... lyrically and pure. It marked the way he talked, softly with a gentle secret language of his own invention. (For example, he coined the term "bread" for money. He would ask, "How does the bread smell?" when asking how much a gig was going to pay. A rare track featuring Prez singing and freely swinging his own lyrics to the song appears on the cut, "Two to Tango" in the playlist.) And cool showed in his style of dress, natty double-breasted pinstripe suits with the characteristic pork pie hat.
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| Click Prez "doin' it" to dig a 25 vid You Tube Playlist [* List highlights below] |
Lester Young was a legendary tenor saxophonist who became famous playing in Count Basie's band. With Basie in the 1930s, Young had changed the way the sax was played. Instead of blowing
the roof off, he coaxed an intimate tone from his tenor, like the
sweetest soothsayer whispering secrets in your ear.
Also in the '30s he met Billie Holiday at a Harlem "rent party." They both appeared in the Basie band around that time. Shortly after that they teamed up for some especially poignant recordings with Teddy Wilson - some featured on the playlist.
Essential to the Swing Era, he greatly influenced many musicians who came later, e.g., John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Wayne Shorter, Zoot Sims, Sonny Stitt, and Charlie Parker. Bassist Charles Mingus composed a tribute to Prez, titled, "Good Bye Pork Pie Hat." (The last track in the playlist.)
It
was Lester Young, whose extreme shyness seemingly went hand-in-hand with an ability to conjure hip jargon who named Billie Holiday "Lady Day." She in turn gave him the title "Prez." Recalling their early collaborations on cuts like "A Sailboat in
the Moonlight," when Wilson, Holiday, and Young had often arrived at the
recording studio empty handed, improvising their arrangements as they played and
sang, Young said of his relationship with Holiday:
"Well, I think you can hear that on
some of the old records, you know. Some time I’d sit down and listen to ’em
myself, and it sounded like two of the same voices, if you don’t be careful, you
know, or the same mind, or something like that."
And
through their differences, Holiday always held Young’s saxophone playing
in the highest regard:
"I always felt he was the greatest,
so his name had to be the greatest. I started calling him the President."
Their
last unforgettable performance together came in December 1957, televised for The Sound of Jazz, which was part of the CBS anthology
series The Seven
Lively Arts. Lester was to play as Holiday sang ‘Fine and
Mellow’, but according to the jazz writer Nat Hentoff, before the band took to
the stage the old friends kept to opposite sides of the room.
Prez looked frail and was the only horn player who sat during the performance, but
after Ben Webster had played the first solo on "Fine and Mellow," [featured in the playlist] Hentoff remembered:
"Lester got up, and he played the
purest blues I have ever heard, and [he and Holiday] were looking at each
other, their eyes were sort of interlocked, and she was sort of nodding and
half-smiling. It was as if they were both remembering what had been – whatever
that was. And in the control room we were all crying. When the show was over,
they went their separate ways."
Photo Gallery:
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- B.B. King quote
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The Coolest of the cool: Prez and Miles (Newport Jazz Festival, 1957).
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* Playlist highlights:
- Four tracks of Prez accompanying Billie Holiday, his musical soul mate
- Six tracks with Count Basie's Band
- "Fine and Mellow:" with Lady Day, et al, from the CBS broadcast The Sound of Jazz
- Prez with The Nat Cole Trio
- ... with the Oscar Peterson Trio
- ... with the Miles Davis Quartet
- Charles Mingus' "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" tribute
