Lester Young
Lester Willis Young, nicknamed "Pres" or "Prez", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist and occasional clarinetist.
Coming to prominence while a member of Count Basie's orchestra, Young was one of the most influential players on his instrument. In contrast to many of his hard-driving peers, Young played with a relaxed, cool tone and used sophisticated harmonies, using what one critic called "a free-floating style, wheeling and diving like a gull, banking with low, funky riffs that pleased dancers and listeners alike".
Known for his hip, introverted style, he invented or popularized much of the hipster jargon which came to be associated with the music.
Early life and career
Lester Young was born in Woodville, Mississippi, on August 27, 1909, to Lizetta Young, and Willis Handy Young, originally from Louisiana. Lester had two siblings – a brother, Leonidas Raymond, known as Lee Young, who became a drummer, and a sister, Irma Cornelia. He grew up in a musical family. His father was a teacher and band leader. While growing up in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans, he worked from the age of five to make money for the family. He sold newspapers and shined shoes. By the time he was ten, he had learned the basics of the trumpet, violin, and drums, and joined the Young Family Band touring with carnivals and playing in regional cities in the Southwest. Young's early musical influences included Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmy Dorsey, and Frankie Trumbauer.In his teens, he and his father clashed, and he often left home for long periods. His family moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1919 and Young stayed there for much of the 1920s, first picking up the tenor saxophone while living there. Young left the family band in 1927 at the age of 18 because he refused to tour in the Southern United States, where Jim Crow laws were in effect and racial segregation was required in public facilities. He became a member of the Bostonians, led by Art Bronson, and chose the tenor saxophone over the alto as his primary instrument. He made a habit of leaving, working, then going home. He left home permanently in 1932 when he became a member of the Blue Devils led by Walter Page.
With the Count Basie Orchestra
In 1933, Young settled in Kansas City where, after playing briefly in several bands, he rose to prominence with Count Basie. His playing in the Basie band was characterized by a relaxed style which contrasted sharply with the more forceful approach of his bandmate Hershel Evans, an alumnus of Coleman Hawkins, the dominant tenor sax player of the day. One of Young's key influences was Frankie Trumbauer, who came to prominence in the 1920s with Paul Whiteman and played the C-melody saxophone. Young left the Basie band to replace Hawkins in Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, but he soon left to play in the Andy Kirk band before returning to Basie.Young recorded his first sides ever in 1936, with Basie but not with his orchestra but with a quintet, among the four side one of Lester masterpieces: his improvisation on the chords of the Gershwinian Lady Be Good. In the next four years with the Basie band, and in different small formations, other gems were recorded: "Every Tub", "Texas Shuffle", "Jumpin' at the Woodside", "Clap Hands! Here Comes Charley!", and "You Can Depend On Me" with a septet. While with Basie, Young made also small-group classic recordings with Billie Holiday, under Teddy Wilson's conduction, and for Milt Gabler's Commodore Records. Although recorded in New York, they are named after the Kansas City Seven of Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, Basie, Young, Freddie Green, Rodney Richardson, and Jo Jones. In these sessions Young played also clarinet in a "liquid, nervous style." His clarinet work from 1938–39 is documented on recordings with Basie orchestra and small groups and Billie Holiday.
Billie and Lester met at a Harlem jam session in the early 1930s and worked together in the Count Basie band and in nightclubs on New York's 52nd St. At one point Lester moved into the apartment Billie shared with her mother, Sadie Fagan. Holiday always insisted their relationship was strictly platonic. She gave Lester the nickname "Pres" because he was the president of the saxophone. Playing on her name, he would call her "Lady Day."
Young's clarinet was stolen in 1939, so he abandoned the instrument until about 1957 when Norman Granz gave him one and urged him to play it.
Leaving and returning to Basie
Young left the Basie band in late 1940; he is rumored to have refused to play with the band on Friday, December 13 of that year for superstitious reasons, spurring his dismissal, although Young and drummer Jo Jones would later state that his departure had been in the works for months.Subsequently Young led a number of small groups that, for the next couple of years, often included his brother drummer Lee Young; live and broadcast recordings from this period exist. Young accompanied the singer Billie Holiday in a couple of studio sessions and also made a small set of recordings with Nat "King" Cole in June 1942. His studio recordings are relatively sparse during the 1942 to 1943 period, largely due to the recording ban by the American Federation of Musicians. Small record labels not bound by union contracts continued to record, and Young recorded some sessions for Harry Lim's Keynote label in 1943.
