A Different Riff

With his debut record date in November 1936, Lester Young burst fully formed into view as one of the most original, resourcefully lyrical and lastingly influential tenor saxophonists in jazz. His solos seemed airborne, their conception and tone far removed from the luxuriantly textured, magisterial utterances of Coleman Hawkins, who a decade earlier had made the instrument a virile, muscular jazz solo voice.

Young’s phrases were spare, implying before they declared. Witty, elegant, debonair, insouciant, otherworldly, aphoristic, succinct--writers groped for words that would render concrete an essence, a set of qualities, that remained deliciously abstract. Listening to Young play, said one, was like watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing; their feet appeared never to touch the floor.

Even the newcomer’s major inspirations--the poised lyricism of the white cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and his stylish associate, C-melody saxophonist Frank Trumbauer--were unusual in a black jazzman of the time. Both Bix and “Tram” were masters of musical narrative; their solos “told a little story,” as Young liked to put it. At first he’d played alto, and in moving to the deeper tenor he simply brought along the lightness and sense of understatement absorbed from listening to Beiderbecke and Trumbauer.

No less important, as Douglas Henry Daniels emphasizes in “Lester Leaps In,” the saxophonist spent much of his boyhood in and around New Orleans, absorbing not only the music but the manner, speech and folklore with which the city and its environs resounded in the century’s early years. The particulars of Young’s life and music are well known, thanks to such scholars as Lewis Porter, Frank Buchmann-Moller, Jan Evensmo, Loren Schoenberg, John McDonough and Lawrence Gushee. Every phase of his musical development has been scrutinized, every solo parsed. Few major jazz figures, with the possible exceptions of Louis Armstrong and the short-lived Beiderbecke, have been accorded such consistently close-focus attention.

What new insights into Lester Young can then emerge from yet another biography, one written by an author whose field is not music? Daniels himself provides a clue in his carefully worded subtitle: “The Life and Times of Lester ‘Pres’ Young.” It’s not the music--and that is all-important in appreciating this book’s thrust and purpose. Daniels teaches history and black studies at UC Santa Barbara, and it is through this prism of black history that he views his subject. To him, every aspect of Young’s life--behavior, idiosyncrasies of demeanor, dress, and speech--is a direct outgrowth of having grown up black in 20th century America.

Through diligent research, particularly combing oral history transcripts and the accounts of many who have borne witness, Daniels creates his own incarnation of Lester Young. He traces the saxophonist’s early years in his father’s family band, his apprenticeship in various Midwest and Southwest “territory” outfits including the famed Blue Devils (with whom his prowess earned him the nickname “Pres,” for “President of the Tenor Saxophonists”) and a traveling unit led by the New Orleans cornet pioneer Joe “King” Oliver. All this leads naturally to Young’s arrival in Kansas City, his membership in Count Basie’s orchestra and to national fame on records with Billie Holiday and countless others.

Daniels pauses along the way to deal with such underdocumented issues as the sense of extended family that bonded black bands as they traversed segregated Depression-era America; saxophonist-arranger Eddie Barefield, who knew Young early and well, renders particularly eloquent homage to such protective camaraderie.

In this context, Daniels also challenges inflated accounts of “cutting contests,” those storied gladiatorial encounters in which several soloists on the same instrument would battle one another for primacy at after-hours jam sessions. “Typically it is the competitiveness among band members and bands that is highlighted in histories of jazz,” he writes, “which all too often fail to consider the sense of community that was so important to these musicians.” He questions, and to some extent debunks, an after-hours 1933 encounter with Hawkins said to have taken place at the Cherry Blossom in Kansas City. As Daniels reads his sources, it seems just as likely that Young simply filled in for an absent Hawkins in Fletcher Henderson’s reed section that night, winning admiration for his almost casual skill in dealing with difficult parts and unusual keys.

Daniels repeatedly stresses the moral lessons of honesty, personal responsibility and reliability, the “family values” Young absorbed early and treasured all his life. He even hears Young’s tenor tone and style as “rooted in certain ideas he harbored about purity and the inherent value of himself and of every individual.” The portrait that emerges is of a gentle, vulnerable sensibility, lending dimension to accounts of Young’s later traumatic experiences in the World War II Army and his gradual retreat into a private realm of thought, attitude and speech, refuge from a world of harsh, often cruel, realities.

But hermetically sealing him within black cultural experience and reaction also risks doing Young the same disservice some feminist historiography has done to accomplished women of times past: It leaches away individuality, portraying its subject only in response to forces obviating free will. However absorbing Daniels’ version of Young may be, the Pres is in this sense a marionette, neutered, the very qualities that make him most fascinating swallowed in the machinery of predestination.

Standing behind all this, of course, is the abiding question of whether growing up black in America has to be so immutable a determinant of direction, thought, personality. However faintly, such thinking echoes the mythology, misapplied often and disastrously in the past, that a Jew born is a Jew forever: that Jewishness shapes behavior, motivation, feeling, even apparent individuation.

Daniels generally avoids addressing Young’s music, instead either quoting critics in quantity--always a risky procedure--or using copious endnotes to cite scholars who have dealt with it best. Though occasionally effective, this method also skews balance: even in acknowledging the importance of the Basie “Jones-Smith Incorporated” records of November 1936, for example, Daniels utterly misses the substance of Lester’s solos on “[Oh,] Lady Be Good” and “Shoe Shine Boy,” merely suggesting (risibly, in this case) that the latter title “had special meaning for Young because he, like many other African Americans, had shined shoes as a youngster.” Similarly, there is no mention of Young’s participation in Benny Goodman’s Jan. 16, 1938, Carnegie Hall concert, though his solo on “Honeysuckle Rose” remains one of the evening’s, and his career’s, unquestioned highlights. He mentions Young’s composition “Tickle-Toe” while seeming unaware of its origin in a Beiderbecke cornet solo.

On another level, small but persistent errors blemish the text. A Holton trumpet is called a “Holden,” the 1918 standard “Ja-Da” becomes “Jadda.” “Blue Skies,” “I Want a Little Girl” and “If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight,” among many other songs, are cited in accounts of years predating their creation; Frank Trumbauer is credited with a solo on a 1927 record on which he does not solo; the “mamma-dadda” drumstick pattern has nothing to do with the “ancient African traditions” Daniels cites but is the basis of the double-stroke roll, a simple rudiment learned by every aspiring drummer. On and on, in dismaying quantity.

No matter. Douglas Henry Daniels has written a provocative book, presenting Lester Young in a novel, even controversial light while opening new avenues of possible investigation into one of the most tantalizingly enigmatic of all historic jazz figures.

But before all else, a reader is a listener, and there is no better testimony to Young’s singularity than his playing itself. So reach for “Jive at Five,” “Let Me See,” “Time Out” or “Lester Leaps In” with Basie or for any of the extraordinary moments with Holiday or Teddy Wilson--”I Must Have That Man,” “A Sailboat in the Moonlight” or the heartbreaking “Foolin’ Myself”--and understand a beauty no words can convey, living on in the empyreal voice of Lester Young’s tenor saxophone.

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Richard M. Sudhalter is the author of, most recently, “Starduster: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael” and “Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945.”