Lester Young Blitzkrieg Baby (F & D Fisher)

This March 10, 1941 recording is not as well-known in the Lester Young canon equally information technology should be.  Vocalist / pianist Una Mae Carlisle, a Fats Waller protege, landed a Bluebird Records date, possibly with the aid of Fats.  Carlisle was an engaging, depression-primal singer.  How she and Lester Young's short-lived fiddling band came together in the studio has never been established, but it was fortunate for u.s.a. and for posterity.

If you were a vocalizer looking for the best band in that year, the choice would have been uncomplicated, given the perfect accessory and solos Lester had been playing with Billie Vacation for the previous four years.  The rest of the band — Shad Collins, trumpet; Clyde Hart, piano; John Collins, guitar; Nick Fenton, bass; Harold "Doc" West, drums — was also splendid, although to my ears they sound slightly hesitant, perhaps constrained past their roles in the recording studio.

The song (1 of four) nosotros are considering is unambitious, its lyrics odd: an try to alloy electric current events — the German bombings — with a cautionary dearest song to an undefined lover.  Is the person beingness addressed an actual soldier or merely someone the singer wants to threaten by violence into adept beliefs?  The lyrics speak of bombing, a paw grenade, a parachute, propaganda, the infantry, a raid, dynamite; the only peaceful annotate is about neutrality, which seems forlorn.  A perverse romantic utterance at all-time.

But the music shows once once more how neat jazz musicians and singers make the thinnest material imperishably cute.  The tape begins with a thump leading us into an ensemble passage — a trumpet-tenor riff that would have been well-trodden past 1941.  (Quick, on which Louis recording did it first appear?) And the rhythm section, although everyone is pointed in the correct management, is more steadfast than airborne, heavier than the Basie ideal.  Carlisle'due south cheerful, hostage-though-amused reading of the lyrics lightens the commonage gravity, and Shad Collins' muted arabesques behind her vocal don't sound like anyone else'southward — although muted trumpet behind a singer was also a familiar convention.  But aside from his brief appearance in harmony with Collins to first, Lester has been silent.

But he emerges into the sunlight in the 2nd chorus, beginning with a elementary ascending three-note phrase I associate with the exposition of a twelve-bar blues chorus, then after a cursory pause for jiff — and space — expanding that initial argument into a line that winds and climbs, non quickly or predictably, taking its time, the notes climbing a stairway that Lester is creating at the moment he ascends and descends, dipping downwards in the eye of the phrase before climbing easily again.  Visually, information technology might be a line fatigued by William Steig.

So information technology might seem that Lester has offered u.s. three improvisations on a uncomplicated climbing motif — not surprising, because many solos start low and climb for pure drama.  All this has happened in the space of xv seconds. Were we watching the original record move on, the stylus and tone arm tracing preordained paths through the grooves, it would seem every bit if a great altitude had been traveled, the needle moving more quickly than the notes, bringing us that much closer to the end of the performance.

But Lester idea structurally: a sixteen-bar solo had its own logic, a balance apparent to the ear and would exist visible in a transcription to someone who could merely discover Up and Downwards, Long and Short.

A more conventional thespian would have repeated and varied the upwardly motif (a trumpet player might accept embellished the initial phrase until it would end on an impressive high annotation) — only Lester's imagination was more spacious, and by 1941 he had heard thousands of formulaic solos adjacent to him on bandstands across the country.

The second one-half of his too-brief solo begins from a top — although not "high" — that his first exploration has barely hinted at.  And Lester, having climbed his imaginary stairway, and so gain to play on it as if he were a child rolling downwardly those same stairs, one downwards-moving phrase tumbling after some other, without haste or urgency, catastrophe his solo with an echo (or a playful parody?) of the first upward phrase with which he began.

Lester's solo is at well-nigh thirty seconds long. To ears accustomed to life later on Bird, Trane, Ornette, Braxton, it seems elementary, unadorned, even plain (leaving aside that dark creamy tone, the rubato hesitations and anticipations too subtle to notate).  But similar a great Japanese brush painting, its magnificence is in the depths under its credible ease.  Following Lester, pianist Clyde Hart, harmonically subtle and swinging, offers his own version of Basie-and-minimalist-stride that (ane says ruefully) seems heavy in comparison with Lester'due south ease.

When Una Mae Carlisle returns for her 2d exposition of the lyrics, the horns riff effectually and behind her: Shad Collins plays straight human to Lester, offering a simple phrase that Lester weaves around rather like ivy twining around a post.  I remember what Lester and Roy Eldridge create in the final minutes of Billie Holiday'south LAUGHING AT LIFE.  Shad and Lester offer a tranquillity miniature of the Basie band in performance, the saxophones explaining the truth to the trumpets or the reverse.  Lester seems to converse with his friend Shad while the rhythm and the bar lines move forth beneath them, until the gentle festivities have to come up to an ending.

Hear for yourself:

Every bit e'er, Lester'southward playing has so much to say to us, seventy and more years afterwards he created it.  He speaks to united states.  And although he seems like the least didactic of men, he has much to tell us by his example:

Use simple materials simply treat them reverently.  No matter how few measures yous have to say your piece, make information technology beautiful.

Go your ain way merely don't exist bizarre for the sake of novelty.  Surprise us only don't shock us.

Honour the other members of the ensemble by making sure they sound good.  Give everyone a risk to shine.

Take your fourth dimension.  Breathe deeply.  Do cipher by rote.  Float on the rhythm.

Fifty-fifty if the lyrics speak of death and imminent destruction, don't let anyone mess upwardly your cool (to quote Vic Dickenson).

And — as a concluding lamentable irony — Lester could make beauty out of the impending blitzkrieg, only the Army didn't see fit to extend him reciprocal courtesies.  But on March 10, 1941, he was on his own sweetly winding, hopeful path.  We can follow him always.

mcnallystind1938.blogspot.com

Source: https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/lester-youngs-message-blitzkrieg-baby/

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