BN-LA-456-H2

Lester Young - The Aladdin Sessions

Released - 1975

Recording and Session Information

Los Angeles, CA, December, 1945
Vic Dickenson, trombone; Lester Young, tenor sax; Dodo Marmarosa, piano; Freddie Green, guitar; Red Callender, bass; Henry Tucker Green, drums.

123A | IM-3563 D.B. Blues
123B | IM-3564 Lester Blows Again
124A | IM-3565 These Foolish Things
124B | IM-3566 Jumpin' At Mesner's

Los Angeles, CA, January, 1946
Howard McGhee, trumpet; Vic Dickenson, trombone; Willie Smith, alto sax; Lester Young, tenor sax; Wesley Jones, piano; Curtis Counce, bass; Johnny Otis, drums.

127A | IM-3567 It's Only A Paper Moon
127B | IM-3568 After You've Gone
128A | IM-3569 Lover Come Back To Me
128B | IM-3583 Jammin' With Lester

Los Angeles, CA, August, 1946
Lester Young, tenor sax; Joe Albany, piano; Irving Ashby, guitar; Red Callender, bass; Chico Hamilton, drums.

137A | IM-3584 You're Driving Me Crazy
137B | IM-3585 New Lester Leaps In
138A | IM-3587 Lester's Be-Bop Boogie
138B | IM-3586 She's Funny That Way

Chicago, IL, October, 1946
Shorty McConnell, trumpet; Lester Young, tenor sax; Argonne Thornton, piano; Fred Lacey, guitar; Rodney Richardson, bass; Lyndell Marshall, drums.

46 | IM-3570 Sunday (as S.M. Blues)
47 | IM-3588 S.M. Blues
48 | IM-3571 Jumpin' With Symphony Sid
49 | IM-3573 No Eyes Blues
50 | IM-3572 Sax-O-Be-Bop (as Sax-O-Beep)
51 | IM-3574 On The Sunny Side Of The Street

Radio Recorders, Los Angeles, CA, February 18, 1947
Shorty McConnell, trumpet; Lester Young, tenor sax; Argonne Thornton, piano; Fred Lacey, guitar; Ted Briscoe, bass; Roy Haynes, drums.

121-1 | IM-3577 Easy Does It
122-1 Movin' With Lester
124-3 | IM-3575 Jumpin' At The Woodside

NYC, April 2, 1947
Shorty McConnell, trumpet; Lester Young, tenor sax; Argonne Thornton, piano; Fred Lacey, guitar; Ted Briscoe, bass; Roy Haynes, drums.

141-1 | IM-3578 I'm Confessin'
142-1 Lester Smooths It Out
143-1 | IM-3582 Just Coolin'

WOR Studios, NYC, December 29, 1947
Lester Young, tenor sax; Gene DiNovi, piano; Chuck Wayne, guitar; Curly Russell, bass; Tiny Kahn, drums.

25-1021 | IM-3579 East Of The Sun (as East Of Suez)
25-1022 | IM-3580 The Sheik Of Araby
25-1023 | IM-3581 Something To Remember You By

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
D. B. Blues	C. Beaks-L. Young	December 1945
Lester Blows Again	L. Young	December 1945
These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You)	H. Link-H. Marvell-J. Strachey	December 1945
Jumpin' At Mesners	L. Young	December 1945
It's Only A Paper Moon	B. Rose-E.Y. Harburg-H. Arlen	January 1946
After You've Gone	H. Creamer-T. Layton	January 1946
Side Two
Lover, Come Back To Me!	O. Hammerstein II-S. Romberg	January 1946
Jammin' With Lester	L. Young	January 1946
Lester Leaps In	L. Young	August 1946
You're Driving Me Crazy	L. Young	August 1946
She's Funny That Way	C. N. Daniels-R. A. Whiting	August 1946
Lester's Be-Bop	L. Young	October 1946
Side Three
Sunday	Krueger-Cohn-Stein-Miller	October 1946
S. M. Blues		October 1946
No Eyes Blues	L. Young	October 1946
Jumpin' With Symphony Sid	C. Beaks-L. Young	October 1946
Sax-O-Be-Bop	L. Young	October 1946
On The Sunny Side Of The Street	J. McHugh-D. Fields	October 1946
Movin' With Lester	L. Young	February 18 1947
Lester Smooths It Out	L. Young	February 18 1947
Side Four
Jumpin' At The Woodside	C. Basie	February 18 1947
Easy Does It	L. Young	April 2 1947
Just Cooling	L. Young	April 2 1947
I'm Confessin' (That I Love You)	Neiburg-Daughtery-Reynolds	April 2 1947
Sheik Of Araby	Wheeler-Smith-Snyder	December 29 1947
East Of The Sun	B. Bowman	December 29 1947
Something To Remember You By	A. Schwartz-H. Dietz	December 29 1947

