This first full-scale biography of legendary tenor saxophonist Lester Young celebrates the jazzman's musical genius while shedding significant light on his myth-shrouded personal life. Sifting through an impressive mountain of carefully documented research, history and black-studies, professor Daniels shows, among other things, the importance of home and religion in Young's early life as one of the members of a family band led by his father and the ways in which black musicians in the swing era re-created their shared sense of home and family on the road. Further, Daniels paints a detailed and revealing picture of the way racism affected every fabric of the lives of black musicians, and he argues persuasively that the image of Young as yet another self-destructive jazzman is not only erroneous but itself reflects the racist climate in which the saxophonist worked and lived. The portrait that emerges here is of a sensitive and loving soul who used music, alcohol, and his own version of hipster language to create a separate world for himself. The impact of Daniels' impressive scholarship, unfortunately, is somewhat dulled by his dry, academic writing style. Still, this is an important biography, both to jazz history and to American cultural studies. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"With thoughtful use of scanty sources, Daniels unfolds . . . the life of a man who was as tender as his music. -- Washington Post Book World, April 21, 2002
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
The President of the Tenor Saxophone
Lester “Pres” (or “Prez”) Young (1909–1959) was without question one of the
most influential tenor saxophonists of the twentieth century. While Coleman
Hawkins is justly recognized as having been the first to popularize the tenor
saxophone in jazz, Young revealed an entirely new dimension to the
instrument. Then, too, Young was a genuine cultural hero to many fans and
other musicians, partly because of his unique musical style, but also
because he was a real rebel—or individualist, depending upon one’s point of
view. His refusal to bow to the dictates of popular opinion regarding his
playing, or to the military authorities after he was drafted (eventually leading
to his court-martial in early 1945), only enhanced his stature among his fans
in an age of patriotism and conformity.
He was, as guitarist Barney Kessel maintained, perhaps the most
controversial as well as one of the most gifted of musicians. Besides denying
having been influenced by Coleman Hawkins, he was notoriously aloof, at
once shy and uncommunicative, relying on his own unique jargon, jazz slang,
and witty comments when he did speak. He was described by more than one
writer as elusive and, in his later life, suspicious. Even some of his fellow
musicians found him strange, with some likening him to an extraterrestrial.
The saxophonist was a musical legend, one of those colorful jazz characters
of the 1940s, but he also had a serious drinking problem that ultimately
robbed him of his health. Only his inner circle and a few hangers-on knew his
private side. He was actually gentle, sensitive, and quite chivalrous toward
women; he never spoke ill of anyone and was generous to a fault with loans
and gifts. And there was yet another dimension to his private life: like Louis
Armstrong, he smoked marijuana daily and unashamedly, in the solitude of
his hotel rooms.
Despite his controversial character, he was, in the opinion of
everyone who played with him, of his family, and of many fans, first and
foremost a superior musician. Both his virtuosity as a soloist and his actual
compositions were singularly influential among musicians besides
saxophonists, and his manner of speech, style of dress, and general
demeanor all led the Beat Generation to lionize him. He first came to the
notice of the public with the Count Basie band in 1936, and the title by which
he became known, “Pres,” or “Prez”—short for “President of the Tenor
Saxophone”—would last long after his passing in 1959. Moreover, acclaim for
his musical prowess was the rule for him for over two decades. His popularity
among his fans endured despite his poor health toward the end and in spite
of the considered opinion of many critics and reviewers that his playing had
diminished in quality.
This book deals with the life and significance of this brilliant
saxophonist, but it is not the usual type of jazz biography. When I started
working on it, no full-length biography of Young had ever been published, but
as other such volumes began to appear, I became even more firmly
convinced that there was much more to the history of Black folk and to the
evolution of jazz than could be found in these or many other books about
Black musicians. I had always admired those earlier jazz biographies that
were based on interviews with their subjects and that were thus, in a sense,
autobiographical, such as Alan Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll and Larry Gara’s
The Baby Dodds Story. But that was a model I could not follow, since I
myself never met Young (I was just a teenager when he died), and no one
else ever interviewed him at length, as Lomax and Gara did Jelly Roll Morton
and Dodds, respectively. The problem was daunting: how does one write the
biography of someone who left only a few interviews but hundreds of hours of
recorded music, when readers are so accustomed to reading about people
who kept diaries, scrapbooks of clippings, and other kinds of written records?
