below or over them, or by pressing several notes together into unhurried, nearly motionless patterns, which tended to deemphasize them for the sake of the total sound. Indeed, Young’s solos often resembled a collection of evasive, pleasantly melodic hums that had the muted, introvert quality of a soundproofed room and that seemed to end before they had even been stated. But underneath this outwardly lazy, one-side-of-the-mouth approach, which most of his imitators mistakenly seized upon as the basis of his style, was an absolute mastery of broken-field rhythm and phrasing—the ability to emphasize the beat simply by dodging it—that is the secret of all hot playing.

This apparent “coolness” has resulted in the axiom that Young and Coleman Hawkins, who, until Young’s appearance, had been the undisputed chief of the tenor saxophone, are the totally divergent leaders of the cool and hot methods of playing their instrument. But both men have been, despite their surface differences, always after the identical thing—a controlled lyricism. Although Hawkins, with his windy vibrato and dark, rubicund tone, has recently and without warning begun playing in an open-armed, impassioned fashion that clearly makes him Young’s opposite, he pursued this lyricism for many years by methodically taking apart the chords of a tune, eliminating certain notes, adding others, and rearranging the residue into elaborate patterns pinned directly to the beat. Young, on the other hand, poked at the melody itself, in a casual, one-finger manner, until he had reshaped it into a starker design that appeared, in spite of its rhythmic liberties, to skid along parallel to the beat, as a revised and improved shadow of the original tune. Young, in fact, was the first to demonstrate that the short, logical, on-the-beat phrases that for most of the thirties were tightly locked to the traditional divisions of the thirty-two-bar chorus could be broken into independent, brilliantly juxtaposed patterns of various rhythms and lengths. A master of economy, he never fell into the excesses of the bop school, which derived from him and which, after a time, engaged in a battle of rhetoric by seeing how many arhythmic and irrelevant notes could be uttered in the space of a chorus.

In the first chorus of a slow number, Young would seem to be stating the melody in a straightforward way until one discovered that he was almost imperceptibly altering it by bending the ends of certain notes down, replacing others with silence, or holding on to still others for a beat or two longer than indicated, as if his mind were elsewhere. Then, the melody properly softened up, he would attack it again, without raising his volume or increasing his intensity, by easing into superbly mixed, gradually more complex phrases occasionally fashioned out of short riffs—repeated several times in slight but surprising variations and neatly adorned by a steady, brief vibrato or out of long, almost level many-noted statements. These last might begin with an exuberant, drawn-out legato phrase, which was abruptly gathered into a multiplicity of notes delivered in up-or-downstairs leaps as daring as some of the crowded, bobbing passages of Charlie Parker but that never called attention to themselves because of the peculiar flattening effect of his tone and attack. Young’s intensity showed through more clearly at faster tempos. (It also broke out unforgettably in the slow blues, which he converted into basking, slightly swollen legato structures that rose and fell like slow, heavy breathing.) His vibrato shrivelled up and his legato phrases were either halved or prolonged outrageously in half-time rhythms, as if he were dumping oil on the beat in an effort to still it. In fact, all of his understated, remarkably contrasted phrases—smooth, thickly populated runs, fat bass honks, single notes spattered around the beat, sustained and slow-spinning sounds that lasted for perhaps a measure and a half—were forced unobtrusively and almost backhandedly toward intensifying the rhythm, and with irresistible results. Some of Young’s most enduring solos occurred on such brisk-paced Basie records (from the thirties) as Taxi War Dance, Doggin’ Around, and Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie. No matter how often they are heard, they remain classic pieces of improvisation; one has the feeling that not a note, tone, or accent could be changed without destroying them.