Liner Notes

LESTER YOUNG

"Prez got that soft tone, so different from Coleman Hawkins', because that's the way he wanted everything in life," a former Lester Young sideman told me many years ago. "I got him a pair of shoes once, and one day I came in and found them in the wastebasket. Then I realized they were hard-soled shoes, and he would always wear moccasins or slippers. It had to be soft and gentle or Prez wanted no part of it."

The story symbolized much that was the essence of Lester Young as human being and as musician. He was a basically gentle, withdrawn and lonely man who never quite found out how to cope with a world in which he had to deal with one night stands, fleabag hotels, booking agents, drunks in sleazy clubs, and the racial segregation that came to a horrifying climax for him during his experience in the U.S. Army.

Lester Willis Young was born August 27, 1909 in Woodville, Miss. His father, Billy Young, was a fine musician who had studied at the Tuskegee Institute and who traveled with carnival minstrel shows. Lester was an infant when the family moved to New Orleans, where he and his brother Lee and sister Irma all studied music to prepare for their participation in what would become a family band. Lester played drums first, but also studied violin, trumpet for a while, and alto sax.

The Youngs went North when Prez was about 11, settling in Minneapolis and touring through Minnesota, the Dakotas and Kansas, with Lester doubling as drummer and handbill carrier for the minstrel show. He was 18 when he quit the family group and joined a band known as Art Bronson's Bostonians, playing mostly baritone and alto sax. Benny Carter once told me: "When I was on the road with McKinney's Cotton Pickers in 1932, we hit Minneapolis and somebody told us about a wonderful alto player in a local club. I went to hear Prez and was enraptured. It was the greatest thing I'd ever heard. He had a definition and a mastery that I don't think he ever felt necessary to display on the tenor."

For several years Lester jobbed around — Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, the road, and some rough times with scuffling bands like Walter Page's Blue Devils. "The Blue Devils were really getting bruised," he told me, "playing to audiences of three people. One time all our instruments were impounded and they took us right to the railroad tracks and told us to get out of town. There we were, sitting with some hobos, and they told us how to grab a train. We got to Cincinnati, no loot, no horns, all raggedy and dirty, and we were trying to make it to Kansas City."

Lester had bought all the great Frank Trumbauer-Bix Beiderbecke records. ("Frank was my idol.") He liked the sound of Trumbauer's C Melody saxophone and his approach to melody. On tenor he was moved by Bud Freeman's singular timbre and phrasing. Since the reigning king of the tenor was Coleman Hawkins, and since Lester after settling for tenor as his main horn developed a style far less bold and extrovert, he faced constant opposition. After his first incumbency with Count Basie in 1934, he left the band to replace Coleman Hawkins in the Fletcher Henderson band. "I was rooming at Fletcher's house. Mrs. Henderson would come in every morning and that bitch would start playing me them records with Hawkins and everything, and I would listen, because I didn't want to hurt nobody's feelings."

Armed with a letter from Henderson confirming that he had not been fired, Prez soon went back to Kansas City. Six months later he rejoined Basie, was heard by John Hammond, and on Oct. 9, 1936 made his first record date, four tunes cut in Chicago under Hammond's aegis with Basie, a trumpeter, a rhythm section and Jimmy Rushing. Three months later the full Basie band cut its first session in New York, and the world soon learned that there was a new way to utilize the tenor.

As Dexter Gordon put it, "Hawkins had done everything possible and was the master of the horn, but when Prez appeared we all started listening to him alone. Prez had an entirely new sound, one that we had been waiting for, the first one to really tell a story on the horn."

