Liner Notes:
Lester Young with Count Basie: 1936-41
by Loren Schoenberg

Whereas [Coleman]Hawkins was all power and confidence, Young was cool and detached. Irrespective of tempo, his melodic invention was always strange and haunting. On a jump number, he would impose a weird mood; a ballad was transformed into a nostalgic song, searching and mysterious.
Stanley Dance

Lester's style was light, and as I said, it took him maybe five choruses to warm up. But then he would really blow; then you couldn't handle him in a cutting session.
Mary Lou Williams

The sound of Lester Young on the old Basie records - real beautiful tenor sound, pure sound. That's it. For alto, too. Pure sound. How many people Lester influenced, how many lives!
Lee Konitz

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
John Keats

In the rarified precincts of the jazz pantheon, Lester Young is unique in that the true essence of his genius remains obscure. Armstrong, Monk, Tatum, Coltrane and the others recorded prolifically in the studio and out of it, etching a relatively complete picture of their abilities. To be sure, there were extraordinary moments that vanished the moment they were created, lingering only in the memories of those lucky enough to have witnessed them. But with Young, the overwhelming consensus of those who heard him where he was young is that he could and frequently did play extended solos, and that it was only in that form that he could express his unique and large range sense of musical architecture. So we are left to parse, ever so minutely, the shards of that vision as they are to be found on the recordings that comprise this collection. All jazz soloists up through the advent of long-playing records in the 50's had to learn to express themselves succinctly and no one did it any better than Young at his best.

Young came from a musical family led by the patriarch, William "Billy" Young, who played all the instruments and made a living first as a teacher and then as a touring bandleader. The family's story has been told in great detail in the three extant Young biographies (written by Frank Buchman-Moller, Douglas Daniels and Dave Gelly), all of which are well worth reading, as is The Lester Young Reader, Lewis Porter, ed. Although born at his mother's family home in Woodville, Mississippi on August 27, 1909, Young was raised in and around New Orleans, and was entranced by music from an early age. Rhythm was vital to his music and it comes as no surprise that he started on the drums before switching to the saxophone. After the trials and tribulations that came from a sensitive nature married to an indefatigable need to assert his musical prowess, the teenaged Lester Young emerged as a demon on the soprano, alto, and baritone saxophones. His relationship with his father was complicated. Billy Young knew early on how talented Lester was and always accepted him back in the fold after one of Lester's frequent escapes from the family. This did not lessen the threat of yet another whipping for some infraction or of a tour into the Deep South, which remained all the provocation Lester needed to run away yet again, and by his late teens he strove to establish a life away from the family. The majority of Young's biography through the Basie years is covered in the session notes that follow. One misconception that should be cleared up before delving into the music is that contrary to the legend, Lester Young was never really a Kansas City musician. It's true that he was playing there with Count Basie in 1936 when they got the call to come to New York, but he had spent the great majority of his time in the preceding years based in Minneapolis. Billy Young had established the family there in the late 20's and Lester found the atmosphere convivial enough to make it his home base. Lester married for the first time while there, and found frequent employment at The Cotton Club.

It was in and in and around Kansas City, however, that the best bands in the region were located, so Young began to gravitate there more and more frequently. There were stints with the famed Blue Devils, during and after Walter Page's tenure as leader, and six months with King Oliver in 1933. Indeed, this collaboration between Young and Armstrong's mentor facilitates many fascinating connections in the jazz lineage. Many musicians have shared the bandstand for a night or two in bands put together for special occasions, but to play in a band for an extended period led by a major player can not help but be a significant influence. The enormity of the linkage becomes apparent when you consider that Young shared musical ideas with both Oliver, who was Armstrong's mentor, and with drummer Roy Haynes, a favorite of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Chick Corea. The many links between the musicians that eventually formed the Count Basie band is illustrated by following Young after he left King Oliver. This was the tail end of Bennie Moten's reign as king of Kansas City jazz. In 1933, after many disastrous months on the road, the Moten band replaced George E. Lee's band at a new K.C. nightspot, the Cherry Blossom. When Moten told the band that he intended to pull up stakes and hit the road again, they called a band meeting, and with Moten's approval, voted to stay in town, and elected Count Basie the nominal leader. Bennie Moten, now without his road gig and his band, created a hybrid unit along with Lee to play across town, at the Club Harlem. Soon thereafter, the Texan saxophonist Herschel Evans (who would create the tenor battle as a jazz convention with Young a few years later) joined the new Basie band, and Young was hired by Moten/Lee. It was during this period that the legendary battle between Coleman Hawkins (on tour with Fletcher Henderson's band) and Young took place. Hawkins was late for the Henderson job, and Lester, in the audience for the express purpose of hearing Hawkins in person, sat in the great man's chair, played his saxophone and clarinet, and then ran back to his own sparsely attended job without ever hearing Hawkins play. When the Henderson band returned to KC several days later, Hawkins lost no time in seeking out the "local" who had sat in for him. What ensued was one of the most fabled "cutting contests" in jazz history. For the first time in his career, Hawkins' legendary endurance and creativity was not only matched but surpassed in a session that lasted well after the sun had risen. Young actually seemed to grow stronger as the hours went by, and Hawkins (who, soaked with sweat while being bested for the first time, played the last part of the session in his undershirt - far from the norm for the sartorially splendid Hawkins) was nearly late for yet another night's gig. When Basie landed an engagement at Sam Baker's hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas early in 1934, Herschel Evans switched places with Young so he could stay in Kansas City. And it was during that engagement that Young received the legendary offer from Henderson to take Hawkins' chair. Young played an active role in this. He gave a friend, George Dixon, from Earl Hines's New York bound band, a letter for Henderson, stating his willingness to come to New York immediately if needed. Young's replacement in Little Rock was Buddy Tate, who was to inherit Evans' spot in the later Basie band. Most significantly, it was during this period that Young began playing with Count Basie, Walter Page and Jo Jones. The result of all those nights and the millions of quarter notes that passed between them would bear fruit when they finally recorded together on the legendary Jones-Smith recordings of November 1936. But Young's sudden entry into jazz's major leagues would have to transpire first. When Hawkins decided to expatriate to Europe a few months later, Henderson called upon the unknown Young, not the established New York Hawkins-ite Chu Berry, to fill what was jazz's most prestigious tenor saxophone chair. What should have been an absolute triumph soon turned into something more akin to humiliation, as Young's ultimately short tenure was made unbearable by his fellow bandsmen's taunts as they found him to be the anti-Hawk. And if that weren't enough, Young, boarding with Henderson, was woken up by Mrs. Henderson every morning, and played Hawkins' recorded solos. One good thing did come out of this unhappy time, and that was the beginning of Young's friendship with Billie Holiday. Unable to bear one more early morning Hawkins musicale, Young found a room in Holiday's mother's flat. Not only was their musical partnership kindled, but Billie also introduced Lester to the ins and outs of life in New York. The Henderson band left New York for an extended tour of the mid-west (that included a night in Beiderbecke's hometown, Davenport, Iowa) and the musical ostracism and stress finally became too much to bear. He requested a discharge, along with a note stating that he hadn't been fired. Then it was back to Kansas City, where he joined Andy Kirk's band, at which point Kirk's tenor man, Ben Webster, one of Hawkins' finest disciples, came to New York and gave the Henderson band just what they wanted. For many musicians, this would have been the end of the story: going to New York to join the major leagues, and coming back a few months later, horn in hand. To make matters worse, Young didn't fit in the Kirk band either and he was let go shortly thereafter. He flitted between Kansas City and Minneapolis over the next several months, working in a variety of bands, auditioning in vain for Earl Hines, and struggling to make ends meet. While in Minneapolis, he heard a broadcast of the Basie band, and was so dissatisfied with the tenor player (one Slim Freeman), that he sent a telegraph to his ex-leader asking for his job back. This set in motion a series of events that would have both of them on the stage of Carnegie Hall in less than two years time, and it all revolved around a member of the Vanderbilt family, John Hammond. John Hammond was a leading jazz critic who had championed Young during his brief Henderson stint two years earlier. He was also closely associated with his future brother-in-law Benny Goodman, who was winding up an extended engagement at Chicago's Congress Hotel. Ever on the prowl for a new band to proselytize, Hammond happened upon the Basie band broadcasting on a short wave station from their nightly gig at Kansas City's Reno Club. Inquiries followed, and by Halloween of 1936, the Basie band was on their way to Chicago to prepare for their New York debut Christmas week. It was during this Chicago stay that the Jones-Smith recordings were made. They were so named because Basie had already signed a usurious recording contract with Jack Kapp of Decca Records, so they made four sides under the names of the drummer and the trumpeter.

(A) JONES-SMITH, INC.

Lester Young's first recordings took place when he was 27 years old, with a long and varied career already behind him. The great majority of his peers begin recording in their early twenties and some in their teens, which makes tracing their stylistic evolution much easier: Armstrong with King Oliver, Coleman Hawkins with Fletcher Henderson, Basie with Bennie Moten, Roy Eldridge with Elmer Snowden, Art Tatum with Adelaide Hall, Benny Goodman with Ben Pollack, and Teddy Wilson with Louis Armstrong. What for us is the very beginning of his oeuvre is at the same time several steps into his own mature evolution. In order to fully appreciate the specifics of Young's contribution to this now classic recording session, we must set it within the larger context of the entire quintet, hence the following broad analysis.

The first thing to keep in mind as you listen to these four selections is that nothing like them had ever been heard before. The rhythm section communicated in a unified fashion and presented a synergistic beat that is without precedent. And in the nascent Lester Young there can be heard the reinvention of the tenor saxophone as well the first recorded examples of a new vocabulary for jazz. Basie was a master of the stride piano style, which demanded equal command of the left and right hands and the ability to summon from the piano the same propelling beat associated with larger ensembles. It was during his years with the Bennie Moten band that Basie first glimpsed the possibility of a more spare approach to the instrument. Moten himself was an accomplished pianist and the two of them would play separate pianos during the band's theater engagements. At smaller venues, with just one piano, Moten would play the bass part, leaving the treble to Basie. Some of his fellow band mates later identified this as the beginning of the famously sparse Basie style, which came to fruition with his own band a few years later.

Basie starts the issued version of shoe shine boy with a brilliant opening gambit that contains more than a dollop of rhythmic, harmonic and formal ambiguity. The idiom is distinctly Walleresque. What seems to be a statement of the melody turns out to be a 16-bar introduction and, as Walter Page (with walking bass lines) and then Jo Jones (with shimmering hi-hat work) settle in, Basie gradually jettisons the striding left hand figures for a far leaner accompaniment. Here is the genesis of the contemporary jazz piano style. Over the years, Basie's tinkling style eclipsed the strongly linear and melodic playing heard here. Jo Jones frequently told about this rhythm section's penchant for rehearsing, and there are many subtle touches throughout these recordings that provide the sort of convergences of phrase that only happen in truly unified ensembles. The sprung rhythms in Basie's left hand during the bridge lead to the descending whole-tone run that later became a trademark of one his greatest disciples, Thelonious Monk. This is immediately followed by the very first recorded Lester Young solo (if this was indeed the first of the two made that day), one of his most tightly constructed compositions. Building around a three-note cell of E-Eb-D (all notes referred to are in Bb tenor saxophone key), Young unleashes two 32-bar choruses of untrammeled cohesion. He telegraphs a feeling of restraint and rhythmic repose, but places himself squarely on top of the beat. Pianist Oscar Peterson later commented that : "Lester. had this remarkable ability to transmit beauty from within himself to the rhythm section.[He would] play some lines that were so relaxed that, even at a swift tempo, the rhythm section would relax." This was a quality he must have admired in the man who codified it a decade earlier, Louis Armstrong, and some hear this entrance as a reference to the trumpeter's famous cornet chop sueysolo. Young uses repetition to good advantage to air out his more complex phrases, and there are echoes of his early days as a drummer, especially in the second eight bars of his second chorus. A subtle touch is the way the rhythm section catches his accents during his bridges, all of which revolve around anticipated beats. The first one finds Jones landing flatly on the downbeat, an on the beat accent he repeats two measures later, which misses Young's phrase by an eighth note. Jones then catches up, and on the second bridge, he waits for Young to signal the accents. Basie is also a co-conspirator in this rhythmic intrigue.

