Lester Young

American jazz saxophone player and songwriter

Young revolutionized modern jazz tenor-saxophone playing, and his light, lyrical sound was featured in orchestras such as Count Basie’s, in his partnering of such singers as Billie Holiday, and in his combo work with both traditional and modern jazz musicians.

The Life

The oldest of three children, Lester Willis Young grew up near New Orleans, where his father, a minstrel-show musician, instructed him on playing the trumpet, saxophone, and drums. Young toured several midwestern states with the family band, and, at age thirteen, he decided to concentrate on mastering the saxophone. Later, he often said that his distinctive sound was the result of his attempt to imitate on his tenor saxophone the C-melody saxophone timbre of his idol Frankie Trumbauer. During the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, Young played for various bands in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Minnesota, including the orchestras of King Oliver, Andy Kirk, and Walter Page. His most extensive and important association was with Count Basie’s big band and small groups, which led to his first recordings.

After leaving Basie in 1940, Young played in several combos led by himself and by other musicians. In 1944, when he won first place in the Down Beat poll for the best tenor saxophonist, he was drafted into the Army, which proved disastrous for his personal and professional life. He was court-martialed for using marijuana, and he spent several months in a Georgia military prison. When he was released at the end of 1945, he resumed playing, recording, and touring. However, the racism that he had experienced before and during the war created deep emotional distress, which was exacerbated by the breakup of his first two marriages to white women. During the 1950’s, his alcoholism and his inadequate diet contributed to a precipitous decline in his health. In 1959, after returning from an engagement in Paris, he died at the Hotel Alvin, located on “the musician’s crossroad” at Fifty-second Street and Broadway in New York City.

The Music

Young had a deep and lasting influence on the development of modern jazz by creating a unique improvisatory style and a new type of jazz, sometimes called cool, because of its avoidance of emotional excess. By his nonconformity in music, dress, and behavior, and through the jazz argot he helped to popularize, Young influenced not only jazz musicians but also such Beat writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In fact, his jazz solos have often been characterized in terms of poetry, since his improvisations flowed like a good conversation. He reveled in surprising combinations of sounds, the way a poet delights in a revelatory ordering of words.

Sax Style. During his early career, Young’s songlike style was sometimes compared unfavorably to the robust approach of Coleman Hawkins on the tenor saxophone. Young had a light tone, whereas Hawkins had a rich, rounded tone. Young had a slow vibrato, while Hawkins’s was fast. Young’s phrasing was smooth, melodic, and economical, where unplayed notes often had as important a role as played ones. Hawkins, on the other hand, constructed his expressive solos with a Baroque profusion of notes. One critic called Hawkins the “Rubens of jazz,” while Young was its Cézanne. Young took Hawkins’s place in Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, but he was quickly let go because he refused to duplicate Hawkins’s sound and style.

Young’s graceful, melodic approach to tenor-saxophone playing achieved success largely through his recordings with the Count Basie Orchestra and with small groups of Basie sidemen. His solos on such big band favorites as “One o’Clock Jump” and “Jive at Five” were so admired that Young imitators memorized them note for note. Even more influential were Young’s solos in Basie sextets and septets. For example, some jazz musicians view his improvisations on the 1936 version of “Lady Be Good” as the best solo he ever recorded. In 1939 his recording of “Lester Leaps In,” with the Kansas City Seven, was so successful that it became his signature tune (it was supposedly named because Lester arrived late for a take on his composition).

Working with Billie Holiday.Young’s recordings with the vocalist Holiday are legendary. She gave him the nickname “Pres” because he was the “President” of all saxophone players, and he affectionately nicknamed her “Lady Day.” Holiday was attracted to Young’s shy, sensitive personality, and she found his melodic and conversational improvisations compatible with the way she interpreted songs. Young believed that a song’s lyrics were important in his improvisations, both when he soloed and when he accompanied singers. In his improvisations he edited, reworked, and transformed the song’s melody, while managing to create a unified solo or accompaniment that deepened and expanded the song’s message and mood. So intimate was the rapport he achieved with Holiday on songs such as “The Man I Love” and “All of Me” that they seem to be thinking each other’s thoughts. Something similar happened when Young collaborated with such talented instrumentalists as the guitarist Charlie Christian and the clarinetist Benny Goodman.

After Prison. A controversy exists among aficionados and jazz critics over the quality of Young’s music after his release from prison in 1945. Some believe that emotional and physical suffering sapped his will to create, and his work in small groups and large orchestras rarely equaled, and never surpassed, the high quality of his work in the late 1930’s and the early 1940’s. Other critics and such jazz musicians as Sonny Rollins dispute this evaluation. They observe Young conquering the depths of his despair to achieve his greatest musical creativity. For example, these commentators view his recording of “These Foolish Things,” in his first session as a free man, as a masterpiece. Furthermore, his solos on “Lester Leaps In” during the Jazz at the Philharmonic tours exhibit consistently inspiring musicianship. Even as late as 1957, when he appeared for the last time with Holiday on the CBS television show Sound of Jazz, the sensitivity and creativity of their collaboration on Holiday’s tune “Fine and Mellow” left musicians and viewers deeply moved.

