“You’ve got to have a style that’s all your own. A man can only be a stylist if he’s made up his mind not to copy anybody. Originality is the thing. You can have tone and technique and a lot of other things, but without originality, you ain’t really nowhere. Gotta be original!” – Lester Young
Though Lester Young’s playing, particularly his recordings with vocalist Billie Holiday, are a major part of the quintessential sound of swing-era jazz, it would be an error to deny the influence that Young had on the creation of bebop. Though most saxophonists moved away from Young’s tone during the bebop era, Young’s harmonic concepts (or rather, his emphasis on melody over harmony) was a catalyst for the development of bebop’s harmonic vocabulary.
Harmonic Contributions
Perhaps the most unique element of Young’s playing is his focus on melody above harmony. Whereas Coleman Hawkins approached improvisation from a harmonic perspective, vertically outlining changes as he improvised, Young rarely did so. Instead, Young’s playing was based more on strong melodic lines. Young’s lines tended to incorporate 13 and 9 tensions fairly often and, unlike players like Hawkins who used them as upper extensions of the harmony, Young would often resolve and end lines on what we would now call harmonic tensions. Young himself, however, given his linear thinking, would not have considered these notes to be tensions. Thanks largely to Young’s influence on the players of the time, bebop became the first movement in jazz to incorporate harmonic tensions as possibilities for resolution, instead of merely as passing or neighbor tones.
Furthermore, it was not uncommon for Young to develop a motivic idea and repeat the idea at a higher pitch level (either diatonically or chromatically); this practice became a major influence for the chromaticism found in bebop.
Charlie Parker
Charlie “Bird” Parker is known, along with Dizzy Gillespie, as one of the founders of bebop. While listening to Bird may not immediately bring to mind Lester Young, partly due to Bird’s immaculate technique, fast tempos, and rhythmic playing, there is no doubt that Lester Young was a great influence in Parker’s development.
According to jazz legend, when Charlie Parker first walked onto a bandstand, the band decided to play a trick on him and change the key of the tune that was being played. This prank threw the extremely young Charlie Parker an unexpected curveball and inspired his lengthy (sometimes 12+ hour) practice sessions. According to legend, one of Parker’s sources of practice material was Lester Young solos. He would supposedly memorize the solos and then practice them at two or three times the original tempo, as well as transposing them to all keys.
While much of what was stated in the previous paragraph is more lore than anything else, we do have some confirmation of its veracity from fellow alto saxophonist Lee Konitz:
“I was on tour with Charlie once and I was warming up in the dressing room – I happened to be playing one of Lester’s choruses – and Bird came noodling into the room and said, ‘Hey, you ever heard this one?’ and he played ‘Shoe Shine Swing’ about twice as fast as the record. He knew all that. I believe he’s probably whistling it up in heaven right now.”
In this Charlie Parker recording, “Meandering,” one can hear one of the signature Lester Young ideas of moving a lick up chromatically, even though the chord changes don’t call for it. The lick occurs at 1:14 in the Parker recording. This passage can be compared with a recording of Lester Young playing, “Indiana,” in which he does the same thing with a different lick at 1:07.
Of course, Bird was not the only bebop saxophonist to be influenced by Lester “Prez” Young.
Dexter Gordon
Dexter Gordon was perhaps the first saxophonist to really develop a bebop sound on tenor; he certainly never hid his admiration for Prez: “Hawk [Coleman Hawkins] had done everything possible and was the master of the horn, but when Prez appeared we all started listening to him alone. Prez had an entirely new sound, one that we had been waiting for, the first one to really tell a story on the horn.”
By comparing one of Gordon’s most famous recordings, a 1964 rendition of “Darn That Dream,” to Young’s recording of “These Foolish Things,” it is easy to hear the influence that Young’s rhythmic interpretation had on Gordon.
Dexter Gordon is best known for playing on the back-end of the beat. While “laying back” is fairly common, Gordon takes it to a whole different level, sitting as far back on the beat as possible without being late. In listening to Young, we hear a similar laid-back style as he plays the head of a different, yet equally moving standard.
The sound that Young and Gordon achieve by playing on the back-end of the beat was the sound that helped jazz progress out of the swing era, primarily because it makes it more difficult to swing eighth notes in the same way that swing era players did, resulting in more of a straight feel than previous eras. This interpretation, along with the break-neck tempos at which most bop players performed, helped to change the sound of jazz articulation by swinging eighth notes less than players from the previous era.
Dexter Gordon: “Darn That Dream”
Lester Young: “These Foolish Things”
Thus, even though bebop saxophone tends to be more similar to Coleman Hawkins from the perspective of timbre, it is important to note the contributions that Lester Young’s playing had on both Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon, two of the more well known bebop saxophonists of the day. Hawkins’ contributions to the rhythmic and harmonic characteristics of the bebop sound helped to transition jazz into the modern era.
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