“...Thus any affirmation of the present moment points far beyond the present.”
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| https://youtu.be/tgjXG8MY2BM i’ll Get By, 1944 - Art Tatum piano |
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night...
from Augeries of Innocence,
William Blake
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
from Mutability, Percy Bysshe Shelley
"I asked the brothers about the primary influence on their music:
"Lester Young,” Albert (Ayler) answered. “The way he connected his phrases. The freedom with which he flowed. And his warm tone. When he and Billie Holiday got together, there was so much beauty. These are the kind of people who produce a spiritual truth beyond this civilization."
“...Thus any affirmation of the present moment points far beyond the present.”
Walter Kaufman on Nietzsche’s emphasis of amor fati (love of fate).
Lady Day ~ 1915-1959 ~ so named by Prez
Prez ~ 1911-1959 ~ so named by Lady Day
All of Me ~ Billie Holiday with Lester Young (alternate take with Prez solo, 1940)
https://youtu.be/GOOoUWM31_Y
Foolin’ Myself ~ Billie Holiday with Lester Young (1937)
https://youtu.be/g4_2hLzHEqQ
Keynote session of December 28, 1943 - quartet recordings of Lester Young with Sid Catlett on drums, Slam Stewart bass, and Johnny Guerniera piano.
"...and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing"
Frank O'Hara, from The Day Lady Died (1959)
Lester Young:
”He was playing a saxophone that looked as though it should really have been in the shop. Around the keys it was turning green in spots and there was a rubber band or two around some of the keys, and we said, “How can he do this?” And then we looked at his attitude towards the music. It was like the horn only became an instrument through which the soul of Lester Young was expressed, it was like a transmitter, you know. When he’d still be up to play I would look around, and people would slow down their dancing just so that 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 the 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 tenorplaying. He was the one who did it. He showed another way to go.”
Thad Jones about hearing the Basie band for the first time in Detroit 1939.
“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-it-ness 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.”
Albert Murray, Stompln’ The Blues
Gunther Schuler (The Swing Era) on Lester’s 12 bar solo on Fine and Mellow by Billie Holiday on the 1957 TV show The Sound of Jazz:
“How fortunate we are that one of Lester’s final and most glorious moments was thus captured on electronic media: his heart-rending twelve bars on Fine and Mellow. Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff, co-producers of the program, have both spoken eloquently of Lester’s sad condition during the rehearsals and performance. Lester was so totally remote and uncommunicative, as well as physically incapacitated, that at one point it was thought necessary to cut him out of the show altogether. But that seemed too cruel, so it was finally decided to limit his involvement to one chorus on Billie Holiday’s slow blues, Fine and Mellow , in the hope that she, his long-time friend, would provide the one possible stimulus for a reasonable musical participation. The document of that television show demonstrates the triumph of soul over matter. For Lester, so sick that he could hardly stand, barely able to draw enough breath to sustain even a short phrase, nonetheless rose to the occasion and played a canticle of such overwhelming expressiveness as to put all the other playing into distant perspective. I think that Lester was dimly yet deeply aware of the fact that even some of his best friends and colleagues in the studio had given up on him. But he was to teach them all a lesson—a lesson particularly in economy and what he meant by “telling a story.” In his twelve halting, recitative-like bars (Ex. 9) he played a bare forty-five notes (not counting another eighteen embellishmental or passing tones), this about half of Webster’s majestic and ornate solo and one-third of Gerry Mulligan’s double-time chorus. This was, of course, not some statistical game to see who could play the fewest notes. But Lester showed them, and showed for all times—as he had so often done in the past—that sometimes one single deeply expressed note could say more than a hundred skillfully executed others. Lester was undoubtedly also expressing his feelings for Billie—perhaps he sensed it would be his last chance to do so—and kept his solo, like her singing, pared-down to essentials.
In any case, in Lester’s brief solo here we have one of the truly profound moments in jazz. It stands as a monument to the music, beyond categorization and beyond analysis. It was perhaps at once Lester’s testament and epitaph. Billie and Lester—two great tragic figures of jazz—never saw each other again. Little more than a year later, they were both gone; they died within four months of each other. Like many key figures in jazz, Lester was a phenomenon, a genius, if you will—and a paradox. It could hardly have been foreseen that such a new and radical stylistic and aesthetic alternative to the firmly established Hawkins and Armstrong traditions would come from such a gentle, outwardly unassertive man. It was revolution by understatement. He was in a sense the Gandhi of American jazz, who left us all a heritage that is still very much with us.”
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