The late Charles Edward Smith, analyzing the singular manner in which Lester's story was told, spoke of a "strong, never heavy, sensuously supple style, with scarcely a ripple of vibrato. This preference for a breathless (but alive) vibrato rather than a breathy one may have helped him to work out what came to be called linear improvisation. This does not imply a lack of complexity. Linear improvisation was a triumph over the two-bar or four-bar phrase, rhythmically and melodically."

These characteristics stood out in bolder relief for the student who compared a typical solo by Prez in those early years with the recorded work of Coleman Hawkins. The arrival of Lester, as a key figure during the rise of the Basie band, happened to coincide with the second half of Hawkins' five year expatriation in Europe, which may have been a factor in Lester's being able to draw more attention to his innovative experiments than would have been possible had Hawkins been dominating the American scene.

It wasn't long after Hawkins returned from Europe, in the summer of 1939, that the image of these two antithetical stylists came more sharply into focus with the unprecedented and unpredictable success of Coleman's Body and Soul. This masterpiece of melodic improvisation was marked by the very qualities Lester had avoided or transcended: the big warm breathy sound, the conspicuous vibrato, and an approach to the song that was vertical rather than horizontal. This is not to say that Lester in any way neglected the harmonic thrust of a theme, or that Hawkins' work was totally lacking in linearity; it was a matter of degree and proportion.

Different though these two giants were in their conception of jazz, obviously certain common elements could be detected. In fact, when one compares either man with the starkly contrasted styles of tenor saxophone prevalent in the '60s and '70s — the Coltranes, the Gato Barbieris, the Albert Aylers — it becomes evident that fox all the disparities, Young and Hawkins could best be regarded as complementary products of the same branch on the historical tree. Nor was there any sense of jealousy; despite the incident involving Fletcher and Mrs. Henderson, Lester was a Hawkins fan like everyone else at that point in the evolution of jazz.

One of his colleagues in the Basie saxophone section was Herschel Evans. a tenor man very much in the Hawkins tradition. Although they occasionally engaged in so-called battles on the bandstand, as the ex-Basie drummer, Jo Jones, recalls: "Actually Lester had the greatest respect and admiration for Herschel. When Herschel died in 1939, it was just like a twin dying. Soon afterwards Lester would be so restless that he would keep his coat and hat underneath the music stand, and other guys would have to pull him back down to his seat to keep playing." It was after Evans' death, according to Jones, that Prez began drinking heavily. Lester felt obliged to play the roles both of his departed colleague and himself. "He had a dual thing going — he'd play four bars of himself and four for Herschel."

By the time Lester left Basie in December of 1940, he had been firmly established as the most vital influence since Hawkins on the course of the tenor in jazz. His break with the band typified his quixotic personality: he refused to show up for a recording session on Friday the Thirteenth. Not long afterward, since those were the days when famous sidemen invariably went on to form bands or combos of their own, he led a short-lived group at Kelly's Stable on 52nd Street. Later he teamed with his brother, drummer Lee Young, in a sextet that played at Café Society and in California.

For all the adulation and publicity that surrounded him, he simply was not a born leader, and these ventures were doomed to failure. The brothers' partnership was dissolved early in 1943 and soon Lester, in a strange irony, found himself working as a sideman in a band led by a capable but far less significant tenor player, Al Sears.

In December of 1943, he rejoined Basie as abruptly as he had left, running into Jo Jones at a 52nd Street bar. "I bought him a short beer," Jones recalls, "and told him 'Now don't forget we're at the Lincoln Hotel. Be at work at seven.' And at seven o'clock there he was."

On the second time around the association was less eventful, since it took place during the union strike and there is no legacy of it on records. Less than a year later, Prez was out of the Basie band forever, and in the U.S. Army. His experience in the service was a psychological disaster. In the words of Charlie Carpenter, who was Lester's manager for more than a decade, "They wouldn't let him play in the band, and he had his hair long and they made him cut it off. Maybe that's why later on he let it grow so long that it began to curl up and he told me he wanted to braid it real long down his neck like an Indian."

