Storyville

Being Prez: The Life and Music of Lester Young

by Dave Gelly

New York : Oxford , 2007

There have been other Prez books, including an autobiographical “You've Got to Fight for Your Life.” Each of these provides some understanding of this gentle jazz giant, who had “trouble in mind” and in his life, in spite of but also because of his incomparable musical gifts. “You've got to fight for your life,” he said. Sometimes he won, often he didn't. With this new book Dave Gelly, a British author and professional musician, adds importantly to the Lester Young literature by melding what happened in the life and what was achieved in the music, showing more clearly than heretofore how the life affected the music and vice-versa.

(Just to get it out of the way, here's Gelly's comment on “Pres” vs. “Prez,” a nickname supposedly bestowed on Lester by Billie Holiday. Gelly opts for “Prez” because, he says, that's the way it's always pronounced.)

The story is told superbly. Gelly fashions a compelling narrative with smooth transitions, keeping the career phases and musical changes in tandem: the family touring band out of New Orleans, territory bands, coming to Kansas City and Basie, brutalization in the Army, back to the small group scene with a jumble of recordings, gigs and groups, fame but no security, finally declining in health, strength, and playing ability, with in the end in a seedy midtown New York hotel.

Young grew quickly to preeminence in the continual jam sessions and cutting contests all across the Midwest and West of the 1930s. Buddy Tate remembered him passing through Sherman , Texas – Lester “blew everyone away” with his phrasing, riffs, playing around the beat, and the floating, flowing tone. Gelly's technical knowledge of the tenor sax and of playing technique helps to provide fine-grain detail about Young's playing style: why, for example, he usually held his ax at a 45 degree angle: It wasn't just to be different, but also because uneven and sensitive teeth may have made for some difficulties with his embouchure.

Young settled for awhile in Minneapolis after an uncomfortable stint with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, and then heard on radio the Basie Band from the Reno Club in Kansas City . This drew him back to KC to become a long-time Basie-ite, the most successful and stable period in Lester's life, lasting from the mid-1930s until he was caught in the draft in 1944. In the Army he was broken and brutalized in body and spirit, then dishonorably discharged after a tragicomedy of military errors and racist-motivated malevolence. Then came several years with Norman Granz' Jazz at the Philharmonic. This provided some steadier money, but also constant pressure and fatigue from intense playing-travel schedules. The last 15 years were a slow, steady decline, yet with flashes now and then of his unique style and imagination.

Ironically, it was in these years that Prez acquired a large cluster of youthful musical followers and acolytes, such as Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, and Allen Eager. Al Cohn recalled: “He was the hippest thing I ever heard” (referring to the effortless harmonic and rhythmic invention in a contest with Coleman Hawkins). “Prez was the reason I became a saxophone player.” But these “copycats” made Lester nervous; “they're picking the bones while the body's still warm.” On being informed that someone else “sounds just like you,” he asked bleakly, “Then who am I?”

Gelly cites Lester's solos from his peak in the Basie years to explicate the special genius of his imagination. On such Basie standards as “Shoe Shine Boy” and “Jumpin' at the Woodside “… [His] actual notes are simple, but they are deployed with such rhythmic cunning that every phrase contains a surprise.”

And about that fluid, floating tone: Basie tenor man Herschel Evans once asked Lester, “Why don't you buy an alto, man? You only got an alto tone.” Prez (tapping his forehead): “There's things going on up here, man. Some of you guys are all belly.”

In the end, Lester Young was done in by his gentle nature. He had said, “You gotta fight for your life.” But he didn't want to, and couldn't. His personality, says Gelly, “… was an ambivalent mixture, suggesting, among other things, regret, longing, uncertainty, wry humor, and hope diluted by experience.”

Yet this view of himself and the world shaped his music. Gelly believes that Young “unwittingly succeeded in extending and deepening the language of jazz…No other musician's work has ever been so emotionally transparent, or so devoid of rhetorical defenses.” He draws an analogy between Lester's playing and the dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who was great “not because he makes a difficult step look easy, but he makes and easy step look interesting.” Near the end, accompanying his adored Lady Day on a CBS-TV jazz show: Lester plays “a single twelve-bar chorus of such purity and restraint that the despair contained within it shines like a cold moon through ragged clouds. She gazes back, smiling sadly.”

This is a masterful, memorable book, skillfully melding the stories of the music and the life, increasing our understanding of both.

- Charlton Price

Miles Davis, Miles Smiles , and the Invention of Post Bop

Jeremy Yudkin

Bloomington , Indiana University Press, 2008

The author summarizes his musicologically meticulous study of mid-career Miles in this part of a concluding paragraph:

Davis 's renaissance in the mid-1960s was catalyzed by his finding younger players whose dedication, open-mindedness, and extraordinary musical skills reanimated his own. He…thought his way through to a new approach to the music…that was abstract and intense in the extreme, with space created for the rhythmic and coloristic independence of the drummer -- an approach that incorporated modal and chordal harmonies, flexible form, structured choruses, melodic variation, and free improvisation. It was freedom anchored in form. We can call it post bop.

Okay, let's call it whatever. However, what has Professor Yudkin said here that's really new or significant? To me, his list of the ingredients of the Miles Smiles recording reads like a capsule description of any style of jazz.

Disclosure: This reviewer belongs to that group of jazzpersons Woody Herman called “civilians.” I don't blow. I can't read. I don't know “diminished” from diminuendo. But I think I know what jazz is when I hear it (cf. knowing porn when one sees it). I've been entranced by this music since big-band BG, Ellington, Basie, and because I was present in 1945 at the creation of bop with Diz, Bird, Max Roach, etc. on 52 nd Street .

So I'm glad I was asked to do this review. Because I've come lately to a fuller appreciation of Miles, Shorter, Trane, and what has happened in the jazz mainstream since classic bop. These days, more than I used to, I really dig Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, even Bitches Brew.

Professor Yudkin's scholarly analysis, however, doesn't add to my enjoyment and understanding of what's what in this middle- Miles period. His opening chapters are a competent summary of how Miles evolved from his apprenticeship on 52 nd Street in the 1940s to a fallow period in the early 1960s. (This ground was covered in greater depth and with more cogent insights, in my opinion, in Richard Carr's Miles Davis On and Off the Record , reviewed in these pages last year.)

Then comes his dissection, in exhaustive detail, in two long central chapters, of Miles Smiles. He presents measure-by-measure descriptions (not really analysis) of all six tracks, as well as numerous transcriptions of solos by each quintet member. All this is to build the case that this recording is a breakthrough -- something truly fresh and new by Miles Davis as a musician and group leader, and something new in jazz.

Miles Smiles was the first recording, in two sessions of first takes, by the quintet of Miles' trumpet, Wayne Shorter's sax, Ron Carter's bass, Herbie Hancock's piano, and Tony Williams' drums. Yudkin gives special attention to the contributions by Shorter, and contrasts the Shorter-Davis relationship with the earlier bond between Davis and Coltrane during the Kind of Blue quintet of the late 1950s.

So, why not do what I'm doing about Miles Smiles ? Just put it on your player and let the music flow over and through you. See if you believe, as Yudkin asserts and I agree, that what this group created in this 1966 recording was important and satisfying. I'd guess that the more you've lived with and love the whole of jazz, the more revisiting this music will reward you.

- Charlton Price

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