Lester Young In Washington D.C.

[Tom 1960]

Based on the glowing recommendations, I just purchased Volume 1. I'm certain others to follow. Thanks fellas!

[John L]

1956 was probably the last great year for Lester Young. In addition to these recordings, there are the Verve sessions with Teddy Wilson, the European date on Onyx, the Cafe Bohemia are more. Just about everything on wax by Pres from 1956 is highly worthwhile.

I heard Pres in Chicago in Oct. 1955 with JATP. He was not in good shape and was hospitalized that November for alcoholism and depression. He emerged, judging by the music he made in 1956, in very good shape. IIRC, the superb "Jazz Giants' 56," with Roy Eldridge, Vic Dickinson, Teddy Wilson, Gene Ramey, and Jo Jones, was the first album to proclaim his return.

Yes, 1954-1955 was generally a down time for Pres. It was no accident that one of the tracks from his Verve session as a leader in 56 with Teddy Wilson was titled "Pres Returns." Still, lucky you to have seen Pres live in any condition!

What I wrote about that concert in my book:

'The first live jazz performance I heard was a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert that took place at the Chicago Opera House on October 2, 1955, with a lineup that included Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Flip Phillips, Illinois Jacquet , Lester Young, Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, and Buddy Rich. Aware of the music for just five months, at age thirteen I knew the names of most of these musicians. And one of them, Eldridge, was a particular favorite because he seemed to speak so personally and openly through his horn, with such passion, genuineness, strength and grit. (By contrast, I thought that Jacquet and Phillips’s tenor saxophone battles were exciting but mostly for show, not to be taken at face value.)

'Lester Young, however, was only a name to me; I’d yet to hear a note of his music. And partly because of that lack of context, much of what he played that afternoon struck me as very strange. (As it happens, the concert was recorded, and eventually released on the album Blues in Chicago 1955, so I can place memories alongside what actually occurred.) Young was not in good shape on the1955 JATP tour, physically or emotionally . He would be hospitalized for several weeks that winter, suffering from alcoholism and depression, though he would recover sufficiently to make two of his best latter-day recordings, Jazz Giants ’56 and Pres and Teddy, in mid-January 1956. But in the gladiatorial arena of Jazz at the Philharmonic, the wan, watery-toned Young I heard seemed to speak mostly of weakness, even of an alarming inability or unwillingness to defend himself. And yet this state of being was undeniably, painfully being expressed, though at times perhaps only out of dire necessity; the brisk tempo Gillespie set for the piece the two of them shared was one that Young could barely make.

'Then toward the end came a ballad medley, which began with Young’s slow-motion restatement of “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” That he seemed to be more in his element here was about all I realized at the time, though even that fact was provocative. And the recorded evidence confirms this, as Young bends a bare minimum of resources to the task --as though he were saying “This is all I have” and asking “Is this not enough?” Admittedly, that is largely an adult response to a performance that now seems remarkable to me. Yet something of that sort must have been crystallizing back then, because I was immediately eager to find out more about Lester Young.'

Thanks, Larry. I recall also reading this in your book.

I didn't realize that the 1955 Chicago concert was recorded. I have never heard it. One of the notorious Spanish boot labels did release a September Carnegie Hall JATP concert from that tour not long ago. Pres is featured on "I Didn't Know What Time it Was" at that concert as well. He sounds weak, but still manages to get off an absolutely gorgeous solo on that song. In fact, I think that it is my favorite Pres solo from 1954-1955 among those that I have heard.

[ejp626]

>> Blues in Chicago 1955

Has this been issued on CD in any form? It looks like some of the other 1955 and 1956 concert dates have come out on Fresh Sounds but not this one.

[Larry Kart]

1956 was probably the last great year for Lester Young. In addition to these recordings, there are the Verve sessions with Teddy Wilson, the European date on Onyx, the Cafe Bohemia are more. Just about everything on wax by Pres from 1956 is highly worthwhile.

I heard Pres in Chicago in Oct. 1955 with JATP. He was not in good shape and was hospitalized that November for alcoholism and depression. He emerged, judging by the music he made in 1956, in very good shape. IIRC, the superb "Jazz Giants' 56," with Roy Eldridge, Vic Dickinson, Teddy Wilson, Gene Ramey, and Jo Jones, was the first album to proclaim his return.

