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William Gottlieb/Library of Congress
Lester Young, c. 1946
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Lester Young Cools a Village
by Henry Blanke
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…..I don’t dig being dug while I’m digging.
…..The slang word “cool” has long been in common parlance and one hears it almost every day. “Don’t let him get to you. I can tell you’re pissed off.” “Naw, man, I’m cool”; “That was cool. Play it again”; “Here comes a cop. Keep your cool”; “He’s so cool. I wish I could be like him.” But where does this word come from and does it signify something more complex? It may be difficult to trace the origins of a slang term to a single individual, but “cool” was first used colloquially by the jazz saxophonist Lester Young.
…..Composer and scholar Gunther Schuller has written that Young was the most influential figure in jazz between Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, but his legacy extends beyond music to style, attitude and language. So much of the hip argot in common use, especially in the Black community, from the 1940s through the ‘60s and still heard today (dig, hip, crib, bread, homeboy) can be traced to the man they called Prez because he was the president of jazz and because he called everyone Prez. And Young had his own private almost impenetrable language unique to him. If he liked something he had “eyes” for it. If someone was ill, Young referred to him as “Johnny deathbed.” If asked if he liked someone’s playing he might say, “that bitch vonced just right for me.” And Billie Holliday was “Lady Day.”
…..Lester Young was born into a musical family in 1909 and grew up in New Orleans. His father was a music educator and band leader who taught his elder son the rudiments of several instruments by the time he was 10 years old. The family band toured with carnivals throughout the Southwest and it is quite possible that the coded language of carnival workers influenced Lester’s subsequent unique jargon. At age 18 he left the Young family band because, being of an especially sensitive nature, he refused to tour the Jim Crow South. He left home permanently in 1932 and settled in Kansas City as tenor saxophonist for the Count Basie band. The mid to late 1930s recordings Young made with Basie established him as the preeminent innovator of the tenor saxophone. Prior to him it was Coleman Hawkins’ heavy vibrato and harmonically sophisticated improvisations which were the model for the instrument. Young’s sound on the horn was light and he developed a linear, thematically unified and rhythmically supple style of playing which influenced modern jazz innovators such as Charlie Parker.
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Listen to the 1939 recording of Lester Young, with the Count Basie Orchestra, performing his composition “Lester Leaps In” [Columbia]
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…..He seemed to tell a story, lyrical narrative in each solo. He is also considered a precursor to the cool jazz of the 1950s, but unlike the emotionally reserved and rhythmically tepid aesthetic of that style, Young’s playing was highly expressive, swinging and rooted in the blues.
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Listen to the 1936 recording of Count Basie performing his composition “Boogie Woogie, (I May Be Wrong)” with Lester Young (tenor saxophone); Jimmy Rushing (vocals); Basie (piano); Walter Page (bass); Carl Smith (trumpet); Jo Jones (drums). [Columbia/Legacy]
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…..Along with his recordings with Basie, those accompanying Billie Holliday spanning the late 1930s to the middle ‘40s hold an esteemed place in the jazz canon. On those records Young’s sensitive lyricism is the ideal counterpoint to Holliday’s emotive chiaroscuro.
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Listen to the 1937 recording of Billie Holiday performing the Jimmy McHugh/Dorothy Fields composition “I Must Have That Man” with Teddy Wilson (piano); Lester Young (tenor saxophone); Benny Goodman (clarinet); Roy Eldridge (trumpet). [Billie Holiday official audio]
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…..In 1944 Young was inducted into the army and as a shy, sensitive Black artist the experience was traumatizing. He was court martialed for possession of marijuana and barbiturates and served a year in the brig before being dishonorably discharged. The critical consensus holds that Young’s playing post-military shows a marked decline no doubt exacerbated by his alcoholism. But there is a melancholy grandeur and, when he was healthy, moments of swinging glory in his later recordings. (At the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival he joins a new version of the Basie band along with several of his old bandmates and plays with an inventiveness and imagination to rival anything he, or anyone else, played before. Remarkably this was recorded less than two years before his death.)
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Listen to Count Basie’s band perform “Boogie Woogie (I May Be Wrong)” from 1957, with Lester Young on tenor [Universal Music Group]
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…..However, what to make of Lester Young’s eccentric and influential lexicon? It was part carny talk, part jazz jive and part pure Lester. But a closer look reveals possible West African roots. As an example, take the word “cool.” Scholar Robert Farris Thompson has shown that in Yoruba culture there are many words with different shades of meaning denoting a mystical composure in the face of either stress and adversity or musical celebration and religious ritual. West African master drummers are in complete, imperturbable command of a complex polyrhythmic vocabulary even as the dancing reaches a peak of wild abandon. “Cool” can function as a kind of aesthetic mask which conceals years of arduous training and which results in a seemingly effortless and spontaneous musical expressiveness. Also, wise and respected elders may be said to “cool the hearts” of individuals or even entire villages in the midst of conflict. And this mystic coolness can also represent philosophical concepts of healing, renewal and rebirth.
…..Now transpose some of this to the situation of African American artists in a philistine and racist society and you may gain some notion of the function of “cool” among jazz musicians, especially the post-World War II modernists such as Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. In this sense Lester Young was the first modern jazz musician. His improvisations danced across bar lines and were both lyrical and abstract, rhythmically sophisticated but danceable and infused with the blues.
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Listen to the 1936 recording of Count Basie performing George and Ira Gershwin’s composition “Oh, Lady Be Good,” with Lester Young (tenor saxophone); Walter Page (bass); Basie (piano); Carl Smith (trumpet); and Jo Jones (drums). [Columbia/Legacy]
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…..And his personal style of jaunty porkpie hats, dark glasses in nightclubs (the first to do this), holding his horn at an oblique angle and liberal use of marijuana signified an elegant detachment from mainstream society. Perhaps first and foremost Young’s distinctive and inventive use of language helped to insulate him as much as possible from the brutal vicissitudes of American racism. But the way he spoke was understood and appreciated by those with a shared sensibility, especially within the jazz community. To his friends, mostly Black musicians, prostitutes, addicts and hipsters, he showed great kindness and tolerance. Furthermore, his slang terminology was appropriated by white beatniks, hippies, the bohemian avant-garde and their fellow travelers and has been in use in this country for the past several decades.
…..Lester Young spent his final days in a room at the Alvin Hotel on 52nd Street across the street from the jazz club Birdland. Years of heavy drinking had taken a toll and his health was in serious decline. Once in a while he would go to the club to check out the music. When he would enter a whispered murmur would go up that Prez was in the house and all eyes would be on him. As shy as he was this often made him uncomfortable and he would leave. One time a guy at the next table asked him why he was going. He answered, “I don’t dig being dug while I’m digging.”
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Henry Blanke has been listening to jazz and Black popular music since 1973. He frequented the Village Vanguard and other New York City jazz clubs for 40 years. He now resides in New Orleans, where much of the music he loves originated.
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Click here to read Henry Blanke’s appreciation of Blind Willie Johnson, “Blind Willie Johnson Leaves the Solar System”
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