Word: lester
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...example: in 1919, when Lester Young's parents had separated and he was living with his mother, Young's father Willis, a teacher of music who toured with his own company, abducted the pre-pubescent boy in his mother's absence and took him on the road with him to perform in his shows. Lester Young wouldn't see his mother again for years. Does Daniels discuss this parental kidnapping, which clearly had a traumatic effect on the child's life, at any length? He merely employs the euphemism that the father "assumed charge of" Lester and his two siblings...
...with Norman Granz's floating jam session, called Jazz at the Philharmonic. A few weeks after his dishonorable discharge, Young appeared at the January, 1946 concert at the Philharmonic Auditorium at Los Angeles. The air was electric that night, because this was to be a meeting of the titans: Lester Young, the great tenor genius of the Swing Era, going head to head with the new kid in town, bebop genius Charlie Parker. The concert that ensued was one of the most dramatic in jazz history, ranking up there with Duke Ellington's so-called comeback at the Newport Jazz...
...bounds, but his own attempts at musicological analysis are feeble at best. He continually drags in tangential asides to the history of Black culture that, while interesting in themselves, shed little light on jazz's most enigmatic artist. He's apparently tracked down the names of nearly every Lester Young relative that appears in any phone book in America in the early 20th century (and pedantically mentions them all), but Young's own relationship with Billie Holiday, with whom he had one of the most productive partnerships in jazz history, is treated scantily at best...
...compatibility or lack thereof between author and subject. Not since Bob Woodward's misbegotten attempt to tell the story of John Belushi in Wired has a biographer been so ill suited to write the life of a creative artist as Daniels is to write about Lester Young. When it comes to illuminating the background, he can be fitfully incisive, but when it comes to telling the story of one of jazz's most protean geniuses (which is, after all, what a biographer is supposed to do), he achieves what I would have thought impossible - he makes one of the most...
...When the first volume of Columbia's multi-LP set "The Lester Young Story" (which Sony, shamefully, has still not put out on compact disc) was released in the late 1970s, a critic enthused that this was "jazz at its most Mozartean," and Daniels' take on this assessment is revealing. "The critics' Eurocentric emphasis - as when they likened Young to Mozart, for example - was also troubling? both in and of itself and because it carried such bald connotations of racial superiority in the suggestion that the saxophonist was worthy of comparison with this or that European master." I'll tell...