In December 1943, Young returned to the Basie fold for a 10-month stint, cut short by his being drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II. Recordings made during this and subsequent periods suggest Young was beginning to make much greater use of a plastic reed, which tended to give his playing a somewhat heavier, breathier tone. While he never abandoned the cane reed, he used the plastic reed a significant share of the time from 1943 until the end of his life. Another cause for the thickening of his tone around this time was a change in saxophone mouthpiece from a metal Otto Link to an ebonite Brilhart. In August 1944, Young appeared alongside drummer Jo Jones, trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison, and fellow tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet in Gjon Mili's short film Jammin' the Blues.
Army service
In September 1944, Young and Jo Jones were in Los Angeles with the Basie Band when they were inducted into the U.S. Army. Unlike many white musicians, who were placed in band outfits such as the ones led by Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw, Young was assigned to the regular army where he was not allowed to play his saxophone. Based in Ft. McClellan, Alabama, Young was found with marijuana and alcohol; he was soon court-martialed. Young did not fight the charges and was convicted. He served one traumatic year in a detention barracks and was dishonorably discharged in late 1945. His experience inspired his composition "D.B. Blues".Post-war recordings
Young's career after World War II was far more prolific and lucrative than in the pre-war years in terms of recordings made, live performances, and annual income. Young joined Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe in 1946, touring regularly with JATP over the next 12 years. He made many studio recordings under Granz's supervision as well, including more trio recordings with Nat King Cole. Young also recorded extensively in the late 1940s for Aladdin Records and for Savoy, some sessions of which included Basie on piano.Struggle and revival
From around 1951, Young's level of playing declined more precipitously as his drinking increased. His playing showed reliance on a small number of clichéd phrases and reduced creativity and originality, despite his claims that he did not want to be a "repeater pencil". Young's playing and health went into a crisis, culminating in a November 1955 hospital admission following a nervous breakdown.He emerged from this treatment improved. In January 1956, he recorded two Granz-produced sessions including a reunion with pianist Teddy Wilson, trumpet player Roy Eldridge, trombonist Vic Dickenson, bassist Gene Ramey, and drummer Jo Jones – which were issued as The Jazz Giants '56 and Pres and Teddy albums. 1956 was a relatively good year for Lester Young, including a tour of Europe with Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quartet and a successful residency at Olivia Davis' Patio Lounge in Washington, D.C., with the Bill Potts Trio. Live recordings of Young and Potts in Washington were issued later.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Young occasionally played as a featured guest with the Count Basie Orchestra. The best-known of these appearances is the July 1957 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, with a line-up including many of his 1940s colleagues: Jo Jones, Roy Eldridge, Illinois Jacquet and Jimmy Rushing. In 1952 he was featured on Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio, released in 1954 on Norgran. In 1956, he recorded two LPs with his 1930s collaborators Teddy Wilson and Jo Jones. AllMusic's Scott Yanow, reviewing one of the albums, Pres and Teddy, commented:
Final years
On December 8, 1957, Young appeared with Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, and Gerry Mulligan in the CBS television special The Sound of Jazz, performing Holiday's tune "Fine and Mellow." It was a reunion with Holiday, with whom he had lost contact over the years. She was also in physical decline, near the end of her career, yet they both gave moving performances. Young's solo was brilliant, acclaimed by some observers as an unparalleled marvel of economy, phrasing and extraordinarily moving emotion; Nat Hentoff, one of the show's producers, later commented, "Lester got up, and he played the purest blues I have ever heard... in the control room we were all crying."Young made his final studio recordings and live performances in Paris in March 1959 with drummer Kenny Clarke at the tail end of an abbreviated European tour during which he ate next to nothing and drank heavily. On a flight to New York City, he suffered from internal bleeding due to the effects of alcoholism and died in the early morning hours of March 15, 1959, only hours after arriving back in New York, at the age of 49.
According to jazz critic Leonard Feather, who rode with Holiday in a taxi to Young's funeral, she said after the services, "I'll be the next one to go." Holiday died four months later on July 17, 1959, at age 44.