As Carl Smith starts his trumpet solo, Basie switches to a totally different background. All this provides a clear picture of the Walter Page concept of a rhythm section creating contrast to keep a performance interesting. Not content to maintain one pattern throughout an entire performance, Page taught Basie and Jones (and later guitarist Freddie Green) to think orchestrally and in terms of counterpoint. Lester also weighs in with a never-ending set of riff variations, creating a tapestry not unlike the New Orleans jazz he had grown up with during the previous decade. Smith, both in this fast company and in later work with Skeet Tolbert's Gentlemen of Rhythm, proves to be an exemplary player who responds to everything going on around him. The next episode finds Smith, Young and Basie trading seamless two-bar phrases for sixteen measures. Jones, echoing his original entrance, lays out for the first eight, and with that small gesture creates a symmetry that presages the end of the performance. His eight-bar solo is played exclusively on the snare drum (he plays the whole session on snare and hi-hat only -- anticipating by several decades Leon Parker's minimalist experiments of the 1990's). The band jams out in true New Orleans fashion, before a short reprise of the trading and the coda.

The alternate take follows the same pattern, deviating only in the details, most notably Jones getting the jump on Lester during the first bridge. Young shuffles his phrases around but manages to order them in the most brilliantly developmental way. Each phrase leads to the next, by virtue of a tone, a rhythm, a sound, or a combination of each. evenin' had already been recorded by Cab Calloway's band in an inspired arrangement by its composer, Harry "Father" White, and this seemingly informal but highly structured rendition seems to indicate that the quintet is playing a pared-down version of the Basie band's arrangement. At the center of this performance is Basie's right hand. What he chooses to play is so enthralling that the near-absence of the left goes almost unnoticed. The first chorus is bookended by Basie's melodic variations backed by Page's two-beat figures and Jones's airy hi-hat, with Young's bridge providing a switch into 4/4 time. The saxophonist uses a panoply of articulations and rhythms (the grace notes in the third and fourth measures, the thrilling and cleanly played descending arpeggio and the closing triplets) that are unique to this stage of his career. Composer/guitarist/trombonist Eddie Durham used to talk about Basie's talents as an "idea man" during their Moten days. Not inclined to write music down, Basie would play things on the piano for Durham, who would then orchestrate them. You can hear the high quality of Basie's compositional concept throughout this recording as he continues playing right hand only (with the exception of a few plunging bass notes) behind the vocal. Again, there are hints of ideas that would lead to the universe Monk was to create several years later. Basie also hearkens back to the stride of James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith and Fats Waller, traces of which remained in both his and Ellington's mature styles. Indeed, the Basie orchestra had played in a battle of the bands with Ellington less than two weeks earlier, so the two men may have shared the same piano. We know that Ellington had an extraordinary ability to hear the essence of things, and it would have been strange if Basie and band hadn't put something on his mind that night. The appearance here of Jimmy Rushing brings to mind Ralph Ellison's late 1950's reminiscence about his first encounters with the singer in Oklahoma City some three decades earlier. "Rushing is known primarily today as a blues singer, but not so in those days. He began as a singer of ballads, bringing to them a sincerity and a feeling for dramatizing the lyrics in the musical phrase which charged the banal lines with the mysterious potentiality of meaning which haunts the blues". Rushing also knew how to pace two consecutive choruses of the same lyrics so that they didn't sound redundant. He is aided by the band, which falls into a riff formation behind his second chorus. All of Page's lessons about structure and contrast bear fruit. When they drop the riff during the bridge, a feeling of freedom ensues, with a dancing Young obbligato over an implied habanera rhythm, before they revert to the riff for the last eight bars. These things don't happen by chance, and it is one of the wonders of this early Basie band that they could make it all sound so spontaneous. There is a quick cut back to the bridge, where Basie builds castles on top of Page's ostinato figures, and then Rushing returns to swing it on out with a modified return of the riff -- all of this within the course of less than three minutes. Ellison again: "One of the significant aspects of his art is the imposition of a romantic lyricism upon the blues tradition, a lyricism which is not of the Deep South, but of the Southwest: a romanticism native to the frontier, imposed upon the violent rawness of a part of the nation which only thirteen years before Rushing's birth was still Indian territory. Thus there is an optimism in it which echoes the sprit of those Negroes, who, like Rushing's father, had come to Oklahoma in search of a more human way of life." This is precisely what we hear throughout Rushing's choruses on boogie woogie. In his bending of pitch and approach to a higher or lower note, we hear implied harmonies and emotions that define what separates jazz blues from blues, exemplified in the way he varies the repetition of the "Baby, what's on your worried mind" strain. By his own admission, Basie knew very little about the blues when he arrived in Kansas City in the mid-1920's. He was a quick study, though, and in much the same way as he had absorbed jazz piano and organ techniques from Fats Waller a few years earlier in Harlem, Basie drank up the blues wherever he could find them. Particularly strong is the influence of pianist Pete Johnson, as reflected throughout boogie woogie.This arrangement was later adapted for the full band, and variants of it remained in their library for the rest of Basie's life. Like the other performances from this session, the piece sounds quite simple, but underneath the surface lies a variety of ever-shifting detail. Basie's accompaniment to the vocal is notable for its middle-register sustained chords and the way he breaks out into little cadential figures at the end of each chorus. Young plays throughout the entire performance. His background behind the vocal is faintly recorded, which makes its beautiful melodies all the more intriguing. When Smith joins in the riffing, we get three-way counterpoint in which the two horns and the piano quite remarkably avoid getting in each other's way while creating a swinging web of lines that helps rather than hinders Rushing's vocal. At the end of the chorus, at the exact moment when Rushing sings "she can call so easy and so doggone plain," Young anticipates where Basie is going and plays one of the pianist's famous closing piano fills with him -- a small triumph, perhaps, but one that speaks volumes for the unity this band had attained. One remarkable element of Young's style in evidence here is the way he used sounds as equal partners with the notes he actually played in conveying the message of the music. Young's two blues choruses on boogie woogie are full of oddly vocal tones that are never served up the same way twice. He lays especially heavy on a G, and Smith picks up on not just the note but the sound when he follows with his own solo, undergirded by more tenor chanting. The band goes back to the top to take it out, and a new way to "jazz" the blues has been born. The session's final performance, lady be good, is sheer perfection from first note to last. While the first three selections were widely copied by young musicians, this one took on an even greater significance, and elements of it were lifted verbatim by everyone from Charlie Parker on down. The first chorus appears on the surface to be a piano solo. And that it is, but the real melodic message is coming from Page's bass lines, throwing Basie's piano figures into the role of accompaniment. This raises the question of who is really in the foreground and who in the background. Page walks four notes to the bar, each with a different pitch. When Young enters, the bassist doubles up on his notes and Basie switches from his sparse solo style to a four-to-the-bar guitar-like accompaniment, aided by a stricter drum feel. It is from the ascending and descending arc of Page's bass notes that Young creates one of his definitive recorded solos. Just three of the many wonders to be found in its 64 bars are the sighing D's that dot both choruses, the blue G natural that rises four measures before the end of the first chorus, and the totally original phrase that kicks off the second. As in the other pieces, Young keeps playing underneath the trumpet solo, adding an almost inaudible texture that nonetheless has a definitive quality even when heard only in the shadows. The rhythm section elides the end of Smith's solo into a return to the bridge with a syncopated note that sounds like a gunshot and culminates in one of Page's definitive descending bass lines, leading to the final jam ending.

(B) BASIE'S BAD BOYS

It is now two and a half years later. The Basie band has come to New York and quickly established itself as a first rank unit. One key to the band's success was the series of tenor sax battles between Young and his ill-fated section mate, the Texas-born Herschel Evans, who had severe heart problems and became fatally ill in January of 1939. He tried in vain to rejoin the band on the road during a one-nighter in Connecticut where he collapsed, and then died just days after this small group session was held in Chicago. The swinging abandon in evidence here is eloquent testimony to music's transformative powers.

There were a multitude of technical problems with the studio, however, and the recording balance was deemed sub-standard, so these performances were initially rejected and withheld from release for over 30 years. Fortunately, they were not destroyed, and they eventually saw the light of day when their original producer, John Hammond, had them reworked, taking advantage of greatly improved equipment and techniques, and persuaded the company to make them available. They reveal "Basie's Bad Boys" to have been in rare form. i ain't got nobody was a particular favorite of Basie's, and after an eight bar introduction, he charges into it with abandon. With the addition of guitarist Freddie Green, this is the first time we encounter what was already known as the All-American Rhythm Section. Although this session still retains some aural challenges, their playing is a revelation. It was not merely piano, guitar, bass and drums playing at the same time; it was actually one single breathing unit that arrived at a rhythmic unison rarely equaled in subsequent jazz and never surpassed. Benny Goodman had given Young a clarinet after first hearing him at a jam session in early 1937, and Young used it to make a handful of recordings in 1938-39. His sound is harder on the clarinet than on tenor and he phrases closer to the top of the beat than usual. Young's roots in New Orleans seem closer than usual at moments like these; imagine all the sounds he heard during his formative years in and around the Crescent City. The bridge of the clarinet solo provides a wonderful example of the uncanny communication between Young and Basie. The New Orleans emphasis on counterpoint between horns is translated to the clarinet and piano. It's also notable for the way Young works his way into some Armstrong-esque quarter notes. Buck Clayton comes next, revealing his stature as a superior improviser with a fragile and immediately identifiable sound. He plays a sensitive cup-muted solo, after which Young follows on tenor. The stark studio sound shows his acute rhythmic sense in greater detail than usual, with less ambient aural distractions. His sheer engagement and lack of what we have come to know as "standard" Young phrases are immediately apparent. As in the Jones-Smith session, his ideas link one to the other with such logic that looking at them on paper, one would assume they were premeditated, but each measure is filled with the spontaneity that distinguishes the best jazz. Spend time with this bridge and you'll hear the vocal sounds he could conjure and how they were inextricably bound to their respective notes. The chorus ends with more of the stressed quarter notes that dotted his clarinet solo. There is a lot of riffing going on during this session, and during the last chorus Basie plays fills over the trumpets until Lester can put down the tenor and pick up the clarinet again. Shad Collins, who was a favorite of Young's, plays the closing bridge. Sessions like these took on greater meaning for the players as the band's fame grew and there were far fewer outlets for this kind of spontaneity.

