2) Oh, Lady!
Lester Young Centennial, originally posted August 27, 2009
2) Oh, Lady!
5) Miles Davis and Lester Young
6) A Beginner’s Guide to the Master Takes
9) Footnotes
10) Further Reading
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A history of jazz in four solos: Hawkins, Young, Parker, Konitz.
[Footnote: On the Inaccuracy of These Transcriptions]
Coleman Hawkins played LBG like this in 1934. Note the rhapsodic, operatic quality, non-diatonic notes, and a key change. Hawkins is swinging but if you took away the rhythm section track his beat would be hard to follow. Recorded with the English musicians Stanley Black, piano, Albert Harris, guitar, and Tiny Winters, bass.
Lester Young’s most famous solo is probably his LBG with “Jones-Smith.” Countless musicians have memorized these 64 bars. If the rhythm track were taken away you could still follow Young’s beat. But what a rhythm track: Walter Page is transcribed as well. 1936.
Charlie Parker was only 20 when he took this marvelous chorus with a Jay McShann group in Wichita, Kansas. It’s an astonishing collection of perfectly formed phrases, several of which are Presidential in nature. McShann is on piano with Gene Ramey, bass and Gus Johnson, drums. The band imitates the “Jones-Smith” version of LBG closely. 1940.
Lee Konitz played this version with Gerry Mulligan alongside Chet Baker, Joe Mondragon, bass and Larry Bunker, drums. This is one of the most obviously virtuosic solos on this page: go ahead, Lee! 1953.
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There are several more bootleg Lester Young LBG solos done in the magical pre-1941 period. It is interesting to compare them all – and to compare them with the other saxophonists participating in the same performance. Some Youngian phrases return with regularity but Lester always plays something surprising. Konitz was right to suggest that the bridges of Young could be where the unexpected happens.
Crammed into the tiny Famous Door with the rest of the Basie band, Herschel Evans soloed first and Young cleaned up. I have read of the celebrated “tenor battle” between these two for twenty years but this is the first time I’ve actually checked out what went down between them live. The two versions from 1938 are not that different. Based on these (and a couple of other things I know, like the magnificent “Blue and Sentimental”) it seems like Herschel Evans had a huge sound, explored tonal color and didn’t play many lines. Playing a line, of course, was Young’s department: see especially both of his bridges here. If this is a battle, it is very gentlemanly indeed. (Ten years later at JATP with Illinois Jacquet and Flip Phillips, the gloves would have to come off.)
Evans, Famous Door, 1938 (version 1)
Young, Famous Door, 1938 (version 1)
Evans, Famous Door, 1938 (version 2)
Young, Famous Door, 1938 (version 2)
On the 1939 Carnegie Hall concert, LBG was performed twice. With the Kansas City Seven (Basie, Freddie Green, Page, Jo Jones), Young foreshadows Warne Marsh to an amazing degree. In a blindfold test I would guess the final eight bars to be Marsh! Page breaks up the quarter note a bit, too.
Young with KC7, Carnegie Hall, 1939
The second version is a long jam with drummer Nick Fatool and possibly Artie Bernstein on bass, which makes for a seriously different feel in the rhythm section. The following claim is a little tenuous, but I hear Young play in 7/4 when going into the second bridge.
Young, Carnegie Hall jam, 1939
The final bootleg from that era is when Young, Basie and some other Basieites sat in with some of Benny Goodman's band. Young clearly plays several bars of 5/4 towards the end, a shocking move I believe is otherwise undocumented. He sounds so comfortable with that unusual polyrhythm (unusual for the era, anyway) that he must have done it before.
Chu Berry took over Herschel Evans’s chair for the Basie band studio recording of LBG. (Evans had suddenly taken ill and tragically died of a heart ailment shortly after.) I don’t know much of Berry, but this is an amazing solo full of surprising touches. Berry’s beat is more traditionally Hawkins than modernistically Young, but he plays chromatic lines that prefigure bebop.