Unfortunately, the reverse is often true of the aforementioned L.P.s. Joining Young on The Jazz Giants ’56 for the five selections—blues and four standards—are Roy Eldridge, Vic Dickenson, Teddy Wilson, Freddie Greene, Gene Ramey, and Jo Jones. The style Young has here first appeared in the mid-forties, and is in general a heavier, less wieldy version of his earlier work. Surprisingly, it recalls the tenor saxophonist Herschel Evans, who, when he died, in 1939, was Young’s sparring mate in the Basie band by virtue of having developed an extremely affecting version of Hawkins’ playing. Young’s tone is thicker here, and even husky, and the vibrato is more pronounced, he uses fewer notes, and his variations sometimes have a blunt, thumblike air. He goes tantalizingly to work, though, on a slow rendition of I Didn’t Know What Time It Was, which he opens by kneading the melody in a warm, patient, lumbering way. Then, just before the close of the first sixteen bars, he evokes all his old unpredictability and inserts a fast, complex phrase—but seemingly executed in slow motion—which shakes up all that has come before and sets him off on a series of explorations during the following chorus and a half, in which, through subtle fluctuations and the repetition of simple clusters of notes, he seems to be rubbing and rubbing at the point of the melody to see what lies beneath. On much of Pres and Teddy, however, he reverts to the groping, slightly sour playing that characterized most of his final work. Wilson, Ramey, and Jones, his accompanists, are forced to support him every inch of the way, and accordingly perform with considerable brilliance. But, regardless of how diminished Young occasionally sounds, the shape and manner are unmistakable a mile away.

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Oakland Tribune (Oakland, CA)
Russ Wilson : 03/22/1959

Pres and Teddy, recorded in 1956 and distributed by the Granz mail order record club now is being put on general sale. Young’s associates are Teddy Wilson, Jo Jones, and bassist Gene Ramey. Because the album was made shortly after Lester completed a stay in the hospital, he was in good physical condition and this is reflected in his playing. And though this is not Young at his best, it is superior to several other records he made during the last years of his life. Lengthy solos by pianist Wilson, a witty, swinging two handed artist, add to the album’s attractiveness. Jones is fine both as soloist and timekeeper, and Ramey’s sonorous walking provides a sturdy bottom.

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San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, CA)
C.H. Garrigues : 04/19/1959

This session, cut in 1956, was released a few days before the death of Pres and so adds one more item to the too-brief library of one of the great tenors of all time.

Nobody, I believe, would claim that Pres was playing his best in 1956—yet it would be difficult to want a better set than this. The strong lyricism, the singing quality of the early Lester Young is still there, even if his line be not as firmly chiseled as in the past. Teddy Wilson, too, establishes himself as a pianist too often neglected in recent years. Jo Jones is on drums, Gene Ramey on bass.

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Saturday Review
John Hammond : 04/11/1959
Lester Young (1909-1959)

On a Sunday morning in the middle of March, Lester Young was found dead in a shabby New York hotel room. For ten hours there was a dispute about the release of his body, pending settlement of a bill for back rent.

When Lester was a member of Count Basie’s band from 1936-1940, he changed the whole concept of saxophone playing in American jazz. He had a small, unforced tone completely at variance with the accepted thick sounds that men like Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry had imposed on the tenor sax. His ability to improvise was legendary, as in a 1936 Detroit jam session when he blew seventy-six straight choruses on Sweet Sue, lasting over an hour.

My first encounter with Lester was in 1934, when he arrived from Kansas City to replace Coleman Hawkins in the Fletcher Henderson band. He arrived one afternoon at the old Cotton Club, thin, wan, and with a beat-up instrument in a cloth bag. Fletcher had heard him a few months before in Kansas City, and was convinced that he had the musicianship, if not the tone, to set New York on its ear. I will never forget the horrified look on the faces of the Henderson musicians when he stood up for his first solo in the deserted club. Since there was no microphone setup, Young could barely be heard beyond the third row of tables where I was sitting, and it was easy to see the disgusted looks of the other members of the section when he sat down. As for myself, I was so moved by his cool, pure sound that I tried to compensate for the lack of enthusiasm among the band. Of course, it was no use.

It was nearly two more years before I saw Lester again. This time the scene was Kansas City, where Lester reigned supreme on the Basie band-stand at the Reno Club. The nine-piece orchestra, of which he was a part, was probably the most exciting and inventive group in jazz history. Sparked by the rhythm of Jo Jones, Basie, and Walter Page, Lester’s incredible improvising blossomed, and his section work, under the tutelage of Buster Smith, teacher of Charlie Parker and the greatest of Basie’s many first alto men, became increasingly secure.