The next title introduces trombonist Dan Minor, who was a veteran of the Blue Devils and Moten band. Though never featured on their recordings, he must have been a wonderful ensemble player and at least a competent soloist. It is he, not Dicky Wells, who is usually credited, that is heard on goin' to chicago" (the program notes for the 1939 Spirituals to Swing concert state that "Dan is a great blues artist and if you will listen carefully behind a James Rushing blues number, you may hear him playing obbligatos as though there were no orchestra in sight.") The recording logs show Wells's name partially erased and Minor's penciled in. If Wells had been there, he would more than likely have been given more solo space; his absence is probably what affords us the extra helpings of Young. It would be two years before the full band got around to recording its classic version of this urban blues, but here we have its blueprint. Among its highpoints are Clayton's open-horn chorus, Minor's fills, a definitive Rushing vocal, and Basie's varied accompaniments. Basie played the organ that was available in the studio, and despite all the sonic problems of this session, we do get to hear his command not only of its keyboard but of the stops that determine its tonal quality. Something about the sound of this organ and the spare way Basie uses it conjures the rural roots of the blues. In his hands, the blues are not a chord sequence repeated endlessly but an outlet for many different thoughts and sounds. The Walter Page cum Basie style was forged in and between Oklahoma City and Kansas City (Mo.), both of which were urban centers surrounded by farms and wide open spaces, and the space Basie and Young favor in the music is evocative of these geographic roots. Young's clarinet floats above the band during the outchoruses, the second of which finds the rhythm section marching together in perfect unison. The seemingly simple perfection of Young's clarinet answers to the ensemble brings to mind Artie Shaw's comment that "Lester played better clarinet than a lot of guys who played better clarinet than he did."

On live and love tonight Clayton elegantly paraphrases the melody for a chorus, playing his trademark cup-mute, followed by the leader whose solo could be easily and effectively orchestrated. Basie uses the organ as if it were a big band, leaving many holes for Page to fill (it's a joy to hear this session in as good fidelity as possible; it seems that someone coughs at 1:28!). Young didn't get to record this kind of song at this tempo very often during his Basie years, and the interesting chord sequence and contrapuntal variety of Basie's backing inspire him to create one of his greatest solos of the era. The bridge is so melodically pure that it summons thoughts of Beiderbecke and Armstrong. Many jazz writers have appended the adjective Mozartean to this sort of melodicism, meaning that within a relatively diatonic harmonic scheme, the soloist/composer is nonetheless able to create something that is no way any less profound or lacking in internal tension than music with a higher dose of chromaticism. As previously noted, Young was very much concerned with sound; contemporary photos of him playing with other reed players (Benny Goodman and Bumps Meyers, for starters) reveal them looking at his fingers. This may very well have been related to the sounds he got out of the instrument. These were not freak effects for their own sake but expressive devices that gave the note in question a specific quality based on its context within the solo. This solo contains more than its share of these singular sounds: Young's approximation of an organ low note in measure 11, the thin, side D (an alternate fingering for the note) in measure 14, and measure 29's weightless high E. Then there is the human tone he elicits from the saxophone by virtue of a seemingly inexhaustible variety of attacks and changes of note duration that mimic an expressive speaker. And as was first noted in the Jones-Smith session, when given a chance to stretch out, Young begins to weave long sentences full of internal references with a sort of developing variation that might have put a smile on old Johannes Brahms's face. A brief Basie tag winds up this rare performance.

Jones' hi-hat ushers in the rhythm section's opening chorus of love me or leave me. The way that Basie, Green, Page and Jones play seems anything but innovative today, given their tremendous influence over the past several decades; in 1939 it was absolutely unique and made them the idol of their peers. All gears mesh to produce a perfect rhythmic concept that calls for the complete subjugation of individual ego in order to create a metaphysical whole. Clayton's solo is one of his best, punctuated by Basie (staccato in the first half, legato during the bridge, and then almost absent in the last eight), and culminating with the cast-iron simplicity of measures 25-28. This session has the free-flowing vibration of a jam session, and in Young's wind-blown 32 measures, one can imagine him--horn held high in his famous posture, casting to the winds yet another classic utterance, couched in eccentric sounds (the keening high E in measure 11 - so different from the same note on the previous tune) and thrilling rhythms, in one of the many hundreds of joints, ballrooms, theaters and clubs he graced with his genius. The Young/Basie simpatico is once more evident as they merge cadences as the first eight bars elide into the second, again at the midway point of the bridge, and humorously during Young's last bridge, when they both descend down a rhythmic slide together. Collins's solo brings to mind Jo Jones's comments about his notes being like spitballs; he makes for a marked and welcome contrast to Clayton's less strictly articulated style. To hear the saxophonist jam so effortlessly over the band in the last eight bars is a rare joy. From this point on, the legacy of Kansas City and the Basie Reno Club band will gradually recede as the uniformity that was essential to the success of a big band usurped the spontaneity that originally personified it. But the change was a slow process and there was still much brilliant music ahead

(C)

The Basie Vocalions begin a determinedly mediocre fashion with what goes up must come back. Rushing does his best with this modest, scalar tune recorded in a far more inspired version by the Bob Crosby band. Basie was known as a superb editor, eliminating everything superfluous from the arrangements submitted to the band. Think of this one as what they sounded like before he started cutting. Lester gets the second half of the last bridge, with just enough space to utter one of his patented aphorisms.

Basing performances on familiar chord sequences was already common practice by the late 1930's, but transforming the moody ballad willow weep for me into the up-tempo taxi war danceis an unexpected and inspired idea. There's not a whiff of the original to be found, but the harmonies inspire Lester and the band to create one of their classic performances. No time is wasted beyond the rolling introduction in getting to Young, who creates a solo so idiosyncratic that even he rarely recalled it in his subsequent solos. As noted before, he is always looking for a dialogue with Basie, and on the issued take, he fractures the upper notes of Basie's comp in his second eight bars, after starting the solo by reciting them almost verbatim. At moments like these, the piano and tenor blend into a unified whole, easily the equal of Young's rapport with Billie Holiday. One way of hearing it is imagining the piano to be adding the punctuation to the saxophone's sentences; another is as a braking mechanism, creating the slightest pause to Young's seemingly unstoppable rhythmic flow. However you think of it, it is the kind of spontaneous combustion that the slightest reflection or hesitation would destroy. The bridge of the issued take contains one of the offhandedly polyrhythmic phrases with which Young could stop traffic at will. On the surface it seems to be based on quarter-note triplets, but it goes deeper to the core of rhythmic irrationality than that. Both takes of Young's solo have odd sounds that function more as effects than as pitches. They occur on measure 14 of the issued take (a high E) and in measure 13 of his trading chorus (a hoarse F#). But taken as a whole, these two 32 bar choruses capture an essence as close as we will ever get to the wild and wooly Young of the Kansas City jam session who cowed any and all challengers. The issued version is on the whole more inspired, in better balance, and Young's opening, with its supposed paraphrase of old man river became one of his most famous and oft-quoted phrases. Dicky Wells's solos highlight many things; most notably, his original voice and concept on the instrument, and the way Basie's piano changes functions depending on whom he is accompanying. He is followed by Buddy Tate, who trades fours with the band (bridge by Basie) before Young returns. At this point, Jones turns on the heat, though you have to listen carefully for his accents, given his distance from the band. It took the Vocalion/Columbia engineers a few sessions to adequately capture the rhythm section's synergistic approach. Young's last four bar band trade on the issued take has him alternate fingering a C# and C natural that seems to say "what to do, what to do". Countless saxophonists copied it, more than likely unaware of its roots in the work of one of Young's early idols, Jimmy Dorsey, who used it on any number of mid-to-late 20's recordings with Red Nichols.

(D)

Don't worry 'Bout me is a superior tune distinguished by a relatively dissonant chord under neath the key melody note where the words are "worry 'bout me" the first time around. Even though the full band plays at various points throughout the performance, it nonetheless has the feeling of a quasi- small band performance. There is an intimacy that was unique to the Basie band of this era and must have sounded vastly different from the mass of other bands that populated the ballrooms and airwaves of 1939. The introduction spotlights the trombone trio working their way down a scale against a stationary Basie trill, which then elides into his melody statement. The arrangement is functional and bears the same epigrammatic stamp as Basie's piano - not one more note than necessary is used. Helen Humes was a singer far more at home in the blues, and her approach to the popular songs of the day was more elemental than that of her peers, particularly her predecessor in the Basie band, Billie Holiday. She never sounded quite comfortable with sophisticated material such as this, but gets through it unharmed, aided by Young's crooning tenor holding her hand in the first obbligato and then gingerly supporting her in the second. His brief solo is couched in that velvety tone and legato phrasing that was at once warm and yet slightly cool. The LP take has a slight brass error in the closing bars (not a wrong note but an inconsistency of articulation in one of the trombones) and a Young solo that Basie briefly gets behind, in contrast to his passive role on the 78 take. In 1956, Young told Nat Hentoff "If I could put together exactly the kind of band I wanted, Frank Sinatra would be the singer." And it was Sinatra the inspiration he received from Billie Holiday but far less known is his remark to Arlene Francis in a 1979 interview that "I knew Lester well. We were close friends, and we had a mutual admiration society. I took from what he did, and he took from what I did." Several close friends of Young's have remarked that the he frequently played Sinatra's recordings in his hotel rooms when on the road. Quincy Jones also wrote that "Frank's greatness - besides immaculate storytelling, drama, and elocution - was that he phrased like Lester Young." It's a shame that these two icons never recorded together, although one diehard fan has synced their recordings of all of me so it sounds like they had.

(E)

Basie's playing of the melody during the first chorus of and the angels sing signals a clear progression towards making the more commercial arrangements readily identifiable as the band's own. Young is given a short cameo on the way to Humes's vocal, as is Edison, whose style makes for marked contrast with that of trumpeter Ziggy Elman, who had immortalized the tune just a few months earlier when he recorded it as a member of the Benny Goodman band. Jones paces the performance with his flowing hi-hats, which gave everything a flow that made the band immediately identifiable. If i didn't care became an instant classic shortly after its introduction by the Ink Spots, and Basie characteristically strips it of its inherent sentimentality, delivering the tune in a sparse, swinging manner. Young, in an off-handed manner, makes the opening statement, coming in over a stop time Jones cymbal clap. The band and Basie each take turns with the melody before Young returns, underscored by an unusual and gamelan-like chime chord from the leader. A second Jones clap concludes Humes's vocal, and listen for the odd (and possibly editorializing) heavy oom-pah background Basie uses for the brief Benny Morton solo before reverting to his customary flow behind Shad Collins's muted trumpet.

