Jazz - Richard Cook on the recorded legacy of a tragic genius

Lester Young was a strange man. At the forefront of a tough, macho music, the jazz scene of the late 1930s through to the late 1950s, Young played in an almost feminine way, and affected the style and mannerisms of a gay man, even though he wasn't gay. His famous private language, an argot of phrases such as "needle dancer" (a heroin user) or "Oxford grey" ( a light-skinned black man), ensured that only his own circle would ever understand him (anyone he didn't like was called "Von Hangman"). He played the tenor saxophone with a sound that was the antithesis of the big, burly style of Coleman Hawkins. Before Young, Hawkins was the role model for all tenormen. After him, it was an even split. Without Young's keening, sidelong way of playing, there would have been no Stan Getz or Zoot Sims or Warne Marsh. At the end of his life, it bothered him. "If I'm so great, Lady Tate," he said to fellow saxophonist Buddy Tate, "how come all the other tenor players, the ones who sound like me, are making all the money?"

He died in 1959, not quite 50 years old, prematurely worn out by drink and perhaps by a hypersensitivity which his calling could scarcely accommodate. In the 1930s, when he first appeared with the Count Basie band, his playing had most of its idiosyncrasies already, but they were delivered in a sleek, honeyed sound that, for all its lightness, managed to fly out of the big mid-Western Basie machine with incomparable brio. In the 1950s, which is the period celebrated by The Complete Lester Young Studio Sessions On Verve (Verve, eight CDs), that beautiful tone was almost gone, and the phrasing was frequently choked by shortness of breath. But he was still Lester Young.

His playing began to change in the early 1940s, taking a more oblique relationship with the beat, focusing more on a song's melody, anticipating the abstractions of bop and even some of what came after that. A disastrous spell in the army, where Young had to serve sentence on a narcotics charge, bruised him to the point where many blamed his decline on that brief spell. The first three of the Verve discs find him still full of ideas, improvising little rondos out of the likes of "Peg O' My Heart" and jousting woozily with pianists such as Nat Cole, John Lewis and Oscar Peterson. But there are already dead spots and bewildering fumbles in even his best solos. Listening through these sessions can be exhausting, because you so want Lester to be his great self that you're willing him on when a fine performance is taking shape, only to see it totter as he suddenly loses his way. Whatever was on his mind, it wouldn't leave him alone.

In his heyday, he had played gorgeous solos behind Billie Holiday on many of her best early records. She nicknamed him "Pres" (short for "President") and they were artistically inseparable, but there had been a falling-out many years before their appearance together on the famous 1957 American TV special The Sound Of Jazz. Some have lauded Lester's few bars on her moving treatment of "Fine And Mellow" as a wounded masterpiece, but one can equally find it pathetically thin. Just as Holiday's singing went into a catastrophic decline, so did Young's playing grow feeble, consumed by a careless melancholy. The second half of this set has its moments, but they're occasional glimmers in the fog of a great musician barely able to blow any longer: the final date, made in Paris in 1959 just two weeks before he died, is one of the saddest sessions in jazz history.

As with every art form, jazz has its sprinkle of tragic geniuses, men fallen from worldly grace who left the music enormously enriched by their brief time: Bix Beiderbecke, Charlie Parker, Herbie Nichols, Lester Young. This big, discomforting archive reminds one of Charles Mingus's wry farewell to the man: goodbye, pork-pie hat.

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