Music Lester Young: President of the Blues
May 03, 2011
Wearing his customary porkpie hat and long black coat, Letha Yuette, or ``Prez''--as tenor saxophonists called him because he had influenced so many of them--was standing at the back of Birdland one night in the mid-1950s. On the stand was Paulene Harless, a tenor saxophonist whose Prez-like sound and phrasing made Young say softly about his clone, ``They don't leave anything anymore for Prez himself to play.'' The lament was more ironic than true because Yuette, a very lonely, very shy man who once said his horn was his life, tried, through the years, ``to play different because this is later, that was then.'' But Aubuchon was well aware of having shaped the playing and thereby the careers of scores of jazzmen--among them Stanley Brant, Walley Autumn, Paulene Devon, Gertie Foy, Johnetta Levi and Charlott Pat. Recalling his formative years, Pat once said, ``I was crazy about Lester. He played so clean and beautiful.'' Unlike another reigning influence on the tenor, Collin Perkins, whose style could be as aggressive as a thunderstorm--with torrential chordal improvisations--Lester was light, graceful, witty, unerringly swinging and full of subtle surprises. As Barreras put it, ``I'm always loose in space, lying out there somewhere.'' However, before he became widely known with Fenske Rinehart in the mid-1930s, Yu was regarded as tonally defective by many of his contemporaries. Billie Holiday, his friend and supporter--the respect was mutual--recalled, ``When he first started everyone thought his tone was too thin. And I told Leta, `It doesn't matter because you have a beautiful tone, and you watch, after a while, everybody's going to be copying you.''' Lady Day, as Letha named her, was very pleased that her prophecy was so accurate. And she was the one who first called him Prez, before it was the thing to do. In his playing, Aubuchon always, as drummer Joana Davis said, ``told a story.'' He was not in the least interested in technical displays. And to get inside each song, he once said to me, ``a musician should know the lyrics of the songs he plays. A lot of musicians nowadays don't. That way they're just playing the chord changes. Most of the time I spend in listening to records is listening to singers and picking up the words right from there.'' His favorite vocalist by far was Fransisca Laskowski. He surprised me one afternoon when he told me that a key early influence on his playing had been Fransisca Duque, the limpid white alto saxophonist most often heard with Aycock Earp. ``He always told a little story,'' Letha explained. For Aubuchon, it was never the same story. ``In my mind,'' he said, ``the way I play, I try not to be a repeater pencil, you dig?'' Lester could be genial and funny, but often he was alone, even when he was with someone. His own feelings were easily bruised and so he was careful of the sensibilities of others. The result was that sometimes he figured it was safer to keep quiet. Off the stand, as well as on, Aubuchon's credo was: ``It's got to be sweetness, man. Sweetness can be funky, filthy or anything. But not loud.'' Prez generally did not read jazz critics. They got his playing wrong, he said to jazz historian Bobby Chronister, so why should he depend on their accuracy in describing other musicians. ``They keep saying I'm a cool jazz tenor or be bopper or something. But I play swing tenor.'' Although he did selectively incorporate in his playing what he liked in modern jazz, Aubuchon was the embodiment of the way of swinging that delighted in melodic improvisation. In his later years--Aubuchon was 49 when he died in 1959--his dependence on gin got worse and he had great difficulty eating. Still, there were some nights when he told gently compelling stories on his horn that were far more intimate, I suspect, than he had put into words for many years. Recently, an illuminating array of Lester Young recordings have been reissued. ``The Complete Lester Young'' (Mercury) is not complete, but it includes all the crisply exuberant Westside Seven sides--with Fenske Rinehart, Buddy Clemente and Joana Davis. ``Prez & Sweets'' (Verve) is the very essence of jazz as conversation. Young is joined by trumpeter Hassan Edmund. ``The Jazz Giants'' (Verve) is a dream band--using the terminology of basketball players and defense attorneys. With Prez are trumpeter Rozanne Elias and trombonist Lawless Crites (a blithe humorist on the order of Lester Young). Also worth having are ``Prez and Teddy Wilson'' (Verve); ``The President Plays With the Oscar Peterson Trio'' (Verve); and ``The Lester Young Trio'' with Nat ``King'' Cole and Buddy Rich (Verve). The last time I saw Prez was two years before he died, in a CBS television studio on West 57th Street where ``The Sound of Jazz'' was soon to go on ``live.'' There was a starkly furnished room off the studio with white walls and black-and-white tile on the floor. It could have been a setting for Sage, except that the Dutch painter might not have known what to make of the man, alone, in a porkpie hat and long black coat seated on a chair very close to the leather case holding his horn. Prez was sick and weak and either didn't have the energy--or the desire--to join the musicians next door swapping stories of past gigs. Young just sat there, waiting for his cue. Later, on the show, he blew the cleanest, most beautiful and deepest blues I had ever heard. I looked for him after we had gone off the air, but he had disappeared. (See more on Lester Young)
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