Euday Bowman wrote the twelfth street rag in 1914 to celebrate one of the streets in Kansas City's famous red-light district (he also wrote rags for 6th, 10th, 11th and other streets to no avail.). Its distinctive three against four melodic pattern had been raised to exponential heights of rhythmic complexity by Louis Armstrong in his classic 1927 Hot Seven recording. The Basie rhythm section first subjects it to a gentle sort of satire (as had Armstrong in his introduction), with Jo Jones using his woodblocks for the accompaniment, then drops the funny stuff in the second chorus. These superlative transfers bring out several details in the rhythm section - Basie's left hand, the little strokes that Green adds here and there, plus many more of Page's actual notes than were ever discernable before. Also audible are many more subtleties of Young's articulations. He enters by paraphrasing one of Basie's famous right hand figures, and then takes off into a flowing two-chorus solo that stands out as one of his most inspired on disc. This brings home the point that so many of his peers made about Young needing time to warm up when soloing, sometimes for as long as four or five choruses before really turning on the heat. Earle Warren used to talk about Lester's ability to breathe deeply and to play long phrases when he was young, and you can hear his complete physical control of the horn to good advantage here. There is a telling moment in the eighth measure of his second chorus, when he pauses to breathe so that he can make one of his swooping upward glissandos. Earle also felt that no matter how much Lester's disciples tried to emulate his tone, his sound was sui generis, coming as it did not only from his mouthpiece and horn but also from his head, which formed a chamber when it resonated with the saxophone. What we are really hearing is the man, not just the instrument. Basie's backing is again superlative, ranging from telegraphic dots and dashes in the upper register to full-fledged oom-pah. Edison's trumpet solo is one of his best of this series, and also benefits from the leader's eccentric comments. Hear how the piano, which when Young plays becomes one with the solo, morphs into a separate line of counterpoint behind Edison. Young gets a reprise in the out chorus, as does Basie and suddenly it's over. miss thing(a Skip Martin original based on the harmonies ofhoneysuckle rose) is virtually all ensemble, with the solos filling in the spaces. The tempo is brisk, and the soloists sail, Young again leaving the most exciting ripples in his wake. Buddy Tate recalled the time in 1933 when he first heard Young on the tenor, "I'll never forget that sound - light, very light, but aah!", and this solo, as quickly as it goes by, shows how intimately Young's tone is tied to his musical essence. Note the declamatory phrases that close the first 16 and the last 8 - they are the music equivalent of periods in a sentence. What separates this early work and Young's post-war period is the sheer amount of ideas that come out of his horn. As the years progressed he lost little of his ingenuity, but the pool of phrases diminished. The band's ability to subtly gradate their dynamics is refreshing; hear how they keep alternating loud and soft passages. Other facets of this performance are the right hand figures Basie plays when the band is at full tilt - he was a master of the rare art of spinning counterpoint to ensembles-- as a well as a few random low trombone pedal tones as the band winds down. Young's solo is followed by a muted Edison, interrupted by a perfectly executed 8 bar brass crescendo, a chorus split between Tate and the leader, and bridges by Wells (two of them) and Warren. The rhythm section is the real star of this performance, with Jones creating a never ending series of cymbal splashes and low drum explosions. This piece had its origins as an accompaniment to a dancer as part of a stage show, and the extended ending, with Edison's trumpet dancing over the rhythm section and culminating in the band's dramatic framing of Jo Jones' whispering drums must have been something to behold. Note the beautiful bass drum tone. Jones once recalled an epiphany he had as a child at the Ringling Brothers Circus, "I saw, heard and felt Mr. Emil Helmicke, the greatest bass drummer player that ever lived. The impact of the bass drum got me right in my stomach and I never relinquished that feeling. That was my real introduction to music. I couldn't keep still; my Aunt Mattie held me in her arms. Right after that, she bought me a snare drum."

(F)

lonesome miss pretty, one of the better arrangements the band recorded in 1939, is a set of inspired and themeless variations on the harmonies of the lonesome road. In his last years, Dicky Wells liked to play as well as sing the lonesome road, and it was a haunting experience. But that was all decades away as the band headed towards its second summer season at New York's Famous Door. Basie has most of the opening chorus to himself with band interjections, before an interlude and modulation lead to an open Edison solo notable for his singing tone and the way it elides into the bridge, which introduces Young's 16 bars, phrasing in a way that underlines the ambiguous nature of the backgrounds. It's ensemble the rest of the way with a closing Basie bridge.

bolero at the savoy was a relatively big record for Gene Krupa's band (he is listed as a co-author) and that may explain the opening and closing drum salvos from Jones. Oddly, this performance slows down as it goes; compare the opening to the ending. The soloists are Edison, Basie, Morton and Young. The latter's bridge is particularly melodic and has interesting details, such as the scooping, throaty note on the fourth measure and the way Basie chimes in during the last two measures and coalesces with both the band background and Young.

pound cake (Lester's nickname for his saxophone and also for Eddie Durham) is clearly a head arrangement, giving the band a chance to return to its Kansas City roots. It is credited to Edison and is fashioned out of phrases that could easily have all fit into one of his blues choruses. The composer and all four reedmen solo, with Warren and Young (the only one who gets two choruses) finding clever ways to slip in and out of the backgrounds. Jo Jones's subtle accents "comp" just like the piano, and the ebb and flow of the guitar and bass is remarkable. Young's solo was frequently used a melody in and of itself by Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, who used his example as a spur to find their own individual voices.

(G)

you can count on me seems to have given Humes a challenge as the alternate take reveals. The undistinguished yet thoroughly professional arrangement shares its style with the bulk of 1939 vocal charts. Although Jimmy Rushing's blues number had an unmistakable stamp as Basieana, the band never developed a similarly distinctive style for its female vocalists. Young gets eight bars, with both versions being equal in quality, and notable for the way on each take he and Basie lead and follow each other into different harmonic webs. There seems to be a vocal exclamation of some sort halfway through Young's solo on the issued take.

(H)

What must have seemed like a busman's holiday to the Basieites turns out to be one of Young's greatest sessions. Organist Glenn Hardman had a penchant for jazz, and later in life, while working around Los Angeles in the early 70's, billed himself as "the Mighty Giant of Jazz". Based on the evidence of these recordings, he was harmonically adroit, a good accompanist who listened and had a sense of adventure. Once in a while, he tended to rush, but what's a few beats among friends? Trumpeter Lee Castle, filling in for Clayton who was down for the count with lip trouble, was a straight middle of the road player whose consistency and good taste won him a place in many of the finest bands of the era, including Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. He shared with Young common roots in the Armstrong/Beiderbecke tradition which enabled the two of them to create ensemble playing of the first water. Young was, if anything, an extremely sensitive musician whose ability to conjoin with others sometimes verged on the telepathic. Like the Kansas City Six date recorded for Commodore nine months earlier and the best of the Wilson/Holiday sessions, here we have Young at his very peak as an ensemble musician. What makes this date stand apart is the repertoire and how easily he fits into what was for the time a traditional mode. Coincidentally, the Basie band was just wrapping up a six-week engagement at the Panther Room of Chicago's Hotel Sherman, where they played opposite Muggsy Spanier's Ragtimers, whose repertoire consisted almost entirely of songs from the 1920's, such as china boy. It comes in at quite a clip with Castle leading, closely seconded by Young's tenor, whose counterlines fit not only the melody but the trumpet's paraphrases. One can only imagine the thrill young Hardman must have felt being in the studio with these heavyweights, which may account for at least part of the reason he strains at the beat so ferociously. Green and Jones do a good job of keeping the reins tight and before you know it, Young is announcing the imminent arrival of his chorus, and what a chorus it is. The sleek lines, smooth tone and flowing rhythm still astonish today, but can you imagine how radical it must have sounded in 1939? Before Young, nothing like this had been heard before. Hardman instinctively knows just what to do and works closely with Green and Jones to lay down a carpet of whole notes, giving Young's variations greater contrast. Especially interesting are stop-the-traffic rhythms Young uses at the end of both his first eight and bridge. They are played so effortlessly that their rhythmic dissonance goes almost unnoticed. Castle (pert) and Jones (slapping brushes) are up next, leading up to the ride out chorus, during which Young unleashes a torrent of ideas that thoroughly surround but never obscure Castle's lead. The tenor's bubbling bridge hints at Young's renowned sense of humor and the kind of babble he'll use on the following Basie session. Given the élan with which the tag is handled, it's hard to believe these men had never played together before, but it's true.

exactly like you was one of the first tunes the Basie band recorded after arriving in New York in late 1936. On that recording Young had a sixteen bar solo, which he alludes to here. This version is slower and finds the tenorist in a far more reflective mood. One of Young's fellow New Orleanians, Sidney Bechet, made a one- man band recording for Victor in 1940; one of the most remarkable things about it is the insight it gives into the sort of counterpoint that Bechet heard in his head. Similarly, the lines that Young weaves when not soloing give us a peek into his harmonic universe and how he thought about chords, passing tones and the other components of his style. They set the mood and prepare us for his solo, following Hardman's well-composed chorus, which has more than a bit of the roller rink about it. As Young enters, hear how Green and Jones (boom on the bass drum) set him up by sitting straight up on the beat, giving it a new, solid bottom. Something about Young's use of specific chord intervals such as the ninth and thirteenth is reminiscent of a painter using pastel colors, and the solo reaches its climax in the first descending and the ascending arcs of the bridges. Castle joins in to take it out, and his grace should not be underestimated. A highlight of both takes is what Young plays behind Castle on the first bridge. The original issue contains a more glancing approach to the chord's guiding tones and a gorgeous gesture in the fourth and fifth measures. The alternate is more plangent and contains subtle but telling gradations of intensity in the tone. Young could telegraph more with a slight adjustment of air than most musicians can by flapping all of their fingers. The solo is only slightly less elegiac than the other, with what can only be called eccentric phrasing, especially in the first eight bars.

on the sunny side of the street plays very much like a continuation of the previous tune, given the similarity of the tempo and general ambience. Castle's tone is quite good and sounds for a beat or two almost like Bobby Hackett. Young latches right onto him and again the ensemble work is magical. The hiccupping organ doesn't distract from the tenor's silken bridge, but the real magic is yet to come. Young switches to his clarinet for the bridge of the next chorus and it's a minor miracle: Hardman arpeggiates the chords using a sound more at home in a Flash Gordon movie, over which Young sculpts as perfect an eight bar solo as he ever played. It's becoming clear that producer Hammond intends for this date to feature Young, who also gets three-quarters of the following chorus, which includes his third bridge. Five years later, Young was on the sound stage of Warner brothers studios playing this same tune, and his solo, which was immortalized in the short film Jammin' The Blues, contained a beautiful phrase in the second eight bars that was so striking that the film's editor underlined it visually. This version also contains a "capper" in roughly the same place; you'll hear it at 2:10. Young reveals his empathy with Castle by doubling his lead in the four measures into the last eight bars.

The title for this medium-slow blues aroused attention as soon as it came out. Glenn Hardman's upright organ blues. Hmm. In both the opening and closing choruses Young weaves around the trumpet in a way that is again reminiscent of Jammin' The Blues, which opens with a blues that is a slightly slower first cousin of this one. The two organ choruses may not be the deepest thing you have ever heard but there is a thematic integrity to them that wears well over time. Young, on the other hand, is the very definition of profundity. He almost seems to be channeling his dear departed friend Herschel Evans in the moaning portamenti with which he opens both his choruses; this may very well be what Jo Jones was referring to when he said in the 1950's: "Even in Lester's playing today, somewhere he'll always play two to four measures of Herschel because they were so close in what they felt about music." Another reference made by Young is a descending phrase that among the Basie-ites which meant "I want some money" and he weaves it into both choruses. It will appear again turned into a full blown tune (wholly cats) in the October 28, 1940 session with Benny Goodman.

who is taken way up, and after warming up on the previous tunes, Hardman stays slightly more in time. The drums seem to have been put more clearly in the mix and Jones's brushes are much more readily audible. Indeed, it is Young who now sounds off-mike. A muted Castle handles the Kern melody as though he had been playing it every day, giving Young something solid to bounce off of. The trumpeter plays his best solo of the session, sounding more to the point than Young, who seems to be still seeking his focus.Jones gets another half-chorus, this time splitting it with Green, who takes a rare chorded solo. We get our second helping of Young's clarinet and the finesse with which he plays it makes it doubly sad that this session would be the last time he would record on it for almost two decades.