Further complicating matters was the fact that Young himself did
not often contribute to the clear presentation of the details of his own life; he
not only was careless about dating events but, as his nephew James Tolbert
has noted, could be “kind of frosty” toward interviewers and people he did not
know. Lee Young claimed that the writer Ralph Gleason got close enough to
his brother to appreciate his sterling worth, but Gleason was alone among
critics in this regard. Nonetheless, the saxophonist did stick to the facts in
some areas, notably when it came to his early musical training, and such
information, corroborated to the extent that it can be, provides some insights
that can be compared to the recollections of other musicians of his
generation.
What this work attempts to do is in some ways very simple. My
object has been, first, to uncover historical evidence that may shed new light
on the details and significance of the saxophonist’s life, utilizing published
interviews with him as well as public records, archives, and oral histories; and
then, second, to interpret that within the context of what we know about his
family, about the careers of other, contemporary musicians, and about Black
history and culture. This necessitates taking into account the views of
Young’s family members as well as his fellow musicians, an approach that in
itself seems reasonable enough, until one considers that often the opinions of
Black folk are not taken seriously, both in the United States in general and in
jazz scholarship in particular. Only then does it become apparent just how
controversial such a strategy might be.
Many writers interview jazz musicians to glean details of their
lives, discographical information, and accounts of specific incidents,
especially humorous ones, but these writers are usually journalists, not
historians. Also of significance is the fact that on those occasions when
musicians speak of the philosophy behind their music, such ideas are rarely
analyzed or even commented upon by writers. While I have relied to some
extent upon evidence and opinions from some critics (some of whom are
superb at what they do), the writings of other journalists have more often
carried the day because their ideas are in better accord with prevailing beliefs
about Black musicians. Where I have made use of the pronouncements and
opinions of critics—or of relatives and sidemen, for that matter—I have been
careful not to blithely accept them as the final word on a matter, a failing that
is seen in far too many histories, in my estimation.
I wanted, in this work, to place Young and his experiences front
and center and within their appropriate historical context, a context that has
changed considerably thanks to the efforts of scholars over the past
generation. The music culture is far too important to be neglected by those
interested in its various manifestations, from songs and dances to slang,
dress, and lifestyles. Also, jazz audiences—dancers, fans, and other various
jazzophiles—tend to interact with “their” music to a much greater degree than
those who favor European classical works. Black music, including jazz,
involves significant audience activity; beyond dancing, audience members
offer vocal encouragement, and the music itself often serves a backdrop for
partying, conversation, and carrying on. As the composer and pianist
Thomas “Fats” Waller once explained, swing was “just a musical phase of
our social life.”1 This fact, however, is largely lost on the wider public and on
many writers, who remain oblivious to the new scholarship in the field of
Black Studies on the complex dynamics of both African and African
American history and culture.
I myself have always felt this very strongly. The music (a term I
prefer to the word jazz) has been a part of my life since I was in my teens.
As a child, I listened to the Hit Parade on the radio in Princeton Park, the
Black community on the far South Side of Chicago where I grew up, and
memorized songs by whites—especially Bill Haley and Hank Williams—
along with ones by Blacks such as Little Richard and Chuck Berry. My older
sisters liked the Platters, Ray Charles, and Johnny Mathis, and thanks to
their record collection, I also discovered jazz as it was played by Ahmad
Jamal, the Three Sounds, and Ramsey Lewis, all of whom were very popular
in Chicago.
As I reflect upon it now, I realize that my passion for music came
from my father, who was born in New Orleans but grew up in Chicago’s Black
Belt in the 1920s, and who along with his childhood friends saw the former
heavyweight champion Jack Johnson when he was a nightclub owner and
heard tales of the battles among King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and other
trumpet players. The fact that my father could identify Clark Terry’s trumpet
playing from just a few notes really impressed me, but I was even more in
awe of his ability to mimic singers such as Billie Holiday and Dinah
Washington, which suggests to me now that he was much closer to the
music than I ever realized at the time. During my last years of high school, I
felt transformed by my discovery of the music of Charles Mingus, Thelonious
Monk, and Miles Davis. I knew that their music and their lives would be of
major importance to me, no matter what I ended up doing.