Basie’s band played at the Reno seven nights a week from 8:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M., except on Saturdays, when a breakfast dance extended the hours to eight in the morning. For this Young received two dollars more than the weekly scale of fifteen dollars. A diet that varied between gin and marijuana enabled him to sit in after hours at the Sunset with Pete Johnson, and he could also be found playing blues over on Eighteenth Street with the more primitive Everett Johnson.

In October 1936, Count Basie came to Chicago with a big (thirteen-piece) orchestra and the backing of the Music Corporation of America. I was lucky enough to supervise the first recording session in which Lester Young participated, a secretive affair first released on Vocalion under the name Jones-Smith, Inc. There were just five musicians on the date: Basie, Jo Jones, Page, Young, and a substitute for the ailing Buck Clayton named Tatti Smith. Within two miraculous hours and without a single “fluff,” four perfect sides were made, and a few weeks later the American jazz public was first able to hear a completely new saxophone sound.

Lester’s second trip to New York was scarcely more auspicious than his first. In December of 1936, the Basie orchestra opened at the Roseland Ballroom, but the saxophone player acclaimed by the critics was not Young but Herschel Evans, a fine Texas tenor man with a lush, conventional Hawkins tone.

A few days after the Roseland opening I arranged an after hours session at a Greenwich Village dive called the Black Cat, so that Benny Goodman could have a chance to hear the Basie rhythm section plus Lester Young and Buck Clayton. After Lester had played a few choruses, Benny turned to me and said that it was the first time he had ever heard a completely natural sound on the tenor sax. With no prodding he went to the bandstand, played the clarinet for a while and then switched horns with Lester. That was the first and last time I had ever heard Benny blow tenor, and to this day I cannot forget my astonishment at the fact that he produced a sound that practically duplicated Lester’s.

The night was memorable for two other reasons. Lester’s clarinet playing bowled us all over to such an extent that Benny gave him his horn on the spot. In addition, that was the night Basie first met Freddie Green, who was playing guitar in the little nonunion orchestra at the Black Cat. Although Freddie joined Basie’s band within two months, Lester never bothered to play more than an occasional solo on clarinet, and then only under duress. His heart wasn’t in it.

Once again Lester did not confine his playing to Basie’s band. Some of his greatest records were made with Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday on Brunswick, and there were even a couple of sides where he “carved” the great Goodman. By 1940, he became enough of a commercial “name” that he left the Basie organization to start a small band with his brother Lee, a drummer now with Nat Cole.

Lester is gone now, and his last fifteen years seem to me to have been a tragic waste of one of the few genuinely creative talents in jazz. He spawned dozens of talented imitators, many of whom became more commercially successful than he. The small bands he led were an affront to his ear and the public’s. Occasionally he would appear in Norman Granz’s frantic “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concerts, unable to honk sufficiently for the fickle crowd.

In recent years Lester Young has been canonized by the progressive, “cool” school of musicians. He belonged to a different era, however, and never sounded as comfortable with the self-styled modernists as with the blues-oriented musicians he grew up with. Ironically, it was as a sideman that he left his mark on jazz, for he had neither the organizational nor business talent to make it as a leader.

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Down Beat : 05/28/1959
Unknown : 4 stars

This is just the record to play for someone that doubts jazz musicians are able to play popular melodies more beautifully than can studio orchestras with strings. Lester Young’s original conceptions of well-known melodic lines fit so well with the ideas the composer had to start with.

Norman Granz is given to quick decisions and usually the result turns out right. He recorded Pres on a band date early in 1956. He felt Pres played so well that he should stay over in New York an extra day and do some quartet sides. He has reasons to be glad he did, especially now that Pres is gone.

As Bill Simon says in notes that rate an extra plaudit as a brief but inclusive writeup on Lester, Pres, like all great jazz soloists, “anticipates chord changes and leads into them with maximum grace and logic.” There have been recordings where Young’s tone may have been more brilliant and his ideas more exciting, but as 45 minutes representative of Young for those not too familiar with his work, this record has few peers.

The rhythm section is ideal for Young and during the date Teddy Wilson got off some wonderful piano on his own.

