Lester Young

These are the trio recordings that captured Young in his most intimate studio setting, and the contrast with his Basie years is striking. Nat King Cole on piano brings a different energy from the orchestral contexts Young had been inhabiting: lighter, more conversational, less about ensemble power and more about two musicians listening to each other with genuine attentiveness.

Young's tone in this period had already begun its post-war shift from the airy, floating quality of the late thirties recordings toward something denser and more bittersweet. The lightness was still there, but it was now freighted with something harder to name, as if the sound itself had accumulated years. On slower pieces especially, that quality is deeply moving.

These sessions were recorded across several years and the lineup varies, but the quality is consistently high. For anyone who knows only the Basie or the JATP recordings, the trio setting reveals a more private side of Young that the larger contexts rarely allowed.

One of the early Clef recordings, gathering sessions from 1949 through 1951 with varying rhythm sections. John Lewis, who would go on to found the Modern Jazz Quartet, takes the piano chair on the earlier sessions, and the combination is revelatory: Lewis's spare, classical approach creates exactly the kind of space that Young's horizontal, melody-centered tenor needed. Hank Jones handles the later sessions with a warmer, more harmonically lush touch.

The rhythm sections rotate across the four dates: Ray Brown, Joe Shulman, and Gene Ramey each take turns on bass, while Buddy Rich, Bill Clark, and Jo Jones share the drum chair. The variety of supporting players gives the album a documentary quality, showing Young in multiple configurations without any drop in the level of his playing.

The ballad playing on this album is some of Young's most nakedly beautiful work from this period. There is a directness to the melodic statements that bypasses all the usual jazz machismo and arrives at something genuinely felt. A quiet record that rewards patient listening.

The most celebrated of the Verve recordings and with good reason. The Oscar Peterson Trio in 1952 was already operating at a level of swing and technical precision that was simply extraordinary, and putting Lester Young in front of that rhythm section produced something that neither party would have generated alone. The contrast between Young's horizontal, floating phrasing and Peterson's vertical, percussive approach should create friction; instead it creates electricity.

Barney Kessel on guitar and Ray Brown on bass give the rhythm section an extra layer of rhythmic propulsion that intensifies whatever Young plays above it. Young responds to the heat beneath him by playing with more urgency than the trio sessions typically required, and the result is a record that sounds fully alive from the first note to the last.

The standard material is treated with genuine care. "These Foolish Things" gets a reading that shows Young at his most melodically inventive, taking the chord changes as a starting point and then following his own logic without ever losing the thread back to the tune. Five stars: one of the essential Lester Young recordings and among the finest jazz records of the decade.

A quintet session with Young's working band of the mid-fifties: Jesse Drakes on trumpet, Gildo Mahones on piano, John Ore on bass, and Connie Kay on drums. These were the musicians who played with Young night after night in clubs, and that familiarity translates into an ease and directness that some of the more star-studded studio dates couldn't always match.

The title track gets a reading that is looser and more relaxed than the later period recordings. Connie Kay, who would become best known as the Modern Jazz Quartet's drummer, keeps the time with a lightness and precision that suits Young's floating rhythmic sense perfectly. Drakes on trumpet provides a straightforward front-line partner, never attempting to steal the spotlight but always present and swinging.

The ballads are particularly fine. Gildo Mahones accompanies with a sensitivity that gives Young all the room he needs to stretch the melodies, and John Ore's bass anchors the slower tempos with a steady warmth. Not the most celebrated of the Norgran/Verve sessions, but the level of relaxation and musical honesty here makes it a worthwhile entry in the discography.

One session, January 12, 1956, and among the greatest small-group jazz recordings of the decade. Roy Eldridge replaces Harry Edison in the front line, and the combination of his more assertive, forward-leaning trumpet with Young's lateral, floating tenor creates a front line of remarkable variety. Eldridge pushes; Young drifts; and the two approaches illuminate each other completely.

Jo Jones on drums is at the absolute peak of his form, driving the ensemble with a looseness that never sacrifices the groove. The Basie rhythm section connection means that Green and Jones are already inside each other's thinking in a way that takes years to develop, and Teddy Wilson makes the piano chair sound inevitable rather than arranged.

