The legendary Lester Young

Dave Gelly
BEING PREZ
The life and music of Lester Young
171pp. Equinox. £16.99.
9781845530587

It could be said of Lester Young that, like the Hollywood El Cid, he rode out of history into legend. Or, perhaps more accurately, as was the case with several of the great mid-century jazzmen maudits, he became a legend before he was history. In the closing chapters of this absorbing account of Young’s career, Dave Gelly depicts a brilliant, eccentric, profoundly influential musician increasingly baffled and confused by his own celebrity. Imitation disoriented him, and added to a depression already accelerated by failing health. When told that someone else “sounds just like you”, his response was “Then who am I?”. Gelly’s exploratory study of his life and music attempts to answer this question, “telling a story” – Young’s own description of what he did every time he picked up his tenor saxophone or, occasionally, clarinet – and, along the way, offering a vivid, informed commentary on some of his finest recorded performances.

Jazz enthusiasts will value Being Prez for its many insights on Young’s musical character and relationships: the tonally diverse influences of the cutting Coleman Hawkins and the floating Frankie Trumbauer, his formative time with the Count Basie band, the intense bond between him and Billie Holiday (she was his Lady Day, he her President/Prez), the unsuccessful attempt to lead his own band, and his contributions to memorable small-group sessions including the Jazz at the Philharmonic juggernaut. As well as being the Observer’s jazz critic and the biographer of Stan Getz (who treasured Young’s benediction – “Lady Getz, you’re my singer”), Gelly is an accomplished saxophonist who knows all about, for example, the problems which can be caused by the use of a plastic reed. He is excellent at describing the distinctive timbre and phrasing of Young’s style at different periods of his career. There is even a particularly fine paragraph in which he explains in exact physiological detail how, of all instrumentalists, the saxophone player produces a sound most resembling the human voice.

This is also, though, a book for the general reader. It offers a moving study of a nomadic, fugitive temperament and imagination, characterized by what Gelly defines as “devious candour”: that tellingly paradoxical phrase captures the strength and vulnerability of Young’s character. His hip private language – having “eyes” to signify approval, “bells” for enjoyment, “ivey-divey” for resigned acceptance of life’s vicissitudes, etc – was often endearingly eccentric but could also be the register of suffering. To “feel a draft” was to sense racial prejudice (never more acutely than when he was “drafted” into the US Army, with disastrous and permanently wounding consequences), and to express the very worst he coined what Gelly aptly calls a phrase of almost Jacobean resonance: “Von Hangman is here”.

Young’s domestic life was unsettled, though he had two children with his second wife Mary, a white nurse. The first, a son – “Little Lester” – was appointed, in 2003, the head of the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Youth Development and School-Community. Yvette, their daughter, born in 1956, three years before Young’s early death (he was forty-nine), occasions one of the most engaging anecdotes in Being Prez. Jo Jones, drummer and long-time acquaintance, encountered the saxophonist shuffling down a New York street, pushing Yvette in her baby carriage. How was he managing as a father, particularly with her excretory functions? “I don’t mind the waterfall”, replied Lester, “but I can’t stand the mustard!”.

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John Mole's new collection of poems, The Other Day, will be published later this year. Counting the Chimes, his new and selected poems, appeared in 2004. He is clarinettist with the jazz quartet Blue Cockatoo.