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| Blue Lester Savoy LP, c 1950 |
The trouble with most musicians today is that they are copycats. Of course, you have to start playing like someone else. You have a model, or a teacher, and you learn all that he can show you. But then you start playing for yourself. Show them that you're an individual. And I can count those who are doing that today on the fingers of one hand.
6 May 1949
He played the tenor saxophone, tilting it at a forty-five degree angle when he did so he wouldn't be mistaken for Coleman Hawkins, one of his greatest rivals on the same instrument throughout the 1930s. He joined the Count Basie Orchestra in 1936 and played on many of its most memorable recordings –– including Honeysuckle Rose, Lady Be Good and Taxi War Dance –– before leaving the band in 1940 to pursue an artistically if not always financially rewarding solo career.
He also featured on many of Billie Holiday's finest small group recordings, including the sublime This Year's Kisses and Mean To Me, and gave her the nickname 'Lady Day,' a tribute she returned by dubbing him 'The President' — a moniker the other musicians he played with invariably shortened to 'Pres' (pronounced 'Prez'). He wore flat little porkpie hats, stylishly-cut clothes and is alleged to have once thrown a brand new pair of shoes in the trashcan because he said their leather soles felt too hard against his feet.
'It had to be soft and gentle,' a former bandmate of Young's once told jazz critic Leonard Feather, 'or Pres wanted no part of it.'
THIS YEAR'S KISSES (1937)
BILLIE HOLIDAY [vocal]
TEDDY WILSON [piano]
BENNY GOODMAN [clarinet]
WALTER PAGE [bass]
Brunswick Records single, 1937
The opening saxophone solo is performed by Young
He referred to himself in the third person (he would say 'Pres is splitting' when he left a room and was supposedly the first musician to use the term 'bread' to describe money) and called white people 'Oxford Greys' or simply 'greys,' often choosing to walk deliberately out of his way to avoid having to speak to them. He would sit alone in a corner for hours sometimes without saying a word to anybody, then climb up on the bandstand and blow audiences away with the sheer beauty of his playing. He drank so much gin and bourbon in his later years that he frequently forgot to eat and had to be hospitalized on more than one occasion because he was found to be malnourished and severely dehydrated.
He was also a musical genius whose fluid phrasing and deceptively light tone came to define the concept of 'cool jazz' long before its official birth in the early 1950s. He influenced almost every major tenor saxophonist who came after him, including Dexter Gordon, Paul Quinichette (who was nicknamed 'Vice Pres' because he modeled his style so closely on Young's) and Stan Getz. Getz even went so far as to say that if he hadn't had Young to copy from when he first started out, he might never have played anything worth hearing on the saxophone at all.
In 1944 Young was drafted into the army, where he was persecuted by a white officer who noticed that he carried around a photograph of a white woman in his wallet –– a white woman who also happened to be the black saxophonist's second wife. Young deserted his post, but returned voluntarily after twenty-four hours, where he was promptly charged with going AWOL and locked up in the base stockade. Except for a few visits to the hospital, where he found some relief from the brutality of his situation by drinking liquid cocaine smuggled to him by a sympathetic orderly, he was to remain behind bars until he received a dishonorable discharge in the summer of 1945.
ALL OF ME (1956)
LESTER YOUNG [tenor saxophone]
GENE RAMEY [bass]
From the 1956 Verve LP
Luckily, Young's playing wasn't affected by the mistreatment he suffered while in uniform. He returned to the studio in the late 1940s, cutting more than a dozen sides for the Los Angeles-based Aladdin label that confounded fans who were unwilling to accept the idea that his style had evolved into something new while still remaining quintessentially 'Presidential.' During the 1950s, which were arguably his leanest years creatively, he appeared on several outstanding duet albums with Oscar Peterson, Harry 'Sweets' Edison and the equally gifted pianist Teddy Wilson. He was also a regular participant in Norman Granz's popular Jazz at the Philharmonic tours, where he was reunited with his old friend Billie Holiday and occasionally had the chance to perform with her on stage again.
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| LESTER YOUNG, c 1956 |
By 1958 his drinking had begun to spiral out of control. A trip to Paris –– a city he had enjoyed visiting as a member of the Basie organization in the 1930s –– proved to be the beginning of the end not only of his career but also of his life. It took him a week to find the strength to board the plane that would take him back to New York and once he got there he resumed what had now become a sad but all too familiar routine. He checked into a seedy hotel directly across the street from Birdland –– at that time the most famous jazz club in the city –– and drank himself senseless while listening to the same records by Frank Sinatra and Dick Haymes over and over again. This was what he was doing the night before he died on 15 March 1959. He was forty-nine years old.
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