The Lester Young Story vol 3

Many, many moons ago I spent nine months or so in the 6^th Earl of Harrowby's minor stately home: a big crenellated Victorian barn of a place where I would smoke my daily menthol cigarette as I lay between a pair of Wharfedale speakers listening to one of my few records at the end of another unreal working day.

From time to time, the Earl's granddaughter would come to stay. Her name was either Suzan or Suzanne. I can't be sure now because his lordship pronounced it Suzarne – which could have served for either variation. She must have been in her early twenties: a nice jolly-hockey-sticks type with no airs and graces but gracious enough to befriend a youth from Belfast who was working as her grandfather's assistant archivist. I reckon she would have married simply but happily and would have been a good mother to three or four children. She probably took them on picnics when they were young and encouraged them to learn some obscure musical instrument like an oboe or a bassoon.

If I remember correctly, she drove a black Morris Minor – or something very similar. One dark winter's evening, she proposed driving us both to the little nearby town of Stone, Staffs., where there was a tiny cinema that was showing Lady Sings The Blues. I knew nothing at the time about Billie Holiday, but realised that Diana Ross was once the lead singer of The Supremes. I believe Richard Pryor played 'Piano Man', probably as a comic and genial guy who bore no relation to the misogynistic brute that Billie seemed to attract. I can't remember; I've never again seen the film – partly, I suspect, because I know enough now to recognise that Diana Ross could neither act nor sing like Lady Day. Besides, I can never forgive her for turning Berry Gordy commercially against the more gifted Mary Wells.

I'm pretty sure, too, that the film was tinted with enough Hollywood gloss to conceal the reality of Billie Holiday's truly wretched abused and drug-addicted life. Did it, I wonder now, cast someone to wear a pork-pie hat and play his tenor sax at a jaunty angle? If it did, I wouldn't have appreciated who Lester Young was and why the man whom Billie dubbed 'Prez' was almost as mythical as Bird. It was the diminutive boyfriend of a truly elfin friend who later introduced me to another of life's abused and drug-addicted stars. 

A little further down the Sampson timeline, when I was still getting used to the millstone around my neck of full-time work, an unassuming man with a florid complexion and a fragile constitution, who hid away from the general public in the finance back-room of Brighton Unemployment Benefit Office, established that I was serious about my music. Generously and trustingly he lent me his entire collection of the Columbia recordings that Billie and Lester made together, often in the context of Teddy Wilson's 'orchestra'.

Some years later, I watched and recorded onto video the famous American TV special, The Sound of Jazz, which caught the pair of platonic friends together at the weary end of both their careers. The way in which Billie Holiday watched the man who had dubbed her 'Lady Day' touches me every time I re-watch it. As if she and she alone understood her friend the President, while he understood her as no other man had ever done before or since. In another two years, they were both dead. First Prez and then Lady Day.

For a while at 18 or however old I was, I was a little bit in love with Diana Ross as Billie Holiday. These days I'm still in love, but with the real Billie Holiday. Not in a physical way, you understand, but in a strictly artistic way. The same way that I'm still in love with Scott Fitzgerald. Reading his collected short stories now, after a gap of many years, I still marvel at the coolness of his vision and the elegance of his prose. Anyway, it sent me looking for a Billie Holiday record, because she had that unique gift as a jazz singer to transform into genuine art some of the frivolous pop songs one associates with the era of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

In fact, she sings on but the first three tracks of Volume 3 of The Lester Young Story. All my other classic Billie Holiday is either on cassette tape or courtesy of a 10-CD boxed set of her complete Columbia recordings that was cheaper than it had any right to be. So they can't count unless I subsequently change my editorial policy. 

'Everybody's Laughing' (not to be confused with the infectious confection cooked up by Phil Fearon & Galaxy), 'Here It Is Tomorrow Again' and 'Say It With a Kiss' all date from 1938, and all were recorded with the Teddy Wilson Orchestra, which contained much of the personnel featured in the 3½ Count Basie sides that complete Volume 3. Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer's 'Say It With a Kiss' is probably the best of the bunch, but it's hardly in the same class as 'Pennies From Heaven', 'These Foolish Things', 'Gloomy Sunday' or 'Back In Your Own Backyard'. 

Nevertheless, it's still instructive to compare them with the other two featured vocalists on Volume 3: 'Mr. Five by Five', the improbably overweight Jimmy Rushing, a fine but unsubtle 'blues shouter', and Helen Humes, a Basie hardy perennial, who does her stuff with minimal fuss. As Michael Brooks writes in his excellent liner notes, she 'comes in for her 32 bars then exits gracefully without disturbing the mood of the record'. Neither of them have that ability to transform a melody by inflecting the lyrics or disjointing the rhythm. Nor, of course, do either of them have that extraordinary timbre that can suggest both joy and suffering simultaneously. Only maybe Madeleine Peyroux of modern jazz singers comes close to approximating it – without necessarily convincing you that it might be anything more than a vocal affectation.

So the focus on this record is mainly on Lester Young and his deceptively light and breezy tenor saxophone. Given the constraints of the old 78rpm records, there's sometimes no room for anything more than a brief interjection. Eight bars or less. But sometimes, the orchestra takes a back seat while he is allowed to stretch out in 24, 32 or even – on '12^th Street Rag' – 64 bars. Not that I'm counting, you realise. Whatever the duration, though, it's always uniquely and recognisably Lester Young.

It's that lightness of touch. Michael Brooks, again, makes a very perceptive comparison with the cricketer, Frank Woolley. My dad remembers big Frank and, having seen the infuriatingly talented David Gower, who could make batting look so easy on some days and so difficult on others (mainly by giving away his wicket in a way that any self-respecting batsman shouldna oughta), I understand the analogy: 'While other players used brute strength to thrash the ball, Woolley was all delicacy, timing and wrist-work. A relaxed motion towards the ball, bat flowing as gracefully as a ballet dancer's arm movement and the ball would be over the boundary... before the opposing players' reflexes could even respond. And Lester generates as much beauty and excitement without even seeming to perspire'.

Enter The Count, the album is sub-titled. So the listener can revel in the famous Count Basie rhythm section that powered a band including Young, Buck Clayton, Harry 'Sweets' Edison and Dickie Wells. However, if I hadn't been the kind of cheapskate to opt for a bargain in the sales, I would have picked Volumes 1 and 2, where the real gems of the Holiday/Young partnership are to be found. Thank heavens for CDs!