Yes, 1954-1955 was generally a down time for Pres. It was no accident that one of the tracks from his Verve session as a leader in 56 with Teddy Wilson was titled "Pres Returns." Still, lucky you to have seen Pres live in any condition!

What I wrote about that concert in my book:

'The first live jazz performance I heard was a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert that took place at the Chicago Opera House on October 2, 1955, with a lineup that included Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Flip Phillips, Illinois Jacquet , Lester Young, Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, and Buddy Rich. Aware of the music for just five months, at age thirteen I knew the names of most of these musicians. And one of them, Eldridge, was a particular favorite because he seemed to speak so personally and openly through his horn, with such passion, genuineness, strength and grit. (By contrast, I thought that Jacquet and Phillips’s tenor saxophone battles were exciting but mostly for show, not to be taken at face value.)

'Lester Young, however, was only a name to me; I’d yet to hear a note of his music. And partly because of that lack of context, much of what he played that afternoon struck me as very strange. (As it happens, the concert was recorded, and eventually released on the album Blues in Chicago 1955, so I can place memories alongside what actually occurred.) Young was not in good shape on the1955 JATP tour, physically or emotionally . He would be hospitalized for several weeks that winter, suffering from alcoholism and depression, though he would recover sufficiently to make two of his best latter-day recordings, Jazz Giants ’56 and Pres and Teddy, in mid-January 1956. But in the gladiatorial arena of Jazz at the Philharmonic, the wan, watery-toned Young I heard seemed to speak mostly of weakness, even of an alarming inability or unwillingness to defend himself. And yet this state of being was undeniably, painfully being expressed, though at times perhaps only out of dire necessity; the brisk tempo Gillespie set for the piece the two of them shared was one that Young could barely make.

'Then toward the end came a ballad medley, which began with Young’s slow-motion restatement of “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” That he seemed to be more in his element here was about all I realized at the time, though even that fact was provocative. And the recorded evidence confirms this, as Young bends a bare minimum of resources to the task --as though he were saying “This is all I have” and asking “Is this not enough?” Admittedly, that is largely an adult response to a performance that now seems remarkable to me. Yet something of that sort must have been crystallizing back then, because I was immediately eager to find out more about Lester Young.'

Thanks, Larry. I recall also reading this in your book.

I didn't realize that the 1955 Chicago concert was recorded. I have never heard it. One of the notorious Spanish boot labels did release a September Carnegie Hall JATP concert from that tour not long ago. Pres is featured on "I Didn't Know What Time it Was" at that concert as well. He sounds weak, but still manages to get off an absolutely gorgeous solo on that song. In fact, I think that it is my favorite Pres solo from 1954-1955 among those that I have heard.

Not on CD AFAIK:

http://www.allmusic.com/album/blues-in-chicago-1955-mw0000955309

http://www.amazon.com/Blues-Chicago-1955-Jazz-Philharmonic/dp/B003MXOTOK

As to whether what's on "Blues in Chicago" is the exact concert I heard, even though it's labeled as such in the liner notes, I'm aware (from the recent Granz bio and elsewhere) that Granz could be quite capricious about what was recorded when and where -- e..g Peterson's "Live at the Concertgebouw," which was recorded somewhere else IIRC, and the stereo and mono material from the Getz-J.J. Johnson JATP sets, which again IIRC were recorded in Chicago and Los Angeles but were tagged on the 1980s LP reissue the wrong way around. Also, though it was corrected on the CD issue, which has room for all that material,, the LP reissue didn't have room for all of it and understandably in one sense chose the (different from the mono) stereo performances of the duplicate titles. But the liner notes, by no less a figure than Bob Porter, claimed that this was because the stereo performances were musically superior to the mono ones (which had been issued on the original mono LP), when in fact the mono performances were superb and the stereo ones were rather discombobulated --and that in part IMO because the arrangement of the band on the stage for the stereo tracks seemed to have placed the members of rhythm section and the horns so far apart from each other that group cohesion was almost impossible. BTW, it might be nice to have a list of all the Granz recordings that were recorded in places and at dates other than what the original albums claimed.

[Don Brown]

I remember that the Basie in London album was actually recorded at a concert in Goteburg, Sweden. I guess Granz had already paid for the posed cover photograph of Basie with a couple of "pearlies" and didn't want to waste it.