Lester Young
The Legendary Lester Young & Count Basie Session
November 9, 1936
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 began recording in their early twenties and some in their teens, which makes tracing their stylistic evolution much easier:
Louis Armstrong with King Oliver
Coleman Hawkins with Fletcher Henderson
Count Basie with Bennie Moten
Teddy Wilson with Louis Armstrong
What for us is the very beginning of his oeuvre are at the same time several steps into his own mature evolution. To fully appreciate the specifics of Lester 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 the selection 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 young Lester Young there can be heard the reinvention of the tenor saxophone as well the first recorded examples of a new vocabulary for jazz.
Count Basie was a master of stride piano, 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 spare approach to the instrument.
Moten himself was an accomplished pianist and the two 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.
Shoe Shine Boy
Carl “Tatti” Smith (tp), Lester Young (ts), Count Basie (p), Walter Page (b), Jo Jones (d)
Count 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 talked 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 versions 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. 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.
“Lester… had this remarkable ability to transmit beauty from within him to the rhythm section… He would play some lines that were so relaxed that, even at a swift tempo, the rhythm section would relax.”. — Oscar Peterson
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, and 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 Walter Page’s 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 to think orchestrally and in terms of counterpoint.
Lester Young 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 proves to be an exemplary player who responds to everything going on around him. The next episode finds Smith, Young and Basie seamlessly trading 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 1990s. The band jams out in true New Orleans fashion, before a short reprise of the trading and the coda. — Mosaic Records