Musical Legacy

Some scholars consider Young to be the greatest tenor player of all time, whereas others pair him with Hawkins as the two most vital creators of how the tenor is used in modern jazz. Young introduced a new sensibility into improvisations by creating a rhythmic flexibility and melodic richness that was malleable enough to transform both ballads and up-tempo tunes into a new jazz style that some called cool, a term that Young may have coined. He had a major influence on many young tenor players, including Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Illinois Jacquet, and Dexter Gordon. Paul Quinichette based his style so closely on Young’s that he was given the nickname “Vice Pres.” Young also had an influence on other instrumentalists, including trumpeters, trombonists, and pianists. Some have claimed that Charlie Parker’s alto sound was reminiscent of Young’s tenor sound, but Parker responded that, though he deeply admired Young, his (Young’s) style was in an entirely different musical world. Some have described Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool album as an orchestration of Young’s tenor sound.

Young’s influence extended even into motion pictures. In the film ’Round Midnight (1986), which some have called the best jazz film ever made, the principal character is largely based on Young. Bertrand Tavernier, the director, dedicated the film to Young and Bud Powell, and Dexter Gordon, who played the central figure, received an Academy Award nomination for his performance. In this way, through recordings and films, Lester Young’s legacy lives on.

Principal Recordings

albums:Kansas City Style, 1944; Lester Warms Up, 1944; Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, 1946 (with Coleman Hawkins); Lester Young: Buddy Rich Trio, 1946 (with Buddy Rich); Lester Young: Nat King Cole Trio, 1946 (with Nat King Cole); Lester Young Quartet and Count Basie Seven, 1950 (with Count Basie); Lester Young Swings Again, 1950; The Pres, 1950; Pres Is Blue, 1950; Lester Young Collates, 1951; Lester Young Trio, 1951 (with Lester Young Trio); Pres, 1951; It Don’t Mean a Thing, 1952; Pres and His Cabinet, 1952 (with others); Pres and Teddy and Oscar, 1952 (with Oscar Peterson and Teddy Wilson); Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio, 1952 (with Peterson); Battle of the Saxes, 1953 (with others); Just You, Just Me, 1953; Lester Young Collates No. 2, 1953; Lester Young: His Tenor Sax, 1954; Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio, Vol. 1, 1954 (with Peterson); Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio, Vol. 2, 1954 (with Peterson); Mean to Me, 1954; The President, 1954; Pres and Sweets, 1955 (with Harry Sweets Edison); Pres Meets Vice Pres, 1955 (with Paul Quinichette); The Jazz Giants ’56, 1956 (with Roy Eldridge); Lester Swings Again, 1956; Lester’s Here, 1956; Nat King Cole: Buddy Rich Trio, 1956 (with Cole and Buddy Rich); Pres and Teddy, 1956 (with Wilson); Tops on Tenor, 1956; Going for Myself, 1957; If It Ain’t Got That Swing, 1957; Laughin’ to Keep from Cryin’, 1958; The Lester Young/Teddy Wilson Quartet, 1959 (with Wilson).

Bibliography

Büchmann-Møller, Frank. You Just Fight for Your Life: The Story of Lester Young. New York: Praeger, 1990. Based on interviews with those who knew and worked with Young, this survey of his life and career also contains a sensitive analysis of his music. Includes helpful appendixes on Young’s performances and the personnel of his recordings and live engagements.

Daniels, Douglas Henry. Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester “Pres” Young. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. Douglas presents a sympathetic, revisionist account of Young seen against the background of the history of jazz and of twentieth century African American social and cultural life. Includes extensive notes, selected discography, and index.

Porter, Lewis. Lester Young. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. This revised edition of a biography originally published in 1985 contains a new preface and updated discography. In its first publication, Porter’s book was praised as “a major contribution to jazz scholarship” that illuminates Young’s life and music. Transcribed solos of Young add to this book’s value.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. A Lester Young Reader. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Porter creates “a symposium of Young, the man and his music” by collecting important primary and secondary sources that he structures in three parts: biographical essays, interviews of Young, and musical analyses.

Schoenberg, Loren. “Lester Young.” In The Oxford Companion to Jazz, edited by Bill Kirchner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A good brief survey of Young’s life and his contributions to jazz. This massive work has a selected bibliography as well as an index of songs and recordings and an index of names and subjects.