The History of Jazz (35 page)

Even before arriving in New York, Basie undertook a memorable small-group session under Hammond’s direction in Chicago—recording under the name JonesSmith Incorporated to circumvent the Decca contract. “It was one of the only perfect sessions I ever had,” was Hammond’s later judgment. And with good reason. Jones, forced to play without a bass drum because of the small size of the studio, reveals his mastery of the high hat and snare drum. Basie’s style, with its winning offhand aplomb, comes across as almost fully formed. Page’s basslines are executed with metronomic sureness and a tone so full that, on their own, they could swing the whole band. But Lester Young is the real star here. On “Oh, Lady Be Good,” he contributes a famous solo, one often memorized and imitated by later generations of jazz players. In its fluidity, clever rhythmic phrasing, and sheer creativity, it stands out as one of the most forward-looking improvisations of the decade.

In New York, the band opened its four-week stint at Roseland to mixed reviews. George Simon, writing in
Metronome
, accused the brass and sax sections of playing out of tune, and even Hammond acknowledged the band’s inconsistency in a
Downbeat
review. Growing pains—the result of Basie’s quick expansion from nine to thirteen players—may have disrupted the band’s cohesion, but the group’s problems with staying in tune perhaps owed more to the inferior instruments that many African American horn players relied on during this period. In any event, the first Decca recordings, made the day after the Roseland engagment ended, showcase a swinging, confident ensemble. During his two-year relationship with this label, Basie developed many of the memorable blues-tinged compositions that would help define his contribution to the jazz idiom, including “One O’Clock Jump” and “Good Morning Blues.” The addition of Edison, Wells, saxophonist Earle Warren, and trombonist Benny Morton during the Decca years further reinforced the strength of Basie’s section and solo work. The contribution of guitarist Freddie Green, another band newcomer, was less noticed by most listeners, but Green’s presence served to solidify the already stellar section of Basie-Jones-Page. By the time the Basie orchestra began making its 1939–40 recording sessions under Hammond’s supervision— which produced a series of classic sides including “Taxi War Dance,” “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie,” and “Tickle Toe”—it had earned growing respect as one of the very best big bands in jazz.

The departure of the Basie contingent took place toward the close of the great period of Kansas City jazz. City boss Tom Pendergast’s conviction on tax evasion charges in 1939, resulting in a year behind bars in Leavenworth, signaled a move away from the fast and loose attitudes that had fueled the local economy during the Great Depression. Even earlier, as the Swing Era took off with full force in other locales, many musicians who had come to Kansas City for the opportunities it provided found ready audiences and gainful employment elsewhere. But even in these late days, world-class jazz could still be heard in the city’s environs. Bandleader Andy Kirk, who had assumed leadership of Terrence “T.” Holder’s Dark Clouds of Joy in 1929, continued to maintain a home base in Kansas City, although his recordings and frequent road trips brought his music to the attention of a wider audience. “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” proved to be a major 1936 hit for the band, and for a while Kirk boasted even greater box office appeal than Basie. With its poised rhythmic flow and strong blues roots, the Twelve Clouds of Joy (as the band was now called under its new leader) was an exemplary exponent of Kansas City jazz, and, though its pool of soloists could not quite match Basie’s, Kirk had found in pianist and arranger Mary Lou Williams a major talent.