We'll never know where Hardman got the inspiration to begin jazz me blues with a the campbells are coming, but it's one of those non sequiturs than nonetheless linger. Young flows in and out of the breaks with ease and with a strong sense of humor, all the while in intimate tandem with Castle's lead. From this tune's earliest incarnations on disc (the ODJB, the Wolverines, the Bix version) the breaks were a place for the soloist to not only fill in the blank space but to play something humorous. After hearing a session like, this, one can only regret that similar opportunities didn't come Lester's way, or that if they did, that he declined them. A dream band would have consisted of trumpeter Frankie Newton, Vic Dickinson, plus Lester and Pee Wee Russell switching off between tenor and clarinet. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Hardman's solo is followed by a closing ensemble chorus, with superlative Young clarinet as close as close can be to Castle's trumpet, which gets the breaks this time. In a final sample of his ability to synergize, Young plays exactly the same three notes in unison with Castle as they come out of the last trumpet break and follows it with a high, smiling clarinet note. Credit must be given to John Hammond for setting up these Basie small band dates and this wonderfully odd one in particular.

(I)

song of the islands affords a good chance to really hear Jo Jones' hi-hat work in detail and the tremendous variety with which he imbued each phrase. No wonder Max Roach used the hi-hat exclusively for his tributes to Jones. Young is typically distant from the microphone, adding to the evocative nature of his other-worldly style. His ability to play understated solos such as this in the midst of a big band, couched in such logical terms is the sort of thing that inspired John Lewis to view Lester as much as a poet as a musician. Very few players of the era, with the possible exception of players such as Pee Wee Russell and Henry "Red" Allen could have even conceived of Young's low register, low-volume penultimate phrase. How wonderful then that quiet music like this should have created such powerful reverberations. At a birthday party for Buck Clayton in the early 1980's at Jean Bach's Greenwich Village home, Clark Terry's gift to his mentor was playing both Clayton's and Young's solos from this recording. Thad Jones, like Terry a star of a later Basie band, first heard Basie at a dance in Detroit at about the time of this session and reacted quite strongly, as he later told Frank Buchman-Moller, author of a biography of Young (titled You Just Fight for Your Life): "It was like the horn only became a transmitter through which the soul of Lester Young was expressed.When he'd still be up to play I would look around, and people would slow down so they could listen, because everybody realized then, even the people who didn't really pay that close attention to details as far as the music was concerned, everybody seemed to sense that they were witnessing one of the greatest musicians of all time. It was like he was a minister and we were his congregation out there. He was speaking words of wisdom to us, and very prophetic, because, his style, what he was doing then, changed the whole concept of tenor playing.it was like listening to a saxophone with the sound of a flute with that clear just mellow, rich, round sound." By the time of this session, the band was in the midst of its second summer at the Famous Door. The ensemble cohesion had been going steadily up and would only improve. clap hands, here comes charlie is what used to be may have inspired the extroverted Jones drum solos that conclude the piece. He never covered the band up, no matter how much he played; it was this transparency that led drummer Don Lamond to say that Jo played like the wind. Dexter Gordon, who was typical of the young saxophonists who were in awe of the Lester we hear here, once said "I got a chance to hear Lester with the Basie band in Los Angeles. They came out there in 1939. All the cats cut school that day- the opening day at the Paramount Theater [October 5th]]. Herschel had just died, so I didn't get a chance to hear him. Lester was really in his thing then. They opened up with clap hands, here comes charlie, and Lester came out soloing, and he was just fantastic. I really loved the man. He was melodic, rhythmic, and had that bittersweet approach. And, of course, in his pre-Army days he had such a zest for living. It felt so good to hear him play." With these excellent transfers, we can now hear all the articulations and the little side phrases that Young used to demonstrate his new concept of time relationships. He is never more composed and serene than at tempos such as this, where most soloists sound harried. The two tenor choruses contain many phrases that would vanish from what we know of his work after the Second World War. The superlative English jazz writer Benny Green (also a tenor saxophonist himself) came up with an inspired phrase to describe a Zoot Sims performance as containing a handful of Young-inspired "catacoustic honks"; they certainly had their roots in the alternately fingered notes Young uses during his second bridge and they quickly became part of jazz's lingua franca. His seemingly nonsensical and humorous last eight bars makes for a musical analogue to Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, which contains the following sentence, for example: "O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, (O my shining stars and body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement!" We know that Young had obscure and occasionally expletive associations with some of his pet phrases, and that may be precisely what we're hearing here.

(J)

It may have been the success of the Commodore Kansas City Five and Six recordings that led Basie to assemble the Kansas City Seven. This is their only record session during Young's tenure and it has long been accorded classic status. The two tunes are essentially jams with just a dab of organization. dickie's dream written by Young, was originally called "Conversation Piece." At the root of its conception is an intriguing chord known as a minor sixth. This is the chord that Thelonious Monk turned Dizzy Gillespie on to and which partly inspired him to compose a night in tunisia Lester heard it differently, however. It was more static, whereas in Monk's world it was a chord that was always on the go. Through the use of a note associated with a major tonality, Young gave this minor chord a major inflection. It's related to what Cole Porter once referred to in everytime we say goodbyeas "how strange the change from major to minor" and the alternation of melodic and harmonic minor scales, which Bela Bartok in his Harvard lectures called bi-modality. This ambiguity may be what inspired Wells to slide into an E natural over the tune's C minor tonality -- what would have been harmonic awkwardness in lesser hands becomes a stroke of genius in his. Lester folds this ambiguity into the center of his solo, with some descending arpeggios and a smooth elision into the bridge, the site of another of those amazing Basie/Young convergences. The approach to Basie's own bridge shows his absolute freedom with meter. The alternate takes seem to have started with the slow breakdown, which is aborted when Hammond announces over the studio loudspeaker that "it's too long, Basie." The next take is faster, finds Young in a relatively prolix mood, and omits the piano solo. The issued take is even brighter, which allows for the insertion of Basie's chorus. All the takes find Basie comping in similar fashion to the Jones-Smith evenin'.

lester leaps in became the saxophonist's own signature number for the remaining two decades of his life. It is based on i got rhythm a composition that he had already long used as a showcase. Here we get a glimmer of what John Hammond was referring to when he wrote: "[Young] would launch himself into improvisations with which each new chorus renewed themselves as if by magic; it was as though his energy and originality knew no bounds. Lester could improvise on the same theme for an hour at a stretch, without once giving the impression that he might be running out of ideas. And there was not the slightest touch of exhibitionism about it. His features evinced not the slightest emotion and his whole being was concentrated in the music." During his solo he introduces many devices, including pentatonic scales, that George Russell, Miles Davis, Gil Evans and others would later expand upon. Basie plays a boogie-woogie figure for just a moment early in Lester's solo. A second later the trigger-quick Young has turned it into a slightly amended blues figure. They were a perfect match, and never played again as well as they did together. One of the best of their later recordings is lester leaps again, recorded in 1944 for Keynote, notable for a series of blues choruses where the two trade phrases as though they could read each other's minds. As this tune demonstrates, Young loved breaks, and here he gets several. A comparison between the issued and the alternate take reveal that he had a basic pattern in mind but could express it in any number of ways. The breaks are cleaner on the alternate, but Young seems to have a slight problem with his horn and some of his ideas are undeveloped in a fashion to which we are unaccustomed. On both tunes, Young plays the melody with Wells on a harmony part below and with Clayton above him. Strange. Of all the music in this collection, lester leaps in brings us the closest to the prodigious, non-stop improviser that Young was before he left the Basie band. Leonard Phillips recalled a 1937 reunion in Washington when Young came to town with Basie and was challenged by a local tenor man at a jam session. After everyone in the band had soloed at length: "Prez fell in and he tored I Got Rhythm all up in pieces. He went through everything in it.when Prez came in he started swinging, and then he started to tell the cats to give him some four [bar ] breaks, and then he played two or three choruses making breaks. That should have been recorded!"

(K)

the apple jump finds the band in relatively sloppy form and it sounds as though they are still learning the arrangement, which also may explain why it slows down so noticeably by the end. It would have benefited from some Basie editing, or possibly just having been in the band's book for a while longer before they recorded it. Bands are like any other family unit which experiences highs and lows for any number of reasons, and their relative lack of cohesion on both of the November 1939 sessions could be related to poor accommodations, non-payment for a gig, someone being fired, or any number of situations. Note how Lester leaps into his solo, his rhythms immediately answered by Jones's polymetric hi-hats. Basie and Edison are the other soloists.

The band gets back on its mettle with i left my baby, a minor-keyed blues made to order for Rushing's plaintive style. Ed Lewis bookends the performance with some elegant plunger-mute work. The same adjective can be applied readily to Warren's alto sax fills on the opening chorus. In any other band, he would have been a featured soloist and it's good to hear him get a rare spot in the open. Young's accompaniment to the vocal sets a unique mood (lots of 6ths and 9ths), with his sound at least the equal of the notes themselves. Lewis continues growling in the far background; he and Young were a tried and true combination. The 1937 Basie recording of Blues In The Dark contained a Rushing vocal backed by Minor, Young, and Lewis, this time replicating Armstrong's 1927 Hot 5 gully low blues solo. The alternate take contains a second chorus with unison saxophones that was edited for the recording but which they played live. Lewis is more audible behind the vocal, and Young's obbligato is similar to the issued take, "talking" a phrase six bars into the second vocal chorus that is eerily beautiful. The closing trumpet cadenza is not as well coordinated as on the previous version.

This session marks the first time that Lester exhibits a certain intransigence at times, demonstrated by his unwillingness to blend in the saxophone section in both tone and articulation. For a musician of his caliber this must have been a deliberate stance. All the evidence from before this period, both location and studio recordings, find him pitching in to create a unified band sound. From this point onwards, (especially in the airchecks) he seems to stand apart from the sax section and at times from the band itself. Was it a growing disillusionment about his place in Basie's world, a desire to strike out on his own, something related to Evans's death? We'll never know but the musical evidence is there. In addition, on the faster tunes there is also a slight trace of ennui, heretofore unnoticed. It's hard to fathom why no one had the idea to feature Young with longer solos or to give him a big band side to himself. Instead, he is called upon to come up with one witty epigram after another; how many times can you do that without sounding stale? That Young created as many small melodic miracles as he did on a small variety of chord changes is testament to his creativity, but these sessions reveal the toll it could take on even as fecund a mind as his. In a 1949 Down Beat interview, Young told Pat Harris: " But Basie was like school. I used to fall asleep in school, because I had my lesson, and there was nothing else to do. The teacher would be teaching those who hadn't studied at home, but I had, so I'd go to sleep. Then the teacher would go home and tell my mother. So I put that down. In Basie's band, there always would be someone who didn't know his part. Seems to me that if a musician can't read, he should say so, and then you help him. Or you give him his part before. But Basie wouldn't. I used to talk to him about it, but he had no eyes for it. You just had to sit there, and play it over and over again. Just sit in that chair."

