The Lonely Tenor Poetry of Lester Young

Lester Young aka Prez. Angel headed hipster of the Kansas City night. Porkpie hat, tilted horn, floating lines behind and ahead of the beat, but always on time. What I would have given to sit in just once with Count Basie's little sextet and have the chance to back him up on rhythm guitar. Or better, chop chords for him when he was leading his own sad little group.

Ezra Pound defined literature as language charged with meaning; maybe music is sound charged with meaning. And if so, Prez' horn carries a devastating, haunting meaning. Kind of like Joyce's invocation of the enveloping invisible presence of the departed in "The Dead", the sound of his hermetic horn is like "distant music" echoing a spectral world behind our "real world". It is a world where the tenor blows a line of blue notes over the void, impossibly forlorn and solitary.

Wittgenstein denied the possibility of a private language. But Prez had one. In his words, in his tenor, in his style. While the rest of the tenormen huffed and puffed to outdo Coleman Hawins, Prez saw another way. He bracketed and transcended the entire battle, redefining the terms of engagement. So dig Prez