Williams had studied piano, composition, and harmony during her formative years in Pittsburgh, but her career in music had come to something of a standstill after her marriage in the 1920s to John Williams, a saxophonist who worked in the Kirk band. Since Williams’s wife “could play a little piano,” she was enlisted as a backup for the band’s working keyboardist, Marion Jackson. But, as her 1930 solo piano recording of “Night Life” makes clear, Williams was no amateur, rather a full-fledged keyboard powerhouse with a stirring two-handed attack. Although blessed with perfect pitch, good time, and a sure sense for the blues, Williams was only slowly recognized as a major talent in the male-dominated world of jazz. Women had long been accepted as vocalists, but few had enjoyed successful careers as jazz instrumentalists, and even fewer managed to make records during this period. In 1939, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female swing band, would be formed, and after a well-received debut at the Howard Theater would tour the United States and Europe, as well as record for the Victor label. But their example would stand out as a rare exception. Williams, for her part, gradually rose through the ranks of the Kirk organization: for a time she acted as chauffeur for the band (she also worked as a hearse driver during this period), eventually securing a spot as a staff writer and full-time performer. But from 1930 until 1942, Williams served as the main catalyst for the Kirk ensemble. Her charts, such as “Mary’s Idea” and “Walkin’ and Swingin’, ” were marked by a happy mixture of experimentalism and rhythmic urgency, while her playing soon earned her star billing as “The Lady Who Swings the Band.” In later years, Williams’s progressive tendencies became even more pronounced, leading her to adopt much of the bebop vocabulary and inspiring her to compose extended pieces, most notably the
Zodiac Suite
from 1945. Following her conversion to Catholicism in the 1950s, Williams wrote and performed a number of sacred works and continued to expand her musical horizons long after the age when most artists settle comfortably into a familiar style and repertoire, even collaborating with free-jazz titan Cecil Taylor in a controversial meeting of minds. At this Carnegie Hall concert, held four years before Williams’s death in 1981, two confident masters of the jazz keyboard confronted each other head on, and neither side blinked. As such daring gestures made clear, none of the Kansas City pioneers brought a broader perspective to their music making than Mary Lou Williams.

But the most influential of the Kansas City players from the 1930s would clearly be Lester Young, who ironically may have been the most introverted, the least focused on inspiring imitators. Redefining the role of the tenor sax was only the first of Young’s achievements. In the process, he profoundly changed the essence of melodic improvisation in jazz, offering an alternative to the hot, syncopated style forged by Armstrong and emulated by countless others. The flowering of cool jazz, a supple manner of phrasing across bar lines, a greater sensitivity to intervals such as sixths and ninths not present in the underlying harmonies, the elevation of jazz above hoary clichés borrowed from the New Orleans and Chicago traditions—all these transformations in the music, changes that would gain momentum in later years, owe a great deal to the foresight of Lester Willis Young. In particular, his small combo recordings, especially those with Billie Holiday, revealed a new facet of jazz, one in which the heated syncopations that had given birth to the music were subsumed in a more delicate chamber music style. But this was much more than an expansion in the techniques of jazz improvisation. In espousing a new aesthetic for jazz, Young also broadened the music’s emotional vocabulary, broaching an intimacy and subtle gradations of feeling hitherto unknown to the jazz idiom.

JAZZ COMBO STYLE IN THE 1930S

Born in Woodville, Mississippi, on August 27, 1909, and raised in nearby New Orleans, Lester Young came of age in a period marked by an unprecedented blossoming of African American music in this region. Young may have had some contact with the pioneering “hot” jazz players who were virtually at his doorstep during these formative years, yet other sources of inspiration—marching bands, minstrel shows, popular songs—apparently made a stronger impression on the child’s imagination. In addition, both parents were strict Baptists, and it is likely that Lester heard far more church music than either jazz or blues during his childhood. In truth, there were all too few leisure hours for the youngster to taste the pleasures of New Orleans jazz: much of Young’s early life was spent finding ways to contribute to the family income. Around the age of five, he began working odd jobs—polishing shoes, distributing handbills, selling newspapers. Even Lester’s introduction to performing music was driven by household financial needs. In 1919, Lester’s father took a job as leader of a circus band. The son, having studied the rudiments of the violin, trumpet, and drums, was soon enlisted as a sideman in the group. He was only ten years old at the time.

Young’s relationship with his father, a stern taskmaster, was stormy at best. Sensitive and shy, Lester Young set a pattern early in life of retreating in the face of conflict. Sometimes this retreat was physical, other times merely psychological. Eccentricities, hip jargon, odd mannerisms—the various bric-a-brac of Young’s personality, celebrated by the Beat generation, were as much self-defense mechanisms as attempts to set a fashionable tone. Several times Young ran away from home during his teenage years, once disappearing for as long as two months. Around the time of Lester’s eighteenth birthday, he left again to join Art Bronson’s so-called Bostonians, a misnomer given that this territory band worked primarily in Colorado, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and other nearby areas. In 1929, Young returned to the family band, but left again before the close of the year. By this time he had developed a fair degree of proficiency on the saxophone—he had first started playing the alto sax at age thirteen, and while with Bronson settled on the tenor as his main instrument. Over the next few years, Young bounced from job to job, returning briefly to the family band, working for a period with Walter Page’s Blue Devils, rejoining the Bostonians, and playing in Minneapolis, New Mexico, and a host of other locales.