After undergoing minor surgery in an Army hospital, and after admitting on a routine paper that he had smoked pot, Lester was arrested under trumped-up charges. (A white Major from Louisiana had seen a photograph of Prez' white second wife,) A five year sentence was later reduced to one year and Prez was sent to a detention barracks at Camp Gordon, Ga. He was terrified, tried to escape, but finding this impossible, settled for psychic escape, in the form of liquid cocaine, mixed with 180 proof alcohol from surgical supplies. A friend, a member of the dental corps, helped him ferment these ingredients, but the MPs found the still. Lester's sentence was extended by several months, and the agony ended with a dishonorable discharge which he was too weary to appeal.

Back on 52nd Street, he found a jazz world in a state of upheaval. Bebop had taken over, and a generation of young tenor players had begun to absorb Lester's ideas from his recordings, "He came back looking for some roots," said pianist Billy Taylor, "and he failed to find them, You could see him wondering where to turn."

Musically, Prez found little time for his imitators. He preferred the easy listening of records by Frank Sinatra or Dick Haymes. Whatever frustrations he may have suffered were alleviated to a degree by the mere fact of his return to civilian life. Soon after his release Lester went to Southern California, where he signed a contract with a company originally known as Philo, later as Aladdin Records, All the records in this album are the products of sessions he made for that company, and are reissued here in chronological order. During the period covered by these dates, Lester divided his time between the long association with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic and intermittent night club gigs, leading his own combo.

The first session, cut not long after his arrival in Los Angeles, reunited him with two former Basie colleagues: Vic Dickenson, who had worked with the band in 1940, and the perennial Freddie Green. Dodo Marmarosa. who had recently left Artie Shaw, was one of the most brilliant young bop pianists, only 19 at the time of this date with Prez. Bassist Red Callender had been a member of Lester's group in 1942. The procedure on this date would be indicative of the pattern followed on almost all Lester's sessions as a leader. The material, usually deciced on at the last minute, consisted simply of familiar standards or variations on long-established chord sequences. DB Blues, for example, is a 12-12-8-12 format, a blues with an I Got Rhythm release. Lester Blows Again uses the ubiquitous Honeysuckle Rose harmonic foundation, and Jumpin' at Mesner's is one of the innumerable performances Prez fashioned on the 32 bar I Got Rhythm structure. It's interesting to note that on the single ballad of this session, These Foolish Things, Lester immediately delineates his own melody, referring infrequently to the original line.

The next four tracks represented something of a departure. There was a four horn front line, and even arrangements of sorts that enabled Howard McGhee, Vic Dickenson and Willie Smith to provide Lester with a background here and there, notably on It's Only A Paper Moon and Lover Come Back To Me. The rhythm section, whose members included Johnny Otis on drums (this was several years before Otis made the transition to rhythm and blues, an area in which he would be a predominant figure of the '50s), cooks effectively on After You've Gone. This track, like many on these sessions, comes to a somewhat rough ending, since Prez rarely bothered to indicate which would be the final chorus, or to cue anyone into a prepared coda. Lover Come Back To Me is another illustration of his facility for jumping straight into an original melodic concept without so much as a nod to the song per se.

The third session is perhaps one of the best remembered, not only for the strength of its personnel, but for the material used. Joe Albany, like Dodo Marmarosa, was a somewhat legendary figure and one of the few really gifted white bebop pianists. When last heard from, he was still gigging somewhere in Europe. Irving Ashby, at that time freelancing in Los Angeles, soon afterward joined the King Cole trio, and would later be heard with an early Oscar Peterson trio. Red Callender returned on bass, and the drummer was another returnee from Lester's own 1941 group, Chico Hamilton, newly back in Los Angeles after four years in the Army.

New Lester Leaps In is a remake with substantial differences of the line Prez had recorded on the Count Basie Kansas City Seven date in 1939. You're Driving Me Crazy also has Basie overtones, since it was the chords of this tune that provided the basis for the jazz instrumental Moten Swing. She's Funny That Way is a superb example of Lester's languid ballad style. In contrast, Lester's Be-Bop Boogie is a curious indication of the then pervasive influence of Lionel Hampton, whose Hamp's Boogie Woogie was a big hit of the mid-40s.