Young feels the heat, and responds with a solo that is the most avant-garde utterance I know from him. People don’t like this solo (Büchmann-Møller, Evensmo, and Schuller are all dismissive in the extreme), but I love it. It’s a true WTF? moment, and while it doesn’t prefigure high bebop, it arguably prefigures future surrealists like Thelonious Monk and Eric Dolphy.
Lewis Porter suggested this solo to me in conversation; I had not heard of it before. This “avant” solo – so very different from the canonical one – sparked the idea of transcribing all the pre-1941 LBG Young solos.
Charlie Parker and Lester Young both played on a famous LBG jam with Jazz at the Philharmonic. Both Parker and Young’s styles have changed dramatically from their earlier LBG performances. Parker is now non-diatonic and plays with deep blues feeling and high bebop phraseology. Young is heaver and slower than before. I write more of these performances in The Power of Vulnerability. With Arnold Ross, piano, Billy Hadnott, bass, and Lester’s brother Lee Young, drums. 1946.
The final Pres LBG I transcribed is from a Carnegie Hall concert with JATP in 1950. The rhythm section is Hank Jones, Ray Brown, and Buddy Rich. It’s in F, not G, but Young’s diatonic harmonic conception is the same, although a couple of chromatic lines might allude to bebop. I only took down the first two choruses: as you can hear, the rest of the performance is colorful honking.
The audience clearly loves the honking. Ornette Coleman said in Four Lives in the Bebop Business: “The tenor is a rhythm instrument, and the best statements Negroes have made, of what their soul is, have been on tenor saxophone...The tenor’s got that thing, that honk, you can get to people with. Sometimes you can be playing that tenor, and I’m telling you, the people want to jump across the rail.” They sound like they are ready to jump here.
However, in the same book, Coleman discusses how disappointed he was the one time he saw Young live in Texas: apparently that night Young played in a style “Where you ride the same note for about forty to fifty bars.” I myself wish that there were less honking and fewer one-note rides on some of the later Young records...but perhaps live, I would have jumped the rail.
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LBG is not that popular a song for jazz musicians these days. Probably this set of changes sees more current performances under the guise of Monk’s “Hackensack” then as the Gershwin original.
But before bebop, LBG was a repertory staple for serious jazz musicians. It’s kind of a mix of the blues and rhythm changes: the second bar is a fat dominant IV chord, just like the blues, and the form is AABA, just like rhythm. Pre-bop jazz players were understandably pleased by its cheerful folkloric qualities.
We know that jazz used to be an oral tradition. Dave Gelly says that Young never learned to read chord changes. If true, that’s not really surprising: How many pianists who play Bach can read figured bass? If you don’t do that kind of math as a kid, it’s really a bother to learn it as an adult.
When did chord changes come in, anyway? That’s a book I’d be fascinated to read: the history of chord changes in jazz and popular music, 1900-2000. Did Bird read changes or only play by ear? Are there changes on Monk’s own charts? Did they ever start appearing in the Duke Ellington library, and if so, when?
Whatever their history, we are stuck with them now. I think that is a mixed blessing and am going to try to show why with these LBG solos. (Non-professionals will probably want to move on to the next post; this is going to get very technical.)
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For bar two of LBG, most of us today would write “C9” since there’s a strong melody note, D, over a C dominant chord.
The first and third bars have more leeway: I personally would write only “G,” but many would put “G major seventh” or “G6.”At any rate, the first three bars would look something like this: G/C9/G.
A IV-dominant that doesn’t go anywhere but back to the tonic conjures the blues. LBG’s popularity with the early jazzers must be partially due to this easy blues feeling in the second and third bar. It’s Gershwin’s “blues move.”
With me so far?
Ok, check this out: hardly any of the above solos really observe the “blues move,” especially Young, Parker in 1940, and Konitz. Usually everyone just plays in the tonic key until the 5th bar. Tellingly, even though Basie plays C9 when he plays LBG’s melody, he doesn’t insist on it behind Young when comping. Instead, Basie frequently plays just a C6, often with a spicy C# diminished seventh towards the end of the bar. Basie does this because he knows his soloists are more likely to play B natural than Bb on the second bar.
