Lester Young, The Most Relaxed Sax Player Ever

The POTUS is never relaxed (it's not the nature of the job) but the Prez (Lester Young, tenor sax) certainly was, in 1951 at least. Enjoy a laid-back hour of Prez sitting in with the Nat King Cole Trio, featuring

• (tracks 1-10) Cole on piano (we forget that the guy did more than sing!), unknown on bass, Buddy Rich on drums; and
• (tracks 11-14) Cole on piano, Harry Edison on trumpet, Dexter Gordon on tenor sax, Red Callender or Johnny Miller (?) on bass, and again Buddy Rich on drums.
  

Mmmmm, it's like eating homemade ice cream!

We are fortunate that despite Young's short life (yes, he died Young, at age 49), he influenced many of the great players of the following generation.

Jazzing It: ‘The Way You Look Tonight’

Sometimes we forget that "jazz" was originally more frequently used as a verb than as a noun. I was looking for moderately comprehensive details of the song "The Way You Look Tonight" (music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Dorothy Fields). Sources seem to agree that the song was first performed on screen by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the film Swing Time (1936). From that point forward, just about every crooner has performed it, and a lot of them have recorded it or worked it into a film (it even appears in the final episode of Star Trek Deep Space 9).

Searching YouTube yields dozens of versions. Two of them in particular caught my attention as an example of a song played straight vs. the same song "jazzed." In this case the straight version is by Fred and Ginger; the jazzed version is by Billie Holiday, accompanied (says one reader) by a band including Benny Goodman and Lester Young (I own that recording, but it's part of a gigantic set of Holiday's work, and I have not confirmed the accompanists). Please listen to them in that order, and notice the effect of jazzing on one of the most popular songs of the 1930s.

First, Fred and Ginger:



Then Billie Holiday:



Got the idea?

Marian McPartland (1918–2013)

One of the original great jazz pianists. Jazz radio broadcaster, Pacifica Radio and NPR. Participant in that amazing photo of 57 jazz artists in Harlem in 1958. Jazz composer until she was almost 90 years old. Wikipedia praises her "encyclopaedic knowledge of jazz standards," and lists seven (7) different major categories of jazz into which her long career carried her. Oh, and she was British, and eventually OBE. (She studied at Guildhall. So did several of my early music buddies, many years later.)

They don't make 'em like McPartland anymore. She will be greatly missed.