Count Basie, piano Lester Young, tenor saxophone Buck Clayton, trumpet Dicky Wells, trombone Freddie Green, guitar Walter Page, double bass Jo Jones, drums The conventional wisdom has it that Lester Young’s playing after his desperately unhappy year in the Army (1944/5) was never again to reach the high creative level it achieved over the first decade of his professional life. Critics will no doubt debate the issue for many years to come, but the evidence from the 12 tracks on this album, recorded between 1951 and 1956, is that Pres remained an outstandingly gifted, original and swinging soloist right up to the end of his career (his last engagement, incidentally, was at the Blue Note in Paris in January 1959). The material here consists of air shots from club dates in New York and Washington. On all but three of the tracks, front-line duties are shared with a trumpet player – either Idrees Sulieman, a vigorous bebop exponent who has worked with Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, the Clarke-Boland Band and Dexter Gordon, or Jesse Drakes, a fiery, staccato player from New York who played regularly with Lester between 1949 and 1955. It is highly appropriate that the opening track is Lester Leaps In, Young’s celebrated theme on the chords of I Got Rhythm which he first recorded with Count Basie’s Kansas City Seven in 1939. The middle eight of the opening chorus is delivered in typically rousing style by Sulieman, but after this it is Lester all the way. He plays the customary stop-time chorus after the theme and builds a solo full of characteristic Pres elements – lazy, laconic lines, reiterated notes and a lovely, loose swing. Lester always had a marked predilection for certain tunes and this is borne out by the fact that the two opening titles on each side of this album were featured on Young’s famous Aladdin recording sessions between October 1945 and December 1948. This Foolish thing, a well-worn standard written as a 28-bar sequence by Jack Strachey in 1936 but later equipped with an 8-bar bridge, is given new life by Lester’s unhackneyed improvisation. He also throws in a rare event where he’s concerned – a couple of quotes from Two Sleepy People. Lester is the only soloist, with Sulieman just heard at the very end. Three Little Words is another favoured Pres vehicle which he recorded on many occasions. This is a most spirited version with good solos by Lester and Sulieman. Young’s playing on this is an object lesson in economy and style. A consummate master of time and space, he could make the most eloquent statement using just three or four notes over two bars. Nothing he plays sounds contrived or ritualistic and he maintains a good balance by interspersing the quavers and triplets with long, smeared notes. Sulieman plays a crackling solo which reveals his admiration for Clifford Brown and the piece is taken to its fade-out ending by pianist Bill Potts who performs more than adequately. On Pennies from Heaven, Lester exhibits characteristic poise and an instinctive feel for right tempos. His playing is unhurried and swings effortlessly; the same languid legato phrasing informs Polka Dots and Moonbeams, a beautiful Burke/Van Heusen ballad from 1937 whose melody Lester never seemed to get totally right. On a Verve recording in March 1950 he modified the melody line, and he does the same here. The concluding track on Side One brings back Idrees Sulieman for a brisk workout on the good old 1918 James Hanley/Ballard MacDonald standard Indiana. Lester’s solo here is a gem – a thoughtful, considered choice of notes, reiteration of the same note over several bars to build up the tension, the use of unexpected intervals – all the Pres trademarks are there. Sulieman is again in boisterous, boppish form, using long, urgent lines of quavers and triplets and that staccato articulation so characteristic of Clifford Brown. Another famous Lester original opens side two (track 7). Lester again demonstrates that, with good taste, timing and timbre, the routine can be transformed into the inspirational. That loose, supple legato is an abiding delight. Jumping With Symphony Sid, originally recorded by Lester in December 1947 and named for jazz disc jockey Symphony Sid Torin, became a major jazz standard. In this version Pres is content with the barest indication of the theme in the opening chorus before leaping into improvisational mode. D.B. Blues is a blues with a middle eight and the fine rhythm section here stimulates excellent swinging solos from both Pres and Jesse Drakes, the latter manifesting a kind of composite Howard McGhee-Clifford Brown style and contriving to inject a quote from A bicycle Made For Two. John Lewis’s chordal backing is reminiscent of Erroll Garner’s on the celebrated Charlie Parker recording of Cool Blues in 1947. Ghost of A chance is a Victor Young/Ned Washington ballad that might have been written for tenor saxophone. Certainly it is much favoured by tenor men and Lester plays it with grace and authority. Up And Adam, a 12-bar blues in C, is a Young original which has no really identifiable theme. He recorded it for both the Savoy and Verve labels in 1950. Horace Silver contributes some typically percussive piano to this piece. Another blues follows and Lester again plays some effortlessly eloquent choruses. Notice the typically Lesterian rhythmic figure played on G and B in the first three bars of the second chorus. It’s a familiar Young device and it can also be heard in his solos on Lester Leaps In and Indiana. Another characteristic Lester riff is to be heard in his fifth chorus – the reiterated D with a D sharp right at the end to lead into the C seventh chord. Also totally typical of Lester’s extemporisation is his frequent use of the sixth note (E) and the rallentando ending. The album ends with a rather attenuated Tea For Two, Lester outlining the theme with lazy understatement, as ever. Recording quality of these club performances is less than exemplary – but there are some jazz exponents whose recorded work would be worth preservation and close attention even if it were cut on corrugated iron with a rusty nail. Lester is one such jazz exponent. As Leonard Feather has observed, it is a duty to preserve his unique sounds on record “for the benefit of a generation that was not lucky enough to hear in person the very special, bittersweet brand of melancholy that was Lester Willis Young”.