Side Three comprises eight tracks on which Lester is heard with members of his touring combo, rather than the pickup bands featured in the previous dates. His frequent companion in the front line was Maurice (Shorty) McConnell, a trumpeter who had worked in the Earl Hines band in 1942-3, and with Billy Eckstine from 1944-6. Argonne (Dense) Thornton, also known as Sadik Hakim, was a self-taught pianist from Minnesota who had come to New York in 1944 and worked with Ben Webster for 15 months before joining Prez. Rodney Richardson was a member of the Basie band from 1943-6. The other two musicians were adequate performers of no particular distinction. The use of Fred Lacey, strumming a little too loudly on rhythm guitar on such tracks as S.M, Blues. apparently indicated a desire on Lester's part to recreate the role Freddie Green had played with Basie.

These tracks are successful in inverse proportion to the prominence accorded to the sidemen, though McConnell's muted solo is quite agreeable on Sunday and Thornton goes through typical bebop motions on S N. Blues. Its title notwithstanding. No Eves Blues is another I Got Rhythm riff. The best known product of this session was Jumping with Symphony Sid It was named for, and adopted as the radio theme of, Symphony Sid Torin, the one disc jockey in New York City who had jumped on the modern jazz bandwagon, and who for a while aired his nightly radio show from a booth in Birdland, the club at which Prez frequently worked. This simple blues figure became a jazz standard and enabled Prez to gain a little more recognition in his lonely career as a leader.

Even more interesting musically are Sax-O-Re-Bop, a blues in the slow tempo at which Lester excelled, and an equally relaxed understated treatment of On The Sunny Side of the Street. For the next four tracks, the band remained the same except that Ted Briscoe took over on bass and Roy Haynes, a 21-year-old drummer from Boston, fresh out of Luis Russell's band, had begun his two year tour of duty with Prez.

Once again the material is very basic: Movin' With Lester, an uptempo 32 bar piece; Lester Moves It Out, a moderato blues; Jumpin' at the Woodside, a re-evocation of Basie's 1938 recording; Easy Does It and Just Cooling, followed by a slow and mournful treatment of I'm Confessin', a song that went back to 1929, and to early versions by Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong.

Lester continued to play night clubs with his combo throughout 1948, but for almost that entire year was unable to record because of a second union ban. When this was lifted on December 15, Ed Mesner of Aladdin, for whom I had produced a few dates, called me from California to ask if I could assemble a New York session with Prez. He didn't want to use the organized group, which at that point had deteriorated somewhat. It was suggested that I round up some of the better jazzmen on the 52nd Street scene to provide Prez with a sympathetic rhythm section. This was easily accomplished, since the clubs were teeming with talented youngsters. Pianist Gene DiNovi and guitarist Chuck Wayne were working together at the Three Deuces (Wayne in 1949 would gain fame as the original guitarist with the George Shearing quintet); Curley Russell had played on the first Dizzy Gillespie combo dates and had gigged around New York with Bird, Miles and Getz. Norman (Tiny) Kahn was a formidable drummer and arranger, then 24 years old, who died suddenly of a heart attack before his 30th birthday.

I recall the session as a strange, less than comfortable afternoon, mainly because Prez didn't care to discuss what tunes would be played, how or when they would begin or end. Fortunately, the sidemen had sensitive antennae. East of the Sun in particular, with the introduction by Wayne and an exceptionally lyrical contribution by Lester, was one side to which, when we heard it back in the control room, even the laconic Prez reacted with discernible pleasure.

The Sheik of Araby has a crisp, clean solo by DiNovi and good work by Wayne; Prez seems well at ease with the support given him by this rhythm team. Something To Remember You By, despite its raggedy ending, is a suitably pensive vehicle for the Lestorian sound.

It was not long after these Aladdin sessions that the real disintegration of Lester Young became disconcertingly evident, physically and artistically. Writing of his reunion with Basie on a concert package tour of the band, I wrote that "his performance was a frightening, distorted image of his past, inspiring laughter among the musicians. As he played absurd, audience-taunting figures, some laughed with Prez, some laughed at him." Still his obsession with beauty remained undimmed. There was a time when he discovered an injured bird and took it to the night club with him. Nursing it between sets, he admired its loveliness, and pitied its helplessness. Later, when the bird disappeared, he explained that he had given it a small nip of bourbon to provide it with the strength to fly.

