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Swing-Era Dossier

Lester Young

1909 – 1959

Born

August 27, 1909, Woodville, Mississippi. Given name Lester Willis Young. Raised in the touring Young Family Band — a carnival/minstrel-circuit outfit led by his father Willis Handy Young, who taught him trumpet, violin, and drums before he settled on saxophone. Younger brother Lee Young became a drummer; the family worked tent shows and vaudeville across the Southwest.

Died

March 15, 1959, New York City, at the Alvin Hotel — across the street from Birdland, the club named in his honor — age 49. Cause: internal bleeding and organ failure from chronic alcoholism and malnutrition, the end of a long decline. He died within roughly a day of flying home from a Paris engagement (the Blue Note, with Kenny Clarke), where he'd barely eaten. Avoid the "died straight off the plane" oversimplification — the cause was cumulative, not a single acute event.

Instruments

Tenor saxophone (primary). Clarinet secondary — a famously light, dry, almost liquid tone on a metal clarinet (the 1938 Kansas City Six sides); his clarinet was stolen in 1939 and he largely dropped it until ~1957, when Norman Granz gave him a new one. Started on trumpet, violin, and drums in the family band before switching to sax (~age 13); moved permanently from alto to tenor in Art Bronson's Bostonians (~age 18).

Nicknames

  • "Prez" / "Pres" (short for "the President") — coined by Billie Holiday, who thought him the greatest tenor saxophonist and paired the title with her admiration for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, "the greatest man." A genuine intimate nickname from his closest musical partner.
  • He in turn coined "Lady Day" for Holiday — the two traded the names that stuck to both of them for life.
  • A prolific nickname-giver in general; handed out names across the jazz world.

Bands / years

  • Young Family Band — carnival/minstrel circuit, childhood to ~1927–28.
  • Art Bronson's Bostonians (late 1920s) — switched permanently to tenor.
  • Walter Page's (Original) Blue Devils (1932) — left home for good; territory-band years.
  • Bennie Moten and King Oliver bands — short stints, early 1930s.
  • Count Basie — first stint (~1934), in Kansas City.
  • Fletcher Henderson Orchestra (1934, brief and unhappy) — left Basie to replace Coleman Hawkins, who'd gone to Europe. The band (and Henderson's wife Leora) pushed him to reproduce Hawkins's big, heavy tenor; his light approach didn't fit and he lasted only months — asking for a letter confirming he wasn't fired.
  • Andy Kirk band — ~six months after Henderson.
  • Count Basie — main stint (1936–1940) — his golden period; recording debut 1936, left late 1940.
  • Count Basie — return (Dec 1943–1944) — ~10 months, until the Army.
  • U.S. Army (1944–45) — drafted, court-martialed, detention barracks, dishonorable discharge (see below).
  • Jazz at the Philharmonic / Norman Granz (1946 onward) — toured and recorded extensively (Verve) for over a decade.
  • His own small groups from the mid/late 1940s.

Active

~1928–1959 (first pro territory-band work to death; recording career 1936–1959).

Signature tunes

"Shoe Shine Boy" and "Lady Be Good" — the Oct 9, 1936 Jones-Smith Inc. session (a Basie small group), his celebrated recording debut; "Lester Leaps In" (1939); "Taxi War Dance" (1939); the Billie Holiday small-group sessions (1937–41); "D.B. Blues" (1945, his post-Army comeback).

Famous compositions (composition split — he's more often credited with recordings he played than tunes he wrote):

  • Wrote: "Lester Leaps In" (1939) — his signature feature, a contrafact on "I Got Rhythm" rhythm changes; "Tickle Toe" (1940, for the Basie book); "Jumpin' with Symphony Sid" (music, 1947) — titled for NYC jazz radio DJ "Symphony Sid" Torin; King Pleasure later added the hit vocalese lyric (1953), so credits sometimes list him, but the tune is Young's; "D.B. Blues" (1945), named for the Army Detention Barracks.
  • Did NOT write (signature recordings, not his tunes): "Lady Be Good" (Gershwin), "Shoe Shine Boy" (Cahn–Chaplin), and the Basie band numbers ("Taxi War Dance," "Jumpin' at the Woodside," etc.). The common trap is listing his famous solos as his compositions — they aren't.

Interesting facts

  • The sideways horn. He held his tenor up and out to the right at a near-horizontal 45-degree angle, "like a flute" — his visual trademark. The why is disputed: one account is that he tilted it to stand out beside section-mate Herschel Evans; another blames a cramped Reno Club bandstand.
  • He invented the hipster's dictionary. Widely credited with popularizing "cool" as approval, "you dig?", "bread" for money, and private slang like "bells" (excellent) and "eyes" (wanting something). His argot seeped into beat and hipster speech.
  • The pork pie hat → Mingus elegy. His flat-brimmed pork pie hat was so identified with him that Charles Mingus wrote "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" (Mingus Ah Um, 1959) as an elegy right after his death.
  • The Army trauma — the central wound. Drafted 1944 and, unlike many white musicians, not placed in a band unit. A locker search turned up marijuana and barbiturates; he was court-martialed, did roughly a year in detention barracks, and got a dishonorable discharge (1945). Sweets Edison: "The army just took all his spirit." He drank heavily and withdrew for the rest of his life, and memorialized it in "D.B. Blues."
  • He is the fountainhead of "cool." His light, vibrato-light, behind-the-beat tenor — the antithesis of Hawkins — birthed the cool school: Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Herbie Steward (Woody Herman's "Four Brothers" sound), Lee Konitz, the West Coast lineage. This is his BRIDGE TO COOL.
  • The Hawkins counter-pole. He and Coleman Hawkins were the two opposing models of jazz tenor — Hawkins big, vertical, heavy vibrato; Prez light, horizontal, linear. The 1934 Henderson debacle is the moment the styles collided head-on.
  • Lady Day and Prez. His kinship with Billie Holiday (he lived a while at her mother's house) produced landmark 1930s vocal-instrumental dialogue and the mutual nicknames that defined both of them.
  • The 1957 reunion. On CBS's The Sound of Jazz (Dec 8, 1957), an ailing, seated Young played one famously tender chorus behind Holiday on "Fine and Mellow" — their last great meeting on film. Nat Hentoff: "the purest blues I have ever heard."
  • He died months before she did. Young died March 15, 1959; Holiday died July 17, 1959 — four months later. Leonard Feather reported she said after his funeral, "I'll be the next one to go" (treat as anecdote; the four-month gap is fact).

Sources

Clips