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Liner Notes by Bill Simon

“I play a swing tenor,” Lester Young once said, and it certainly is true, but it only begins to tell the story of a style that brought on a new way of playing jazz. Lester never confined his ideas to the standard two or four-bar patterns. They overlapped the bar lines frequently. Also, the custom of accenting an strong beats went by the boards as he subtly shifted his rhythmic patterns. He always has thought ahead in a tune, which has made it possible for him to anticipate chord changes and lead into them with the maximum grace and logic. Like Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer, he enjoyed the sound of impressionist harmonies, and he incorporated them naturally into his bouncing swing style. In the Spring of 1949, in the Record Changer, Ross Russell undertook a brilliant series of articles dealing with bop instrumentation. His first piece, entitled “The Parent Style,” dealt with Lester.

Said Russell, “Lester added variety to the melodic line, but he knew well how to balance the parts. He is complex, but is never complicated. Wild crescendos 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 Lester Young story began in Woodville, Miss., August 27, 1909. The family moved soon thereafter to New Orleans, and although Lester left there when he was 10, the memory of the tailgate bands has remained with him. His father was a bandmaster and teacher, (some years later, Ben Webster was to be one of his pupils) and he taught Lester drums, then alto sax. With an outft called the Bostonians, Lester changed to tenor. While the great King Oliver located in the Midwest, young Lester jobbed around with him for a year or more and absorbed the traditionalist’s slant on the blues.

The story has been told many times that Lester, working in Minneapolis, heard Count Basie on the radio, broadcasting from Kansas City. He decided that Basie needed another tenor man, and sent him a wire offering his services. Basie accepted and thus opened a new Chapter of jazz history, Shortly thereafter, Jo Jones joined the band on drums and opened another course to modernism this time for the rhythm section.

In 1936, John Hammond and Benny Goodman persuaded Music Corporation of America to bring Basie east, and the band obtained a Decca recording, contract. However. before the first Decca date, small unit from the band, including Basie, Lester and Jones, made four sides for Vocalion under the tag “Smith-Jones Orchestra,” and that date, which produced the incomparable Shoe Shine Boy and Lady Be Good, marked Lester’s disc debut. Thereafter, he produced dozens of memorable sides with Basie, including the romping, driving Every Tub and such tours de force as Miss Thing and The World Is Mad.

In a more intimate setting, he wielded an influence for warm, lyrical expression in ballads. This refers to the sides he cut between 1936 and ’38 with Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday for Brunswick. His obbligatos to the vocalist, and the breathy, personal solo passages he took between her choruses, have never been rivaled for sheer beauty. During that time, in fact, he was living at the home of “Lady Day” and her mother, and in their mutual admiration, Billie gave him the title of “President” and he tagged her “Lady Day” – titles which they have held unchallenged to this day.

By 1941, Lester had had his fill of big band playing – the constant section blowing, broken up by brief eight or 16 bar solos – when he had so much more to express. He started his own combo and worked at Cafe Society in New York. He spent a good part of ’44 and ’45 in the army, and after his release went back to small jazz units. Norman Granz, one of his staunchest fans, began recording him immediately for a new West Coast label, featured him in his award-winning film, “Jammin’ The Blues,” and incorporated him into most of his Jazz At The Philharmonic tours.

Oddly enough, while there were some Lester followers during his Basie period, his influence didn’t really catch a firm hold until the late ’40’s. Then it did so emphatically, virtually obliterating other tenor styles. The Woody Herman band, with its “Four Brothers” sax section, actually at first consisted of four tenor saxophonists, all playing with Lester’s sound. To fashion that sound, Woody at times employed such men as Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Herbie Steward, Al Cohn and Jimmy Giuffre. Others in the idiom included Paul Quinichette (called the “Vice Pres” and often indistinguishable from Lester whom he once followed into the Basie band), Allen Eager, Brew Moore, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray and such latter-day stylists as Arno Marsh, Dave Pell, Bill Perkins, Bob Cooper, Warne Marsh, and alto saxophonists Lee Konitz and Paul Desmond.

Early in ’56, Lester was called in for a recording session by Norman Granz, along with Wilson, Jones, Gene Ramey, Vic Dickenson, Roy Eldridge and Freddie Greene. He reportedly played so well that Granz postponed his departure for the Coast and called together several quartet sessions with Pres, Teddy, Jo and Gene. This recording is the result of those sessions.