This comes to the fore on riff interlude, a blues carousel featuring Tate, Edison (both at the top and the bottom), Young and the leader. All of them have thought out their solos and stick to the same pattern, with slight and, at times, interesting variations. But the real star of the performance is the rhythm section, particularly Jones, who shines in the concluding ensemble choruses. We hear producer Hammond exclaiming during the breakdown that "Lester's going to have to come in there, because the band is so loud behind him we just lose him". Most soloists would be crowding the microphone to make sure every note they played was captured clearly, but it fits with Young's aloofness that he preferred to remain at an arm's distance. And it's not just this session. Overall, the lack of melodic engagement (and at times cohesion) throughout the alternates and the picture of his growing disenchantment with being a cog in a big band wheel becomes clearer. Lee Young touched on this in his interview with Pat Willard: "I think my preference was to always hear him play the beautiful things, because, you know - and I loved to hear him play in the harder keys, but just to play in Bb and, you know, it makes the instrument sound the same. Where can you go? You know, playing eight-bar blues- that's what they were playing, the twelve-bar blues, or whatever they would play, they'd try to mix them up, but still blues are blues." Imagine if Basie had let Lester have a chorus of a ballad to himself; Cab Calloway featured his saxophonists Hilton Jefferson and Chu Berry on slow tunes, as Ellington did with Ben Webster and Johnny Hodges. Nonetheless, Young puts it all together for the issued take, and his second chorus became an emblem of hipness amongst men such as Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Gene Ammons, and his many other disciples of the 1940's who quoted and/or alluded to it countless times. The magic on each take starts during the piano solo and continues throughout Jones's transparent explosions (different each time) behind and in-between the ensemble figures. The new source material used for this collection affords us for the first time the chance to hear the subtle clicks and clacks that Jones used to alternate levels of intensity, sound and dynamics, as well as the quiet contributions of Page, Green and Basie.

(L)

It's been months since we've heard from Helen Humes, and between the devil and the deep blue sea is one of her best vocals with the band--confident, swinging and melodically inspired. Gibson's arrangement is similarly inspired, with radical yet smoothly elided modulations. The band starts in Db (bridge by Edison, sounding a tad like Frankie Newton), goes down to C for the vocal, then to Ab for the band and Lester, before returning to C for Humes's last eight bars. You'd never know it from listening and given the Basie band's predilection for similar chord sequences and general lack of modulations, the variety is more than welcome. The brass section sounds quite crisp, making the raggedness of the saxophones (and Lester in particular) all the more apparent. Producer Hammond stops a take to draw it to Basie's attention, who of course heard it but was not the sort of bandleader to upbraid Young. Like his idol Ellington and unlike the great majority of his peers, Basie let his men have a great deal of expressive freedom, even if that meant sub-par performances on occasion. But it was that very liberty that enabled them to play over their heads and keep in touch with how they really felt. The great majority of big band sidemen were expected to churn out a consistent if mediocre product come hell or high water. If Lester felt a certain way, it was going to sound that way - for better or worse. Warren was a sterling first altoist and certainly knew how to lead a section, so this lack of cohesion is due to more than just inattention. It seems that Lester is losing interest in making the effort to tamp down his individuality. In a way, the situation is analogous to his desire a dozen years earlier to leave his father's band. Young never enjoyed touring down South and had left the family band rather than endure the indignities of the region. Basie's band was also crossing the Mason-Dixon line. Indeed, right after these Los Angeles sessions, the band headed for Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee. The new takes find Young trying different approaches to the solo; the first complete alternate is notable for its beautiful, nostalgically Armstrong-like second half, while the second is slightly hotter. The original 78 version has long been famous for its utter simplicity, starting out as it does with a scale going up and down. Bassist Gene Ramey was a Kansas City stalwart, a student of Walter Page, who later played with Charlie Parker in Jay McShann's band and also appeared with Young's quartet in the early 50's. In recalling Young's stylistic evolution, he made the following fascinating observation: "Towards the end of 1933, Lester had a very spacey sound.He would play a phrase and maybe lay out three beats before he'd come in with another phrase. You know, instead of a more continuous staying on style, like Bird would play, you know. He had kinda' loosened up." We hear vestiges of that spare style here.

Basie's band was famous for its tenor battles, and one of the great mysteries is why they never recorded Young and Evans going at it as they did virtually every night. They clearly inspired each other to ever greater heights. It's no insult to Buddy Tate, who was a fine player and a lovely man to assert that he was nowhere near Evans as an improviser, making ham 'n eggs a pale shadow of what it would have sounded like just a year earlier when Evans was still there. That's the glass half empty. But it's also half-full and with the newly discovered alternate takes we get some very inspired Young solos. The tune itself is based on the chords of exactly like you with a honeysuckle rose bridge. Jones introduces the sprightly tempo, and is then joined by the rhythm section before Basie starts his opening chorus. In later years, the pianist's playing was sometimes reduced to a handful of pet phrases, artfully strung together. Here we have the man who inspired awe in his contemporaries, who still had the virtuosity of a stride pianist, and was thoroughly engaged in creating spontaneously at the keyboard. As Jimmy Rushing told Stanley Dance, "Basie used to please people with his piano, but he got away from it when bop came along. He got shy. I used to say, 'Come on, Basie, play one!' He'd say, 'Oh, man, I can't play no more.' But Basie can play a whole lot of piano still. When people asked me about it, I would say, 'Well, Basie's gotten lazy, and he hides behind his band.' That was only partly true. We used to go to house parties where he wouldn't be criticized, and Basie would play. How he played! Oh, God! You hear him on Bennie Moten's lafayette and prince of wails. That's true Basie." The bridge is a perfect example of how this rhythm quartet breathed and thought as one, with Page being the root intelligence that undergirded the three whose tessituras lay above him. Tate's solo is followed by a four bar interlude that Basie sort of fudges on the first alternate (though it works), and shortly after Young enters, the take breaks down with the leader apologizing that "I must be drunk". The next attempt goes smoothly, with the break being only slightly awkward and the band being ushered in by a few Jones drum hits. In fact, Jones uses his patented snare drum accents to parse Young's solos on all the takes. While most of the phrases are part of his standard bag of tricks, the saxophonist plays a stop-the-traffic Bb in his first phrase of the second chorus. Clocking in at just two and a half minutes, this performance could easily have accommodated another Young chorus. The issued version is the most successful of the lot.

hollywood jump is a relatively undistinguished Gibson original that also could have easily been opened up for more solos without losing its character. Young takes a break into his chorus, which has a Basie bridge; the last eight bars is reminiscent of Lester's famous jive at five solo recorded earlier in the year. The new take is cut from the same cloth, and one gets the feeling that Young, for all his elegance, is somehow treading in the shallow part of the pool.

This was a watershed year for the Basie band, as it was for Ellington. Gibson's writing was achieving a new level of sophistication, and there was also the advent of one of the most brilliant and influential lead trumpets of the period, Al Killian, who launched the band in a direction that would eventually lead to the powerhouse Swing Machine of the 1950's. For the first time, the Basie brass would sparkle in the same way that Goodman's and Lunceford's did. This new approach is abundantly clear throughout Gibson's arrangement of i never knew. The tune itself was a favorite of Basie's, who had recorded it with a small group in 1938, and also used a variant of it for the big band take it pres, which exists in a broadcast from the Southland Theater in Boston made just a month before this session. Killian makes the ensemble crackle in a way it hadn't before, and although there is some scuffling in the inner parts (especially when it comes to the fast eighth-note passages), the band is clearly turning a corner in terms of ensemble virtuosity. Chick Webb played with a new kind of confidence and had instigated a way of orchestrating his drums around big band arrangements that was tremendously influential in the early 30's, when most drummers were content to basically keep time and make random accents here and there when necessary. Webb took an aggressive stance, and his work inspired virtually of his peers, including Jones, who dots every i and crosses every t of Gibson's inspired arrangement. The sheer flow and airiness he exhibits here brings home writer Whitney Balliett's comment that "Jo Jones took the clutter out of drumming." This was no accident. Trumpeter Joe Newman, who joined the band three years later, sat next to Jones, and even filled in for him on occasion. He noted that "Jo came up with a whole new approach to playing drums. He developed new ways to play cymbals, getting the best out of them - whether he was just playing time or making colors. The cat was always experimenting with his sticks, trying new holds, using half of the stick, three-quarters or all of it, so he could get different sounds. One thing is for sure; Jo Jones could take any part of the drum set and make music out of it." Jones's work throughout this collection contains a myriad of innovative percussive effects that were to become a standard part of the jazz drum vernacular.

Trombonist Vic Dickinson was, like Jones, another true individual who reinvented his instrument. His sly musical sense of humor obscured at times the mastery of articulations and technique that he needed to make his statements work. His three-quarters of a chorus (bridge by Basie) follows a brief solo by Wells, who gets the bridge of the first chorus. A side note: Dickinson took Benny Morton's place, and although there is no film extant of this Basie band, Morton, Dickinson and Wells comprised the trombone section of the Basie All Star band on the 1957 The Sound of Jazz television broadcast, a half century old and still unequalled. The centerpiece of this arrangement is Young's solo (16 bars, plus the second half of the bridge), which Gibson's arrangement sets up dramatically with a whole-tone interlude, a harmonic sound that Young was fond of. He used it in his introduction to the 1938 Teddy Wilson/Billie Holiday recording of if dreams come true. Young might very well have first heard that augmented sound back in the late 20's, when, according to trumpeter Leonard Phillips, he arranged Bix Beiderbecke's in a mist for the Young family band. Whole-tones were also a staple of the Paul Whiteman band's late-20's recordings, which Young studied carefully for their Bix and Tram solos. As noted above, Killian adds much to the band's sound, but this challenging arrangement must have undoubtedly sounded even better a few weeks later as the band got it more solidly under their respective fingers.

tickletoe, a Young composition, is a variant of Eddie Durham's topsy, one of the band's 1937 Decca classics. The melody is made up of arpeggio figures of the type that the Goodman small groups favored and that would soon become a prime facet of Parker and Gillespie's music. Gibson's arrangement is a no-frills affair, leaving ample room for solos by Tate, Edison, Young (one of his most famous), and the leader. Lester's love for the music of Beiderbecke becomes apparent again through his use of eight bars of the cornetist's solo from the Paul Whiteman recording ofwhen-- the saxophones play it in unison just before the end of the piece. But there is also the even-eighth note feel and melodic simplicity of his solo that hearken back to Trumbauer as well, though admittedly couched in a new, swinging rhythm unheard of in the 20's, save for Armstrong. Jo Jones's drum fills behind the tenor solo have long attracted attention, and deservedly so. It has become a cliché that Kenny Clarke was the first drummer to play accents on the bass drum. He wasn't. True, he placed more of an emphasis on it, but the recorded evidence is clear that Chick Webb, Gene Krupa, Sid Catlett, Dave Tough and many others knew how to spur the music with an off-beat whack of the bass drum (they all played the ride cymbal as well). Jones does it with great abandon leading up to the half-way point of Young's solo, creating a rhythmic counterpoint that bounces off the Page/Green quarter note against Young, who leaves space for it to be heard. Young plays a faint tag at the end of the piece, similar to the one he ended riff interlude with on the previous session.

