Home » Search Center » Results: Lester Young
Results for "Lester Young"
Results for pages tagged "Lester Young"...
Lester Young
Born:
Lester "Prez" Young was one of the giants of the tenor saxophone. He was the greatest improviser between Coleman Hawkins and Louis Armstrong of the 1920s and Charlie Parker in the 1940s. From the beginning, he set out to be different: He had his own lingo; In the Forties, he grew his hair out. The other tenor players held their saxophones upright in front of them, so Young held his out to the side, kind of like a flute (see picture above). Then, there was the way he played: Hawkins played around harmonic runs. He played flurries of notes and had a HUGE tone that the other tenor players of the day emulated. Young used a softer tone that resulted In a soft, light sound (if you didn't know better, you would think the two were playing different instruments). Young used less notes and slurred notes together, creating more melodic solos. He played the ordinary in an extraordinary way, using a lot of subtleties to produce music that Billie Holiday said flips you out of your seat with surprise.
In Circuses and Carnivals, Sideshows Brought Black Music To The Heartland
by Arthur R George
Black musicians in circus and carnival sideshow bands from the late 1800s well into the Twentieth Century brought ragtime and what would become jazz and rhythm and blues to white audiences deep into Midwest agricultural regions. Trumpeter Lester Bowie, later known for the avant-garde Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), ...
Miles Davis: Ascenseur pour l'Échafaud
by Jack Kenny
A legend has grown up around the music Miles Davis created for Louis Malle's debut film Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud). The story goes that Davis arrived at the Paris studio having never seen the film. He watched the rushes once, then improvised as the footage rolled with his European quintet--René Urtreger on piano, ...
Davidsson: A Lifeline from the Land of Fire and Ice
by Dean Nardi
Icelandic artist Thorleifur Gaukur Davidsson grew up on a volcanic island called Heimaey, four miles off the coast of Iceland. He records by his Swedish patronymic surname, meaning “son of David." His debut album Lifelines (OPIA, 2024) is filled with memories and emotions culled from family and the natural beauty of his home island. Davidsson took ...
Carlos Nathaniel Ward: libertà, spiritualità e rigore
by Gaetano Fiore
“Arte e Jazz? Non facile e acritica gestualità ma concentrato di analitica ponderatezza". In occasione di un mio omaggio pittorico espositivo a Bill Dixon a San Vincenzo (LI) nel 2010, Libero Farnè scrive la suddetta frase che ben fa riflettere su quanto sia importante procedere con “lentezza" per tradurre i concetti di libertà, spiritualità ...
Fred Hersch: The Touch of Genius
by Ken Dryden
The sound of Fred Hersch at the piano is so distinctive, a couple of bars is usually enough to identify him. The mainly self-taught Cincinnati native excelled early, playing jazz in his home town before leaving to study with pianist Jaki Byard at the New England Conservatory of Music. From there, Fred moved to New York ...
Roberto Ottaviano: Dark Sides
by Giuseppe Segala
Lavoro intenso, Dark Sides. Autentico, ricco di sfumature e di contrasti. Spiritualità e bagliori sinistri vi si mescolano come in una tragedia greca. Amarezza avvolge i lati oscuri evocati dal titolo. Lamento e presagio già impregnano l'atmosfera del brano introduttivo, “A Long Deception," un lungo inganno tracciato da intervalli enigmatici, trafitto da suoni metallici con lungo ...
Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Jay McShann, Mary Lou Williams & Bennie Moten
by Joe Dimino
In celebration of Con Chapman's 2023 book Kansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good, we spin a full-throttle hour of Kansas City jazz--saluting the sound, the swagger, and the city that helped shape America's music. We light the fuse with the brilliant Eddie Durham, then roll straight into the blues-soaked brilliance of Buck ...
Take Five with Saxophonist Steve Treseler
by AAJ Staff
Meet Steve Treseler Steve Treseler is an award-winning Seattle-based saxophonist, composer, and innovative leader in teaching improvised music. Hailed by Earshot as a “firebrand of the tenor saxophone," DownBeat calls his music “beautifully crafted... whether free, through-composed, or somewhere in between." Steve performs and leads improvisation workshops throughout North America and Europe, performing at Birdland, Blue ...
Richie Beirach: Indelible Memories and Thought-Provoking Reflections on a Life in Jazz, Part 1
by Victor L. Schermer
This two-part article was first published on All About Jazz on August 13, 2019. Part 1 | Part 2 Richie Beirach hovers somewhat mysteriously in the pantheon of the great modern jazz pianists. Some of the others in that category from his generation (coming up in the 1960s/'70s), like Herbie Hancock, Keith ...