Lester’s co-leader in the quartet is the above-mentioned Teddy Wilson, a musician whose background is similar to Lester’s and whose influence likewise has been widespread and profound. Teddy is a perennial “modern” who has not changed his style radically since the mid-’30’s, but who always has fit in comfortably with players of the modern schools, even participating in several of the important recordings of the Bop Era. Teddy’s rhythmic approach and his harmonic resourcefulness are timeless. He took the “trumpet” style of Earl Hines and refined it, organized it. He inaugurated the walking tenths in his bass, as opposed to the older “swing” bass.

As a member of the Benny Goodman Quartet and Trio, with Gene Krupa and Lionel Hampton, Teddy’s became an international name. Everyone came to recognize his clean, articulate and symmetrical solos and nearly every young jazz pianist absorbed something of his style.

Teddy was born in Austin, Tex., in November, 1912. For four years, he studied piano and violin at Tuskegee and majored in music at Talladega College. He moved to Detroit in 1929 and played with bands in that vicinity until ’31 when he landed in Chicago. For two years he gathered way-back experience with outfits led by Louis Armstrong, Erskine, late and the late clarinetist Jimmie Noone, who was a prime influence on Benny Goodman himself.

In ’33, he joined Benny Carter in New York and participated in a recording session cut by Carter for English Parlophone, under the aegis of John Hammond. One night, at Mildred Bailey’s apartment. Hammond arranged to have Teddy and Benny Goodman play some “chamber pazz,” with Mildred’s brother joining in on drums. And that’s where the idea for the Goodman Trio was born. Teddy was with Benny from 1935 through half of 1939, when he left to form his own big band. During his time with Benny, Hammond brought Teddy into the Brunswick and Vocalion studios for a good many recording sessions, usually using Basie men and some Goodman men, and often featuring as vocalist Billie Holiday. Teddy also was Mildred Bailey’s favorite accompanist, and on these dates, Basie-ites Young and Jones had first call, along with Buck Clayton and Walter Page. Together, these people brought Iyricism in jazz to a new peak, combining urbanity with the basic feeling of Kansas City blues.

After leaving Goodman, Teddy eventually went back to small groups, heading an outfit at Cafe Society for some years. On several occasions he rejoined Goodman, but for the most part, he spent his time playing on radio and recordings, and in teaching. Every summer, from 1945 through 1952, he taught jazz piano at Juilliard.

Jo Jones, born in Chicago in 1911, opened the door to the modern concept of percussion in jazz, and with Lester, to the bop movement. This man, who, with Basie, was called upon to swing the most powerful band of all time, actually was the master of the light, subtle cymbal stroke. He initiated the idea of keeping the four beats going on his cymbal, setting up a legato feeling along with a tingling timbre, and leaving his bass drum foot free to accent where necessary.

Perhaps one of the most successful drummers of the new jazz period, Chico Hamilton, recently recognized Jones on a recording and had this to say: “The master! I love him, I love him!. I can’t say enough about him. This is the man for whom the instrument was made. Jo is responsible for me in many ways, and I attribute what success I have to him. He’s really Mr. Drums!”

Jonathan Jones was with Basie from 1936-48, except for an army hitch. Then he was with JATP and with Lester Young’s combo for two years, in addition to clubbing and recording, mainly around New York City.

The bassist in the quartet, Gene Ramey, is a younger man, but his roots are similar to those of his three colleagues. Like Wilson, he was born in Austin, Tex,, in 1913. In 1932, he moved to Kansas City and received a thorough grounding in the K.C. idiom. He threw away his sousaphone and studied string bass with the great Walter Page. Between ’38 and ’40, he played with Jay McShann’s K.C. band, which for several of those years included young Charlie Parker on saxophone. In the heyday of bop on 52nd Street, he played with all varieties of groups, from the Kansas City combo of Hot Lips Page to the swing unit of Ben Webster to Charlie Parker’s bop group. During part of ’52 and ’53, he was one of the replacements for Walter Page in the Count Basie band, and during this period, he has worked and recorded with the modernist units led by Stan Getz, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, and, of course, Lester Young.

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UK Liner Notes by Benny Green

Between the most recent-of these tracks and the first recordings of Lester Young lies a period of exactly twenty years in which connoisseurs of jazz have been privileged to watch the development of one of the most literate and highly personal styles of any jazz musician.