The punningly titled let's make hay while the moon shines sounds like an slightly more organized version of one of the band's famous head arrangements. Elton Hill hit pay dirt the following year with Gene Krupa's recording of his original let me off uptown - he does a good job here of retaining the loose sound of the Basie band at its best. The chord progression has a refreshingly challenging bridge that also enlivens things, and clearly inspires Young, as does the need for a modulatory figure at the end of his 16 bar solo. On the issued take, he uses an augmented arpeggio to make the key change. This is just one of many Young-isms that worked their way into Clark Terry's work, as can be heard at the end of his solo on Ellington's who's afraid of the big bad wolf?. The waves of influence that rippled from Young were many and varied. Miles Davis recalled in his autobiography "Lester had a sound and approach like Louis Armstrong., only he had it on tenor sax. Billie Holiday had that same sound and style..That's the style I like, when it's running. It floods the tone. It has a softness in the approach and concept, and places emphasis on one note. I learned to play like that from Clark Terry. I used to play like he plays before I was influenced by Dizzy and Freddie [Webster], before I got my own style. But I learned about that running style from Lester Young." Edison, Wells, Basie and Dickinson are the other soloists, and are clearly masters at the largely lost art of making a complete musical statement in a short amount of space. The alternate take is no way inferior and Young plays a solo that is the inverse (in terms of phrasing) of the issued one, this time making the modulation with one pivot note.

Gibson kicks off louisiana with a metrically ambiguous introduction that leads to a Killian high note before the band sets out on this attractive J.C. Johnson tune. Leonard Phillips remembered the Whiteman recording of this tune being one that he and Lester paid close attention to because of its solo by Beiderbecke and the lead saxophone playing of Trumbauer. In addition, Bill Challis, who wrote the arrangement, was heavily influenced by Bix and Tram's aesthetic. In a similar fashion, Gibson was the first arranger after Eddie Durham to figure out an idiomatically appropriate way to arrange for the Basie band that preserved their small group essence while funneling it into a big band context. Like Durham, he seems to have listened closely to the band's soloists, incorporating not only their phrases but going out of his way to create settings in which they would flourish; this was a talent he may have honed during his 1937 tenure with Ellington. Gibson had a knack for combining the brass and saxophone sections in a creative way and passing the melody back and forth between them in unpredictable fashion. The soloists are Edison, Young (now we truly hear his luminous tone and some more phrases that are one-of-a-kind, including the waterfall figures that conclude his first solo), Basie and Dickenson, whose melodic content was high compared to most trombonists of the era. Young bats clean-up with a melodic home-run (yes, he's right on pitch as well) before Killian comes back to nail the high-note ending. The alternate take is only slightly less inspired.

(N)

The band was certainly on a roll in the spring of 1940, for the very next day they recorded easy does it a Sy Oliver-Trummy Young original that is one of the definitive Basie classics. To truly appreciate their individuality, listen to Tommy Dorsey's version of the same tune. Dorsey's was a dance band and one of the best, and their recording features a superior tenor soloist, Babe Russin. Then listen to this version. It's art. Under Basie's laconic yet firm leadership, this group of 15 men created music that continues to transcend its 1930's middle-American origins, speaking directly to anyone with a predilection for the freedom inherent in four swinging quarter notes in a row. They used space in a way that begs comparison with the way that Frank Lloyd Wright (who, like Young, also favored a pork pie hat and cape) opened up of architectural vistas that owed less to ancient Greek and Rome and more to the space inherent in an America whose ambitions and domain knew no boundaries, even in the conflicted world of early 1940. Was that view of America partially a myth? Undoubtedly, but myths have always given birth to creativity. The Basie-ites were living in a racist America, to be sure, but were finding new solutions to those challenges, as well as the challenge of playing a new kind of music better than any band in the land. Widely imitated by others from Benny Goodman on down, the Basie band was still unable to play in many of the most lucrative venues, not to mention having to face the indignities of travel and accommodation on a daily basis. So the relaxation and peace that flows from this by now classic disc is well-earned and comes from a different vantage point than that of those who didn't face those obstacles on a daily basis. This is not just music but a reflection of the lives these men were living, as is all art. Too often in jazz education, the titanic social and cultural contexts that surround the music are slighted in favor of what note, what chord, and what scale is being played. This is the kind of music that inspired Ralph Ellison to write and Jacob Lawrence to paint, as well as their peers Romare Bearden, Piet Mondrian and Saul Bellow. One of the most original approaches to these intersections comes from Alfred Appel, whose definitive study Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce traverses the intercourse between jazz and other 20th century arts, and deals with Jo Jones and other Basie-ites in great detail. easy does it begins with the rhythm section introducing the germ of the melody, leaving its exposition to the band. This is one of the few studio recordings featuring full-chorus solos from both Clayton and Edison, but the centerpiece is Young's, which begins with a four bar break. As Buddy Tate told Richard M. Sudhalter: "That modulation, he did it right off the top of his head, completely unrehearsed. He made it sound as if it had been written. He upset everybody in the band. We couldn't wait for the thing to be over, just to ask him, 'Hey, how did you think of that?' He was real cool, just said something like 'Aw, that's just one of those things that come to me sometime.' I guess that's part of what makes him great." Using an alternating series of augmented chords, Young builds down to a low Bb, leading into a 24 bar solo that is at once brilliant and nonchalant. The trumpet solos are equally definitive and etched deeply into the memory of untold thousands for whom this recording and others like it supplied inspiration for whatever task was at hand. If you could do whatever it was that you had to do as well as they did what they did, you were in good shape.

It would be hard to think of a greater contrast in mood and means than the up-tempo let me see. Gone is the reflective relaxation. This is life in the fast lane, where notes turn on a dime and the slightest hesitation will cause the musical equivalent of a head-on collision. In 1957, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross recorded an album with Basie and his rhythm section, turning many of the band's classics into vocalese. Hendricks's lyrics did an excellent job of capturing the essence of the solos. Their version of this record, while wanting in pitch in many instances, amplifies both the Dickinson solo (notable for its clear articulation and melodic strength at a rapid tempo and also for the bridge, which became a standard part of Vic's repertoire) and Lester's as well, turning his opening, modulatory swoop into "How do you do there!" It's interesting to hear how the soloists deal with the fast tempo. Tate fluffs around it, landing a good phrase here and there. Basie articulates with the same sort of deliberation we hear in Dickinson, though he comes off more relaxed than the latter. While the issued version is more polished and better balanced, the alternate take finds the band reaching, and it's thrilling to hear. One of the fascinating things about the band with Herschel Evans was how he and Young found stylistic common denominators at times. This was all the more striking given the great differences in their basic musical orientation. One of Young's trademarks was an ascending glissando (though he also could do an incredible downward gliss, never captured on a studio recording but audible on a live jumpin' at the woodside from the summer of 1938) which he, Evans and Jack Washington tossed back and forth on the Decca doggin' around. Tate uses it to mark the last phrase of his solo, and not to be outdone with his own lick, Young takes the very same note and augments it right into his modulation. For those who knew this take in its previous incarnations (first heard on a Columbia LP then bootlegged from there), there was an awkward edit that added a beat to the second eight bars of Lester's solo. We hear it now for first time without that burp. Dickinson eschews the preliminary buzzing around he uses on the issued take for a four-square entrance that duplicates Lester's twelfth street rag, which was itself a patented Basie piano figure. This is just the tip of referential iceberg visible to us at several decades remove. Then there is also the following interpretation from Albert Murray's Stompin' The Blues: ""In all of Lester Young's finest solos (as in Ellington's always ambivalent foxtrots) there are overtones of unsentimental sadness that suggest that he was never unmindful of human vulnerability and was doing what he was doing with such imperturbable casualness not only in spite of but also as a result of all the trouble he had seen, been beset by, and somehow survived. In a sense, the elegance of earned self-togetherness and with-itness so immediately evident in all his quirky lyricism is the musical equivalent of the somewhat painful but nonetheless charismatic parade-ground strut of the campaign-weary soldier who has been there one more time and made it back in spite of hell and high water with shrapnel exploding all around him. A typical Lester Young solo on an up-tempo number, especially one of the now classic Basie recordings, is as symbolic of heroic action as any fairy-tale exploit."

________________________________________________________________________ (O)

Whatever Tab Smith's blow top lacks in melodic or structural interest is more than made up for by the intense ensemble playing and solos from the leader, Smith, Edison, Young (whose bridge is another example of his strong hook-up with Basie), and Dickinson who is already quoting his let me see solo. Honors here go to Jones, who is on fire, particularly during the second eight of the ensemble chorus that follows Young. The band seems to have rebounded definitively from the fall 1939 California sessions, and Killian was undoubtedly part of the renaissance. Smith had been a soloist and arranger with the Mills Blue Rhythm Band in the mid-30's, along with Harry Edison. It's been claimed that Smith's barrelhouse came into the Basie band via the trumpeter, and was turned into jive at five. On the alternate, which seems to be have been recorded first, given Young's false entry, Smith was given the first half-chorus solo, with Basie taking the bridge. That was reversed on the issued 78 take. Note that Dickinson plays an entirely different, non-referential closing bridge.

(P)

Evenin' is one of the most uninspired recordings the band made during this period. It's clearly a head arrangement and not a particularly good one at that. Young sounds like he's going through the motions (though in 1940 that's still something to rave about), and even makes an editorial harmonic comment at the end of the first eight of Rushing's second chorus, highlighting the off-handed if not quite sloppy nature of the band's riffing. What this recording does offer is an elegant opening Clayton melody statement and a superb balance on the rhythm section until the vocal starts.

Gibson turned the blues into an extravaganza titled the world is mad. We don't know what prompted the title, but in the summer of 1940, as Europe experienced the German occupation of France and the beginning of the Battle of Britain, it's certainly possible that someone recalled explorer Ernest Shackleton's query upon emerging from two years of isolation in the Antarctic in 1916: "Tell me, when was the war over?" to which the reply came "The war is not over. Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad."

The soloists are Basie, Tate (one of his best with the band during this period), Dickinson and Lester, who spans both sides of the original 78 issue, and then returns for a duo with Jones. It is the rhythm section, however, with Page at the helm that really distinguishes this recording. Jones once said "I learned to play the drums from Mr. Walter Page. He was a musical father to me because without him I wouldn't know how to play drums. For two years Page told me how to phrase, he taught me how to turn on what the kids now called 'dropping bombs.' Now bombs are just pure accents. The accents in drum playing are going to be here for years to come just as they've been for millions of years before now." After backing the soloists and the ensemble sections, each in a different fashion, the rhythm section follows Young's opening solo on Part Two with extremely chromatic playing from Page. He is leading, and the others follow suit, recalling Harry Edison's comment about just such moments: "It used to send chills up me every night when I'd hear the rhythm section. The whole band would be shouting.and all of a sudden.everybody would drop out but the rhythm section. Oh, my goodness, I've never heard a band swing like that." Page was the architect of the Basie style, as everyone in the band knew, and his concept was so strong that he ordained what was going to happen by the sheer power of his will. Close listening reveals some very unusual and creative drumming during the ensemble choruses that follow, stoking the fire until Young reenters for an extended gambol with Jones. The band also had an arrangement of I got rhythm (never recorded, but extant on a broadcast) that had a similar extended passage of Young playing with just the drums and band interjections. The ending of this piece, with its various alternations of horn sections and whispering drums, is reminiscent of miss thing.

