Savoy’s complete compilation travels through two and a half hours of Lester Young’s studio sessions and rehearsal time. There are several takes for many of the numbers, and the listener has the ...

Back in 2009, Mosaic Records issued Classic Columbia, Okeh and Vocalion Lester Young With Count Basie (1936-1940) , a 4-CD boxed set covering four years. When the limited number of boxes pressed sold ...

Along with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, the legendary tenor saxophonist Lester Young is considered one of the seminal figures in the history of jazz. From his first recorded ...

He looked different, he played different, he was different. Lester Young stood out: green eyes, reddish hair that earned him the boyhood nickname “Red,” a porkpie hat, an ankle-length black coat, his ...

In the line of tenor saxophone players who wind through modern jazz, the place of Lester Young is precious if not quite peerless. His smooth-as-silk solos in the Count Basie band of the late 1930s ...

W.C. Fields famously described Charlie Chaplin as “the best ballet dancer that ever lived.” Chaplin’s lightness on his toes—his agility darting in and out between pursuers and adversaries, his narrow ...

He was born in 1909 and was famously kicked out of Fletcher Henderson’s band in the early thirties for not sounding enough like Coleman Hawkins, his predecessor in the tenor-sax chair. Lester Young, ...

A.B. SPELLMAN, National Endowment for the Arts: Murray, the Idiot's 30-second History of Jazz would have women singing the blues, trumpet players playing like women singing the blues, Louis Armstrong ...