One other autobiographical note is relevant here. Two years spent
teaching primary school in Tanzania, in 1965 and 1966, introduced me to the
Kiswahili language, the history, and the peoples of East Africa. I also
became acquainted then with the worldviews of Tanzanians and the ethos of
a newly independent and Socialist government. During my second year there,
the government prohibited foreigners like me from teaching history and
geography. The reasoning behind this was that only other Africans could
provide African children with the proper perspective, one in which the “great
explorers” such as Livingstone and Stanley were regarded as mere “visitors.”
I became sympathetic to this anticolonial outlook, and after I
came back to the United States, my new insights were sharpened by the
uprisings of 1967, a summer of considerable unrest and awakening on the
part of African Americans. I entered graduate school at Berkeley that fall,
avidly interested in African American history and convinced that once I had
developed my research skills, I could set about discovering a historical
perspective that would do justice to African Americans and jazz, in much the
same way that African historians and government officials were recasting the
teaching and conceptualization of African history from an anticolonial point of
view.
From the outset of my research on Lester Young, I learned to
question the once-prevailing notions promoted by the jazz journals,
especially in contemporary record reviews, highlighting Young’s successes
with Basie and exaggerating his decline after 1945. The critics’ Eurocentric
emphasis—as when they likened Young to Mozart, for example, in reviews of
reissues of the saxophonist’s work in the 1980s—was also troubling, both in
and of itself and because it carried such bald connotations of racial
superiority in the suggestion that the saxophonist was worthy of comparison
with this or that European master.
When I first began doing research for this book, I did not really
notice how frequently my sources were giving me—often in just a few words—
verbal snapshots of Young that challenged existing conceptions. For
example, when he was asked if the saxophonist had played differently after
being discharged from the military, Wilbur “Buck” Clayton expressed the
heretical opinion that he had played better, even though according to jazz
legend, Young’s playing had suffered after his stint in the army. Clayton also
recalled that Young’s father had been a professor of music, pointing to the
development of talent within the family over multiple generations. In another
instance, in interviews with me, several Blue Devils with whom Young had
played in 1932 and 1933 took credit for naming him Pres, contradicting the
widespread belief that Billie Holiday had given him that nickname. In other
words, his identity as “Pres” had preceded his meeting the singer or joining
Count Basie’s band, despite hallowed folklore and testimony to the contrary.
In interviews and casual conversation, both family members and
fellow musicians questioned the prevailing wisdom about Young in ways that
were not only tactful and insightful but profound. I remember how the late
Connie Kay, drummer in the Modern Jazz Quartet, responded to allegations
that Young had had bad nights, or hadn’t played as well, or had failed to
meet his own artistic goals in the 1950s: he said that as a sideman, he
couldn’t make those kinds of judgments about Young, or about Charlie
Parker, either, for that matter, because those two men had been artists, not
imitators. To paraphrase Kay, when an imitator plays something differently,
you can conclude that he doesn’t have it together, but how can you tell with a
musician of the caliber of a Pres or a Bird, both of whom were always
experimenting? I rarely encountered comments as thoughtful as this in the
printed jazz literature.
Kay told me of another drummer, Carl “Kansas” Fields, who had
been with Young during his last days in Paris and who in 1981 was living on
Chicago’s South Side. Fields was an unassuming gentleman who responded
that he was still learning—and was in enrolled in a local college—when I
asked him when he had learned to play the drums. He very patiently
explained what was then a new idea to me, that Young’s music reflected the
man himself, and that his personality was expressed in his music. In other
words, the saxophonist had been a total artist, whose life was submerged in
his art. This concept merely puzzled me at the time, but it made me want to
go deeper into the subject matter in an attempt to understand Fields’s notion
and the perspective that had fostered it.
From the musicians I learned to be highly skeptical of received
wisdom about Pres. I also came to appreciate their often quite scientific
approach to questioning people’s ideas about such things: Were you there
every night? they would ask. Did you play or travel with him? Did he himself
tell you that? Such questions deal with the very essence of the respondent’s
knowledge about jazz and are therefore essentially epistemological, touching
on the nature of opinion and on how we know what we know.