(Q) Remember to put Green in the Personnel

This is the last small group session Young recorded before leaving Basie, and is notable for its two guests: Benny Goodman and his guitarist, Charlie Christian. Christian's style was based on a thorough knowledge of Young's means. They had met over a decade earlier. The guitarist was known to have driven some members of the Goodman band to distraction with his habit of singing Young solos non-stop on the band bus. Ralph Ellison painted an indelible portrait of the Young Christian first met:

" .perhaps the most stimulating influence upon Christian, and one with whom he was later to be identified, was that of a tall, intense young musician who arrived in Oklahoma City sometime in 1929 and who, with his heavy white sweater, blue stocking cap and up-and-outthrust silver saxophone, left absolutely no reed player and few young players of any instrument unstirred by the wild, excitingly original flights of his imagination. Who else but Lester Young, who with his battered horn upset the entire Negro section of the town? One of friends gave up his valved instrument for the tenor saxophone and soon ran away from home to carry the new message to Baltimore , while a good part of the efforts of the rest was spent trying to absorb and transform the Youngian style."

This session was never issued during Young's lifetime, finally coming out in the 1970's. It seems to have been a recorded rehearsal. Rumors were rife in the fall of 1940 about the bandleading difficulties that both Goodman and Basie were experiencing. Goodman, coming off of back surgery, was in the process of putting a new band together and Basie was having an increasingly fractious time with his booking agency. There were even rumors of the two bands merging, though in reality it never could have happened. Their musical identities were already so unique and divergent that neither party would have been satisfied. But one offshoot of this brief period of change is this studio session. It would be difficult to find adjectives to over-praise the results. The sound quality is superb, each of the participants was in top form and the band sounds as though they had been playing together as a unit for years.

The most intimate music comes during the one tune where Goodman sits out. It is truly an ad-lib blues, growing out of a series of four bar breaks that initiates each chorus. The entire band seems to be thinking the music more than playing it. There is no effort, just the eternal current of time emanating from the Walter Page-led rhythm section and carrying the horns along with it. An abundance of phrases unique to this session emerge from Young's horn shedding new light on his early style, which became the basis for entire movements within the jazz world. Except when he is soloing, Christian doubles up on the rhythm with acoustic guitarist Greene, and they never clash. As was his wont, Christian shows absolutely no hesitation in his improvisations. Sometimes it sounds as if he just threw a switch on and brilliance came pouring out. Young plays some quiet riffs behind his second chorus and everything is just right. Buck Clayton never makes a false move, and cultivates a sensitive, almost frail quality in his choruses. Of particular beauty are Young's pair, which weaves varying patterns of diminished chords out of and right back into the blues. Basie and rhythm section follow, leading inexorably to an example of Kansas City jazz at its flowing best. Lester and Christian set spare yet evocative riffs that let the rhythm section surround them, breathing the beat. They have become one with the quarter notes. This is a deceptively simple sounding art, somewhat like haiku. As the music fades out, Christian alludes to hooray for hollywood the theme of Goodman's last movie, hollywood hotel.

Goodman joins the band and the ante is raised even further. He had been a Young man since they first jammed at John Hammond's urging shortly after Basie came to New York in late 1936. You can heard shards of Young's innovations come out of not only Goodman's clarinet, but also in the contemporary work of Artie Shaw, who was fascinated with Young's way of phrasing so evenly while still managing to, as the English put it, "swing like the clappers."

wholly cat is the blues that Jo Jones said came from a phrase of Young's that meant "I want some money." It sounds as if Goodman called a blues, Basie started oom-pahing, then Goodman sang a few notes of the phrase, which started the ball rolling. Although the horns never agree on the exact notes of the melody, the magic happens the moment the solos start. Goodman tells Christian to go first, which he does, playing seamless lines over the course of three choruses. In 1985, I spent an evening with Goodman listening to his 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, and the music that brought him the greatest joy to listen to was not any of the "killer-dillers" or drum solos or fast, virtuosic small group numbers. It was pianist Jess Stacy's backing of his clarinet solo on the One o'clock jump. - Goodman kvelled over the dialogue he had with Stacy. It was sort of a rhythmic entente, culminating in a rhythmic unison. Goodman sought the same convergence with Basie, whom he had observed dialoguing with Young on numerous occasions. It happens as Goodman holds a high note bridging his first chorus to his second, as Basie codifies the cadence with a few well placed plinks. Clayton is next, playing it very close to the microphone, setting the stage for Young, who fills the room with his dense yet light sound. There is a photo from this session where Young is soloing in his customary horizontal pose, literally casting a shadow over Charlie Christian. These are the last extended glimpses of the Basie Young and every beat is precious. Jones switches to brushes for the tenor solo and gooses the time just a bit, as if to say, "here's our guy." Upping Christian's ante from the end of the previous tune, Young begins his second chorus with an ever so slight hint of Goodman's hit Don't be that way, and ends with a bubbling chuckle.

Both Charlie's dream and Lester's dream are the same piece, cut from the same cloth as Dickie's dream. They are in a minor key with a sudden burst of major tonality at the bridge. Young plays with a Zen-like intensity that makes it sound as though the saxophone is playing itself. There is none of the outward manifestation of physical exertion that often mars lesser efforts. It is as though he is thinking rather than playing the music. Young is so at once there and not there that it begs the question that Sonny Rollins has posed - which planet did Lester Young come from? Listen for the shouts, cries, moans and effervescent laughter he gets out of his tenor saxophone. On both tunes, he places his most extravagant thoughts in the second eight bars, using a three against four New Orleans kind of drum beat, following it on lester's dream with an unearthly sigh. Goodman starts the solo cycle, followed by Clayton, Young, Basie (with Page in the drivers seat, with all of Green's and Christian's string pulling in perfect time with his bass notes), Christian for 16 bars, Goodman's bridge and a final 8 bars of melody that the horns never quite work out. This makes it clear that the session as never intended for commercial issue. i never knew, as mentioned, was a favorite tune of the Basieites, who, by the aural evidence, delighted in finding new ways around its rather limited harmonic scheme. This version has a particularly perfect Young chorus, with an unusually straight reading (for him) of the bridge's chords. The rhythm section shifts gears for each soloist without calling attention to itself - a virtually lost art. We also hear Goodman's penchant for incessantly setting riffs, most of which help rather than hinder, but if you listen closely to Clayton's bridge, you will hear what may be Young clearing his throat in an attempt to get Goodman to lay out for eight bars. One gets the impression that Goodman was keeping Christian on a relatively short leash on this session, which is too bad. It would have been great to hear him and Lester stretch out a bit. But that is like complaining that a Chopin Mazurka is only 3 minutes long.

As wonderful as this music was and is, it wouldn't do for Goodman. Too much was left to chance. Goodman liked musical details nailed down. This was Basie's world - Benny was just living in it, and Lester was about to split.

(R)

In the early years of the band, Buck Clayton did much of the writing, the great majority of which went unrecorded. He wrote the majority of the vocal charts for Billie Holiday and many other special assignments as well. Using a relatively static set of voicings, Clayton was nonetheless able to always make a band "ring", which is a term composer/arrangers use to describe the sound when the horns are arranged in a fashion that maximizes the overtone series. That's what always gave his charts that vital, snapping sound. what's your number is yet another adaptation of standard chord changes with standard band figures played with panache. Young's tone has been turning more and more "velvety", as pianist Mel Powell once put it, since the Jones-Smith session, and with this session and the Goodman date that precedes it by two days, we encounter the final stage in its initial evolution. This is the same Young we hear on the 1941 sessions with Una Mae Carlisle and Billie Holiday, where he seems to be thinking the note as much as playing it. There are solos from Basie (boogieing on the issued take), Edison, Young of course, and Wells, though he is usurped by a ragged band passage on the fast alternate take. As wonderful as this music is, with Lester's last session with the band looming, one can't help but wish that someone (specifically John Hammond or Basie) could have arranged for a side or two featuring no one else but Lester. After all, he had been the band's premier soloist for almost four years and was never given more than two choruses in a row. No wonder he left. (S)

As the band became stronger, it was able to play arrangements that just a year earlier would have left them standing at the gate. Don Redman's dazzling reworking of five o'clock whistle is attacked with élan. This is a wonderful example of a great arranger pulling out all the stops to create a masterpiece with what in lesser hands would be overwriting. The tune was a trifle that many bands covered, including Ellington. Redman exploits its harmonic scheme (the bridge goes up a fourth from the A sections) by modulating up a fourth, from the head in Eb, to Young's chorus in Ab, the brass fanfare with the Young bridge in Db, and then returning to Eb for the out chorus, with a strutting Edison bridge; as Dicky Wells said, he could "make your insides dance" when he fanned his trumpet with a derby as he does here. All three horn sections are given a chance to strut their stuff, but it is the passages when the whole band is playing (with Killian's sparkling lead) that are the most thrilling. Columbia's engineers were now making tremendous strides in capturing the true sound of the band. They also created an acoustical shell for Young, whose luminous tone is captured better than it ever has before. You can hear the engineers turning the microphones down on the trombones for their background to Young and then turning the saxophones up for their bridge. All three takes (two complete ones and a breakdown) find Young at his very best, taking the dross of a mundane chord progression with busy, full trombone backgrounds and turning it into melodic gold. We are hearing Lester at the biggest turning point in his career. He must have known he would be leaving the band soon, and the future seemed to hold everything he ever wanted in store. Jo Jones had considered the arranger/composer Henri Woode one of his inspirations when they were both with Lloyd Hunter's band back in the early 1930's. No wonder he plays so wonderfully throughout Woode's broadway. Like Sonny Greer with Ellington, Jones created a spontaneous counterpoint to the band - what the Duke described as the pong to the band's ping. Edison and Lester are again the soloists, and if there is one Young solo with Basie that encapsulates all he brought to the band, this might very well be it. The relaxed stance, the sheer elegance of the melodies, the velvet tone and flowing rhythm all unite in an ascending and descending arc that reveals Young to be as much a master of the line as Matisse. The alternate take finds him jumping the gun during the interlude to his solo, and as good as it is, it doesn't equal the perfection of the issued version. It does have one particularly brilliant moment however: in the third measure of his last eight, Young defiantly plays a G natural over an Ab dominant chord, blithely contradicting each and every harmonic law. Edison takes his cue, laying on the same audacious interval when his solo comes. Just about a decade later, Miles Davis was shocked to hear Young do the same thing on the blues one night at Birdland. It was precisely this kind of moment that Lee Young referred to in his interview with Patricia Willard: "He loved to play jam sessions and loved not to know the tune. You know?...If he didn't know the tune, he'd say, 'Don't call the chords to me. Just play the chords and I'll play.' And I'd seen him do it many a time, you know.he said it confines you too much if you know it's a Db7 chord, you know, you start thinking of the only notes that will go in that chord, and he would say that's not what he would hear. He wanted to play other things and make it fit. And he did."

With Young's departure, the band lost the individual voice of a true genius, and things would never again be the same.