Is Lester laughing? Is he crying? Inside of a short phrase, he can do both. Yet it feels so relaxed that you don’t know whether to dance or simply listen in on the conversation. This trio track with pianist Nat King Cole and bassist Red Callender is an insistent foot-tapper. His playing is an essence – floating, silky, swinging. There are never too many notes with Young. What’s next, you wonder? Where is Lester taking me? Like Miles Davis, one of his heirs, Young is taking you toward a bright beauty, hiding inside a hazy, bluesy swirl. When does breath become sound? That’s the mystery with Lester Young, who begins his final round of choruses on this track with a barely murmured phrase – just the trace of an idea, though it immediately catches the attention. Indiana (Aladdin, 1942, available on The Complete Aladdin Recordings of Lester Young, on Blue Note) More basically, he was teaching them to build an improvised solo on the instrument that would come to define the very sound of jazz.
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Hawkins was not only showing his peers how to play a ballad magnificently. His improvisation unfolds in stages, like a giant cadenza. Listen to his sound, brawny and ripe, as he moves through chorus after chorus, decorating his phrases with florid touches, letting notes trail, then heading back toward the mountaintop. Like his hero Louis Armstrong, Hawkins’s conception was commanding and brilliantly clear. But this iconic track is from an earlier phase of his career, when he literally was putting the saxophone on the map, demonstrating that it wasn’t some awkward marching band instrument – no, thanks to Hawkins it would become the dominant instrument in jazz. Maybe that will happen a few months from now.īut in the meantime, check out these 15 essentials.īody and Soul (RCA, 1939, anthologized on Coleman Hawkins: Ken Burns’ Jazz, on Verve)Īs an elder, Hawkins – “Father of the tenor saxophone” – would mentor Thelonious Monk and play with the avant-gardist Eric Dolphy. To a degree, then, the completion of this list requires the making of another. No Michael Brecker or Kenny Garrett or Joe Lovano or Ravi Coltrane. No Roland Kirk or Pharoah Sanders or Archie Shepp. No Cannonball Adderley or Joe Henderson or Jackie McLean. That’s inevitable, but it hurts to think of the musicians who didn’t make the cut.
What’s more, this list of “essentials” is missing dozens of groundbreaking players. After all, how can you select just one album by Sonny Rollins? Sometimes you just have to go with the one you love the most. But here and there, the list has tipped toward personal favorites. I’ve tried to include “essential” recordings, ones that anyone interested in jazz should hear. Good luck, right? What you are about to read covers about 80 years of jazz history. So here we are, attempting to boil down this history of saxophone glory into a list of 15 recordings. Again and again, the innovations of saxophonists have carried the music forward: from Lester Young to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and beyond.
For the better part of a century, the sound of jazz has been inseparable from the sound of the saxophone: urgent, wailing, uniquely expressive.
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