By 1932, Young had settled down with the Blue Devils, but that group was now in its final days. Walter Page had already left, and Buster Smith stepped in as leader. In late 1933, the Blue Devils disbanded, and Young returned to Kansas City, where he played with many of the local ensembles. Already he was developing a reputation as an outstanding young saxophonist. But the arrival in Kansas City of the Fletcher Henderson band in December 1933 gave Lester the rare chance of testing his skills face-to-face with the most prominent tenor saxophonist in jazz. Coleman Hawkins was the featured soloist with the Henderson band, and an after-hours jam session at the Cherry Blossom provided a venue for the visiting celebrity to test his mettle against Kansas City’s finest. Mary Lou Williams, who was present that night, later described the scene:

The word went round that Hawkins was in the Cherry Blossom, and within about half an hour there were Lester Young, Ben Webster, Herschel Evans, Herman Walder, and one or two unknown tenors piling in the club to blow. Bean didn’t know the Kaycee tenor men were so terrific, and he couldn’t get himself together though he played all morning. … Hawkins was in his singlet taking turns with the Kaycee men. It seems he had run into something he didn’t expect. Lester’s style was light, and, as I said, it took him maybe five choruses to warm up. But then he would really blow; then you couldn’t handle him on a cutting session. That was how Hawkins got hung up. … Yes, Hawkins was king until he met those crazy Kansas City tenor men.
⁸

At the time of this encounter, Hawkins was on the brink of leaving the Henderson band—where his replacement would be Lester Young. Despite his jam session success at the Cherry Blossom, Young’s stint with Henderson was short-lived and poorly received. Most of the sidemen had wanted Chu Berry, a Hawkins disciple who would later become a star soloist with Cab Calloway, to take over for the departing tenorist. Young’s playing was deemed too light, his tone too thin. While Hawkins (and many of his followers) boasted a vibrato as wide as the lapels on a zoot suit, Young maintained a pellucid tone of almost classical purity. His lines were less rooted to the ground beat, less tied to the underlying harmonies. Such stylistic choices were odd ones in the context of the jazz world of the day, and virtually amounted to heresy in the context of the Fletcher Henderson band. Henderson’s wife went so far as to play Hawkins’s records for Young, citing them as examples of how the tenor
should
sound. Within a few months, Young left the group, returning to Kansas City. For a time he worked with Andy Kirk, then freelanced with a number of bands, and finally joined Count Basie shortly before the latter’s rise to national prominence. Only then, during the closing years of the decade, was Young able to establish his tenor sound as a valid alternative to the Hawkins model.

This was no small achievement. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hawkins had forged a powerful full-bodied approach to the tenor saxophone, one that would come to define the mainstream sound of that instrument for years to come. Incorporating elements drawn from Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum, and others, Hawkins constructed a robust, harmonically adept style. The uncertain phrasing and slap tonguing of his earliest recordings had by now been replaced by a smoother legato, a ponderous tone, and a melodic gift enlivened by Hawkins’s mastery of passing chords. Only a few weeks after the stock market crash of 1929, Hawkins participated in a pathbreaking interracial session as part of the Mound City Blue Blowers. “One Hour,” from this date, is an especially memorable performance, with Hawkins taking the piece at a much slower tempo than any he had attempted previously on record. The result is a rhapsodic mood piece of the kind that would soon become a trademark of the tenorist. Along with Beiderbecke and Trumbauer’s work on “Singin’ the Blues” (1927) and Louis Armstrong’s “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” (1929), “One Hour” represents a key milestone in the early evolution of the jazz ballad style. Over the next few years, Hawkins would build on this distinctive and influential approach to slow tempos, the process culminating in his iconic 1939 recording of “Body and Soul.” In contrast to the plaintive style inaugurated by Beiderbecke and Trumbauer (and taken up by Young), Hawkins offered a more expansive approach to the jazz ballad: implying double time with his intricate constructions, the saxophonist would often fill up each beat in the bar with dense, harmonically-charged phrases, employing these baroque arpeggios as cornerstones for a whole solo. Later in his career, Hawkins would typically use fewer notes in such contexts, but these early forays set a standard with their analytical probing of the popular ballads of the day.