Young's solos on this record have a particular authority. By 1956 his health was beginning to decline, and the later recordings sometimes reflect that. Here none of that is present. He plays with focus and warmth and the kind of easy swing that made him the most influential tenor saxophonist in jazz history. Five stars and essential.

The day after Jazz Giants '56, the same rhythm section without the trumpets and trombones, and the result is an entirely different kind of record. Without the front-line ensemble, the music opens up into a more interior space, and Young and Wilson find each other across that space with the ease of musicians who have been listening to each other for twenty years.

Wilson is one of the most harmonically sophisticated pianists in jazz history, and his comping beneath Young is so perfectly calibrated that it sounds less like accompaniment and more like a continuous conversation. He plays every note with the intention of supporting whatever Young needs and never once imposes his own agenda. The result is that Young sounds freer and more melodically adventurous than on almost any other recording of this period.

Jo Jones with brushes throughout, Gene Ramey walking with absolute authority: the rhythm section is as settled as any rhythm section gets. "All of Me" is perhaps the album's finest moment, played at a medium tempo that allows both Young and Wilson room to breathe without ever losing momentum. Five stars and among the finest ballad-and-standard recordings in jazz.

A live recording from December 1956 at a Washington D.C. club, released posthumously on Norman Granz's Pablo label in 1979. The sound quality is what you would expect from a club recording of the period: present but not pristine, the room audible, the intimacy of the setting coming through the decades. What it documents is Lester Young in a working-band context, playing without the studio polish of the Verve sessions.

The supporting cast is not the star-studded lineup of the studio dates. Bill Potts is a capable but unremarkable pianist; the rhythm section is solid without being exceptional. Young is the complete reason to listen to this record, and he provides ample reason. His tone in late 1956 is still recognizably his, still warm and horizontal, though the health issues that would overtake him within two years had begun to color the sound.

For completists and devotees this is essential. The relaxed club setting reveals things about how Young approached a standard that the more formal Verve dates do not: longer stretches, more casual tempo work, the sense of a musician playing because he likes to play. Released in five volumes; any of them rewards attention.

The title says something. By 1958, Lester Young's health was in serious decline: alcoholism and depression had hollowed out some of the vitality of the earlier recordings, and the saxophone sound itself had changed in ways that make direct comparison to the 1956 dates a sometimes difficult exercise. And yet the musicianship here is never absent, and the best moments have a quality that no earlier period could have produced.

The session brings together two of the era's finest trumpeters, Harry Edison and Roy Eldridge, flanking Young's tenor with contrasting brass voices. Hank Jones on piano is a warm and attentive accompanist who gives Young exactly the right amount of support without pressing, while Herb Ellis adds subtle guitar voicings that enrich the ensemble texture. Mickey Sheen keeps the pulse alive with an easy swing, and George Duvivier's bass anchors the proceedings. The slower ballads are where the album is most consistent: Young playing through the late-period weight with a simplicity that has its own beauty.

The album's title is a joke that contains sadness, which is true of a lot of late Lester Young. Not the best entry point, but for anyone who loves him it is essential: the late period, clear-eyed, the musician playing with whatever he had left, and it being enough.

His last recording, made in Paris in early March 1959 for a television broadcast. Young would die less than two weeks later, on March 15th, on the flight back from Europe to New York. Knowing this gives everything on this album a weight that is not entirely fair to the music itself, but the music does not resist that weight: it seems to carry it willingly.

Kenny Clarke on drums is the rhythmic anchor, playing with his characteristic looseness and authority. Pierre Michelot on bass is one of the finest European jazz bassists of the era. Rene Urtreger plays piano with a fluency that shows how thoroughly bebop had traveled across the Atlantic by 1959. The European support cast treats Young with the reverence his stature demanded while still playing rather than merely accompanying.

Young's tone on this record is not what it was in 1952 or even 1956. The years are audible. But his melodic intelligence, the ability to find the essential phrase and play it with total commitment, is unchanged. "There Will Never Be Another You" gets a reading of such quiet finality that it is almost impossible to hear without the biographical knowledge pressing in. He died eleven days later. Five stars.