However, the remarkable truth of the matter is that many people who pay lip-service to the Lester Young legend are inclined to regard his career, which after all stretched from early days as baritonist with King Oliver, surely the most incongruous juxtaposition in any kind of art, right down to the days when Charlie Parker was a fond memory existing only on the recordings he left behind, as a single entity, like sausages or Mae West. In actual fact, while the Lester on these sides is of course Intimately connected with the man who cut that Lady Be Good side with Basie back in 1936 and inverted the whole art of jazz, there are profound differences between his earlier and later approaches, and if these differences are not appreciated, then neither is Lester Young fully understood.

By 1956, when most of these sides were cut, Lester’s mind and fingers had slowed down. One has only to compare, say, the Basie recording of Twelfth Street Rag with the track Love Is Here To Stay on this record to see the obvious truth of this statement. The metallic sheen of the Lester tone of the mid-thirties had gradually evolved, right through the 1940s, into something broader and slacker, something more akin to the old Hawkins tone which Lester himself had superseded in the Basie days. The quicksilver fingers had stopped flying. Even in the faster numbers here, there are few of the bravura passages which made the solos of the thirties such dazzling, exhilarating affairs. In other words, Lester Young’s musical mind by 1956 was neither as prolific nor as speedy as it had been twenty years before.

The reader may well ask at this juncture, “Well, in that case, why bother to listen to the later Lester at all, when obviously what you mean when you say Lester Young is really the young Lester?” The answer is that in this as in all things, the usual rules of the game do not apply when discussing this remarkable musician. Although the blithe world of sound of the Basie days is gone, Lester’s genius as an improvisor seems to have ensured that something vital did remain, and that something vital is a vast reservoir of relaxation.

Now relaxation is perhaps the most Impossible to define of all jazz terms, but jazz without relaxation is always bad jazz. Lester is so relaxed on his later recordings that his playing sounds deceptively elementary. His great contemporary Coleman Hawkins once watched Lester on stage and is supposed to have remarked, “There are times when I’m really relaxed, but I’ve never seen the time when I’m as relaxed as Lester.” He seems at times on these recordIngs, for instance on Prisoner Of Love, to be hardly improvising at all. Please take it on trust from a saxophonist who has for many years played the sedulous ape to Lester without much success, that nothing could be further from the truth, and that Lester here is still pulling off the little tricks that nobody, not even his most slavish imitators can match. Perhaps it is misleading to use the word “tricks”, for Lester’s style has always been one of the most perfectly integrated in all jazz. I could quite easily make a catalogue of his mannerisms; like the persistent use of the chord of the minor sixth, demonstrated here every time he arrives at the first four bars of Love Me Or Leave Me; the use of false fingerings to obtain different densities of sound on the same note, which effect is scattered all over this record; the use of the augmented fifth interval, usually at the end of a middle eight, an effect particularly suited to his whimsical melodic conception. But Young’s achievement is that he resolved these scattered mannerisms into a single original style, and in so doing introduced into the jazz context for the first time the qualities of wit, as distinct from the Fats Waller brand of buffoonery.

On Gigantic Blues, a glimpse of the old mercurial grace may still be caught, and the listener would do well to remind himself that those phrases Lester is racing through, phrases since made all too familiar by thousands of saxophonists, are literally his own invention. He created an entire new vocabulary for jazz saxophone, and the fact that we are sometimes inclined to forget it is testimony to his complete success as a revolutionary. In fact, so completely assimilated have his stratagems become that many younger musicians echo his thoughts today without being aware they are plagiarizing at all.


Despite his active liaisons with the Parker-Gillespie generation, Lester is essentially a Swing Age player. Indeed, his is the best jazz which that era produced. The choice of Teddy Wilson as pianist is therefore a particularly fortunate one, for Wilson, having recorded with Lester dozens of times in the halcyon days of the Wilson-Holiday-Young partnership, knows better than anybody else what kind of harmonies to feed Young. Oscar Peterson says of Lester’s reaction to pianists, “You could never pull any changes on Lester. If you changed the chord structure, that didn’t bother him. He didn’t care what you did; he went ahead and did what he felt. Lester would never conform.”

To which I may add that because the world of jazz finally learned to recognize a genius when it heard one, he never had to. It was the rest of us that did the conforming, and very good it was for us too.