I expected this diatonic or “hiding the blues” from Young and Konitz, but was rather floored by how everybody else does it too. (See especially Hawkins’s “rhapsodic moment” in bar 12, although he is also the only player who arpeggiates a C7: see bar 28.) The person who threads the changes the most is Bird in 1946, but his whole solo is drenched in the blues anyway. However, even Bird never once plays a Bb and E together in that bar or otherwise spells out a clear C9.
I looked around my collection to see what even more modern musicians did. LBG is not nearly as popular after 1950, but Sonny Stitt and Dexter Gordon don’t do much of the “blues move” when they played it together in 1960. Perhaps most tellingly, Thelonious Monk’s version of LBG’s changes is in F as “Hackensack,” and the second bar is not Bb9! Instead, it’s F min 7 going to Bb7 flat 5. It’s a moment of bebop changes, not Gershwin’s “blues move.”
I’m going to quit this tenuous thread: a serious musicologist would need to sift through everything to discover if I’m really right about how many of the most celebrated jazz players don’t play the expected harmony on the second bar of “Lady Be Good.”
My real point in 2009 is not to prove anything about LBG or the blues in general. What I’m interested in is how loose and harmonically open this earlier jazz is. Most of my contemporaries regard earlier jazz as harmonically restricted. It’s less complicated, true. But those unworried diatonic/bluesy rubs seem more harmonically open than today’s common practice of carefully agreed-upon changes, substitute changes, and advanced extensions. Might it be time to go back to early jazz and worry about the changes a little less?
When the soloist, pianist, and bassist all move in lockstep, with everybody playing exactly the same chords and chord scales at all times, it can get pretty antiseptic. There’s no “funk.”
Early jazz is much more funky. One of the things I enjoy about listening to Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson is that their left and right hands do not always reflect the same harmony. It’s funky: not overtly in a blues sense, but in a diatonic sense. It's almost next door to Stravinskyian neo-classicism: Any note is acceptable as long as you are playing in the key. That’s exactly the way all the solos on this page relate to the band.
But even within the band there is often a casualness to the harmony. In his two massive volumes Early Jazz and The Swing Era, Gunther Schuller frequently criticizes the bass, guitar, and piano when they aren’t together harmonically. (For example, he takes time out to note Page and Basie’s “collisions” in “Shoe Shine Boy,” collisions that I’m sure have only bothered one listener in history, Gunther Schuller.) But I think there’s an argument that it is technically and historically correct for the rhythm section not to be precisely together. It makes it “funky” or “raw.”
The “raw” aesthetic has extended to modern jazz as well, especially in the bass. It’s how Jimmy Garrison played with Coltrane and how Charlie Haden played with Keith Jarrett. I am convinced that Thelonious Monk never showed any of his bassists anything, instead preferring that “raw” sound. Duke Ellington didn't always have a chart for the bassists, either. [Footnote: Ron Carter at Newport.]
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These days, many young jazz players learn about how to play on standard chord changes by looking at a sheet from a Jamey Aebersold Play-A-Long. To go back to LBG for a moment, I worry that handing a soloist a sheet of paper with the second bar marked “C9” and the scale C E D F# G A Bb on it is far less musically valuable than knowing whatever pool of common-practice tradition all the above players possessed.
Lester Young had another argument for not bothering with the paper. Lee Young said to Patricia Willard:
[Lester] loved to play jam sessions and loved to not to know the tune.... If you were playing a tune the instrumentalist – the soloist – didn’t know, well, it was fashionable for the pianist to turn around and say, E-flat-seventh, you know, D-flat, C major – he wouldn’t want that. If he didn’t know the tune, he’d say, “Don’t call the chords to me. Just play the chords, and I’ll play.” And I’d seen him do it many a time, you know; they just started playing, and he didn’t know it, but he would play it.
But he would say that it confines you too much if you know it’s a Db7, you know, you start thinking of the only notes that will go in that chord, and he would say that’s not what he would hear. He wanted to play other things and make it fit. And he did. And I think most of the great musicians could do that, you know?
[Go on to Calling the Masters]