This kind of skepticism was, I thought, quite healthy. In my own
interviews, I noted a certain tendentiousness on the part of a few musicians,
who disagreed with whatever I suggested about the music’s history and
indicated that it was always greater than expectations or preconceived
notions. This was one way they had of resisting the labels and ideas that
were commonly assigned to them, regardless of their opinions. Furthermore,
it reflected a measure of intelligence not generally attributed to jazz
musicians.
Still, I wondered, why are the opinions of musicians so readily
discounted by critics, and why do writers so rarely secure the cooperation of
family members in jazz biographies? These were some of the questions I
pondered over the years as I interviewed musicians. Family connections are
seldom examined in any detail in jazz biographies, but as Jo Jones pointed
out, African Americans have family traditions just like the Rockefellers and
the Kennedys. Many jazz writers seem to ignore this fact, for whatever
reason. In this respect, the Young family’s oral tradition was particularly rich,
and it was not one they always shared with writers. They were typical
Louisianans, a tightly knit family presided over by a patriarch, Young’s father,
and his father before him. They had their own unique perspectives on the
saxophonist and on other family members. For example, Young’s father, the
music professor, impressed upon his children the importance of a work ethic,
punctuality, self-discipline, sticking to one’s principles, and standing up for
something—specific values that were adopted by his children, including
Lester, but that have often been overlooked by those writing about Young.
Moreover, important spiritual truths and traditions were a part of
the family heritage for generations. Jacob Young, Lester’s paternal
grandfather, was a pillar of Allen Chapel, the first African Methodist Episcopal
(A.M.E.) church in Lafourche Parish, in the bayou country of Louisiana about
sixty miles from New Orleans; his name is listed on a memorial plaque in the
church’s vestibule. Martha, his wife, was a missionary. The saxophonist’s
father conducted church choirs. The women of the Young family sang and
gave recitations in church; Lester’s aunt Mamie married the minister of Allen
Chapel late in the nineteenth century. Unlike the Baptists, the denomination
to which the majority of African Americans belonged (and still belong), the
members of the A.M.E. were quite cerebral in their spiritual demeanor, not
given to jumping up and shouting or dancing with joy, as many of their
Protestant brethren did.
The pianist Sadik Hakim, a Young sideman (and one of the first
such I interviewed), stressed that he had seen Young as a spiritual leader—
another of those opinions that have gone largely unpublicized. Hakim’s
assertion was quite perplexing to me at the beginning of my research
because Young had usually been portrayed as a rebel, an iconoclast, and an
alcoholic—qualities not generally associated with spiritual leaders.
Nevertheless, a memorial service has been held for him at Saint Peter’s in
Manhattan every March since the 1980s.
Whenever I told musicians that I wanted to ask them about Lester
Young, they invariably corrected my use of his name: “You mean Pres?” His
identity as President of the Tenor Saxophone was so compelling that long
after his death, this term was still presented as his rightful title, representing
the essence of his stature in the jazz world. Of course, it was some time
before I understood the significance of their correcting me: it was tantamount
to their saying that he was a giant who should be spoken of in a manner
befitting his singular contribution. This habit of theirs impressed upon me the
permanence of the mark Young had left upon music.
Revealing though they were, however, the insights that Young’s
sidemen provided were limited to some degree. I knew I needed to get a
better sense of the historical, social, and cultural influences that had shaped
Young, and so I began archival research in Louisiana parishes and other
places where his family had lived prior to his going out on his own, in around
1929. Eventually this research led to Lester’s father, Willis H. Young, who
Buck Clayton said had taught music and voice, played every kind of
instrument, led bands all over the country, and trained not only his children
but his grandchildren and generations of other musicians.
Some old-timers, such as Le Roy “Snake” Whyte and
Charles “Truck” Parham, helped me re-create the Minneapolis milieu (oddly
neglected in histories of jazz) in which Young had spent nearly a decade of
his career. I also bore down on the U.S. Manuscript Census, which turned
out to be of less use than I had hoped: I could never find any listing for Willis
Young after 1900, and the identification of Lester, his sister Irma, their
mother, and their stepmother was problematic, too. But it was through the
census that I discovered Aunt Mamie, Willis’s sister, living with her husband
in Washington Parish, Louisiana, in 1910, and without that piece of
information it would never have occurred to me to search that parish’s records
for her brother’s marriage license.