After the failure of his second marriage, Lester tried for a third time, attempting to settle down to something resembling a normal home life in St. Albans, Long Island. The marriage produced two children and there were some indications of a return to stability. But the temptations around him and the rigors of American society were too much for his shattered psyche. Several times, beginning in 1955, Lester was hospitalized, suffering from malnutrition, and at least once for a nervous breakdown supposedly triggered by alcoholism, After one hospitalization in 1958, he left his family and moved into a seedy hotel at 52nd street and Broadway. He now had a girl friend who endeavoured to persuade him to eat rather than drink, but in spite of her ministrations, his physical condition declined fast, he couldn't work, he couldn't even get out of bed unaided. The girl and Dr. Luther Cloud, a psychologist-physician, tried to make him eat, and diluted the gin with water, Prez spent much of his time listening to records of pop singers, staring vacantly out of his window at Birdland across the street. He gobbled up vitamin pills and tranquilizers, drank wine instead of gin and bourbon, and began to regain some of the lost weight.

Late in 1958, he was well enough to attend a tribute staged in his honor at Birdland. Lester cut the cake prepared for the occasion, holding the knife with one hand, while with the other he fingered his horn to play I Didn't Know What Time It Was as an expression of his surprise.

Plans were made for a booking in Paris. Lester was eager to go there, for he had pleasant recollections of earlier visits with JATP. But by the time he was due to depart, his drinking was again out of control. When Dr. Cloud tried to reassure him with such remarks as "We all have our worries," Prez bitterly replied, "You have no problems. You're a white man.'

He left for Paris in January 1959. Somehow he struggled through the job there, but because the hotel forbade him to cook meals in his room, he forgot to eat. He was too tense to sleep, too weary to travel. It took him a week to summon up the strength required for the plane trip home. On a cable dated Friday March 13 he advised his girl friend that he was leaving for New York.

He had barely made the trip from the airport to the hotel when he was back to the old routine, staring at Birdland, playing records endlessly, lifting a bottle feebly. By midnight he had consumed a fifth of vodka, and most of a pint of bourbon, but hadn't eaten. At 1 a.m. on March 15, lying in his bed semi-conscious, he began to move his mouth as if playing his horn. The girl, worried, telephoned for help, but by the time the doctor arrived Lester Young had been dead for 20 minutes.

Four days later, Billie Holiday and I went together to a funeral home on East 52nd Street. Billie, who had once been the love of Lester's life during their days together in the Basie band, and who had given Prez his nickname, was herself visibly weakened and upset. "I'll be the next one to go," she told me. Billie survived Lester by just four months.

It is never easy to be a rebel in any of the arts. It was triply difficult, in the 1930s and 1940s, to be black and a jazzman and a rebel. Lester also had to face the accumulating traumas of parental discipline, difficulties in his love life, and the hostility he encountered even among some fellow musicians who found his music and his personality unacceptably odd. During most of his career he retreated into a shell, protected alternately by stimulants and depressants, shielded from the real world in a variety of ways. His strange ways of communicating verbally (he coined many terms that later became common parlance) were as famous in their day as the pork pie hat he wore in Norman Granz's famous Jammin' the Blues.

Lester was the great maverick of an apocalyptic era in the evolution of jazz. Superficially he had much in common with Charlie Parker, for both had to face much the same problems, yet Bird for extended periods showed himself conquering his frustrations, even of going through conventional social motions.

It is paradoxical that when he was asked who were his favorite tenor players, for a "musicians' musicians" poll, Lester named four men, only one of whom, Stan Getz, was conspicuously influenced by him. The others were all of the pre-Prez school: Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Paul Gonsalvez. Getz, today the only survivor among those five, went on to develop a style and sound of his own; yet he would be the first to admit that had there been no Lester Young, he along with numberless other young musicians would have been deprived of a sense of direction.

His legacy can be found to this day in the work of these young men who had turned to Prez for their inspiration, but most vitally of all it can be encountered in the recorded works of the man himself. In mixed pleasure and regret, we find that a society which failed to accord him full recognition in life now belatedly honors him by restoring his unique sounds, on records at least, for the benefit of a generation that was not lucky enough to hear in person the very special, bittersweet brand of melancholy that was Lester Willis Young.

LEONARD FEATHER
(Author of From Satchmo To Mlles, Stein Day, which includes an extended essay on Lester Young,)