Throughout my years of research on this book, I felt a sense of
responsibility toward the members of Young’s family, who took me into their
confidence; above all, I wanted to remain true to their trust rather than betray
it with a quick publication that would add little to our knowledge of the
saxophonist or, even worse, contribute to the all-too-prevalent misinformation
and misunderstandings about him. During his life and after his death in 1959,
rumors circulated that led to a persistent and unsympathetic depiction of him
as an aging alcoholic, a has-been whose artistry had declined precipitously
after he was drafted into the U.S. Army, court-martialed for possessing
marijuana, and dishonorably discharged in 1945. Then, too, I often recalled
the words of advice that Young once gave a sideman, Valdo Williams, who
paused in a solo as if uncertain whether to take another chorus: “Never give
up. . . . Don’t ever give up.”2
I felt obliged to write a sympathetic portrait because I believed it
would permit a better understanding of my subject than any other kind of
approach. One reader’s response to an early draft of my manuscript typified
the reactions of those who wanted me to make judgments about Young—to
condemn him for being irresponsible and a bad father, for abandoning his wife
and children when he went to live at the Alvin Hotel in Manhattan toward the
end of his life.
Such opinions were never voiced about Lester by his family
members or sidemen, who were in fact puzzled and sometimes troubled by
attempts on the part of the press to portray Young as anything but a gentle,
sensitive artist who was misunderstood and maligned during his lifetime. One
Blue Devil, Ernie Williams, rather cryptically remarked to me, “It was a damn
shame what they did to Lester.” (Williams did not consent to be interviewed.)
I came to reject the conviction of some writers that those closest
to Young were hiding some deep, dark secret about him. Furthermore, the
portrait drawn by family members and fellows musicians seemed to contrast
so sharply with published descriptions of Young as to require a revisionist
portrayal of the saxophonist, undertaken in much the same spirit in which
historians have revised African, African American, and U.S. history over the
past generation.
Eventually I came to appreciate why so few people really did or
could know Young: like many musicians, he had a rich social life outside the
world of commercial entertainment, a life that he guarded closely because he
valued it as private. For him and others like him, relations with spouses,
children, other family members, and musician friends and their families were
particularly important because they were their own and they were real,
intimate, and sustaining, different in character from the tinsel and hullabaloo
of show business. Young, for one, often visited with what he called
his “waybacks”—friends he had known for years—when he traveled on the
road with his combo. At other times, in a world of his own making, he
would “hold court”—to use saxophonist John “Zoot” Sims’s expression—with
sidemen and local musicians in his hotel room or backstage. This Jazz
musicians’ universe of family and close friends, and its meaning to the
musicians themselves, would have been invisible to outsiders and writers
unless, for example, they were regularly invited to dinner in a musician’s
home or, an even rarer occurrence, married into his family.
African American musicians in general, and Young himself in
particular, were remarkably adept at hiding their private lives from strangers.
Tactful responses to pointed questions, the use of vague metaphors and jazz
slang, and a host of other techniques all kept people out of their business.
When interviewed in private and asked to tell their story, however, in the
comfort of their own homes, musicians may sometimes reveal their special
insights, wisdom, and criticism. Had I invested less time in this project, such
glimmers of Young’s interior life would never have shown themselves to me.
My respect for the opinions of Young’s family and sidemen
extends to the precise words they chose to express them, which is why I
have elected to quote them at length in this work and to provide an
interpretive context that does them justice. Young’s reputation and memory
are safe in the record (now CD) grooves that he etched, and I suspect that
his music will continue to be heard forever. I am not so sure that the same
will be true of the testimony of the musicians who revered and loved him, so I
hope to make some contribution to its longevity by taking it seriously and
reproducing it so that others can consider it, too. These witnesses deserve to
be heard along with those whose opinions have so often been voiced in the
trade journals, books, liner notes, and record reviews.
