Prez

Play a blues for Lester Young. At one time, he leaped out of the Basie band and was heard, in wheaty-toned, languorous pleas, groping for beauty in 12- or 32-bar sighs. When he played with inimitable delicacy, he transformed the most banal tunes into dramatic, personal monologs, wondrous speeches emerging from a kaleidoscopic life tinged with gin and bourbon and cheap wine and marijuana. When he stumbled, he often fell, scratching for answers, scratching for grace, love and beauty.

Billie Holiday named him.

"When it came to a name for Lester, I always felt he was the greatest, so his name had to be the greatest," she wrote in her autobiography. "In this country kings or counts or dukes don't amount to nothing. The greatest man around then was Franklin D. Roosevelt and he was the President. So I started calling him the President. It got shortened to Prez."

Lester was the president and the other tenor saxophonists knew it.

"I was about 12 or 13," remembers Al Cohn, one of today's better Prezian tenor men, "and at that time clarinet was the instrument in jazz. I'd found nothing interesting in the saxophone. Then I began rummaging through the nine-cent bargain counters in those stores that sold used 78s, and someone told me about a band--Count Basie. Well, when I heard Jumpin' at the Woodside and Dark Rapture, I switched overnight. Prez was the reason I became a saxophone player."

"Lester had his own sound and style, even way back around 1933 in Kansas City," says Coleman Hawkins. "The kids today are too young to have heard him when he was real great--his best days were just around the time I came from Europe in 1939, when I first heard him with Basie. And none of those imitators could ever really get anywhere."

"Prez got that soft tone, so different from Hawkins', because that's the way he wanted everything in life," says a former Prez sideman. "Why, I even got him a pair of shoes once and one day I came in and found them in the wastebasket. Then I realized--they were hard-soled shoes and he would always wear moccasins or slippers. It had to be soft and gentle or Prez wanted no part of it."

Prez himself was soft and gentle, and infinitely lonely. Confronted with one-nighters, deadlines, booking agents and nightclub drunks, he recoiled repeatedly into his own quietly decaying world, destroying himself more with each retreat. He shuffled toward beauty, grasped it momentarily, lost it, and resumed his ambling way.

"Lester's approach to everything he did in life was concerned with beauty," says pianist Billy Taylor. "He liked things pretty, and the word had a special meaning for him; the highest compliment he could pay anyone was 'That was real pretty.'"

Beauty was the perpetual goal, existing apart from Prez' way of life, like an icon available for solace. His way of life was something else. He read comic books. He was a Giant fan. He drank gin with a sherry chaser, or Courvoisier with beer. He consumed buttermilk and Cracker Jack, or sardines and ice cream. For years he could sleep only in a room filled with light and the sound of a radio at full volume. Once, at Birdland, he battled members of the Basie band, armed with a water pistol. He spent much of his off-stand time listening to vocal records. Sinatra was his man.

But on the stand, Prez was his own man, and jazz was his language. Often obscure in his speech, he spoke lucidly and warmly through his horn. When he did, the musicians gathered and the critics took notes.

In the early days, Prez' ideas did not enchant the conservatives in jazz. When he tumbled the status quo that persisted since Coleman Hawkins first established the tenor saxophone as a jazz voice in the late Twenties, there were cries of agony and resentment. Prez wasn't moved by them. A fastidious perfectionist, he was certain of his artistry, but he was less certain of facing a complex 20th Century life. Tormented by an inability to adjust to the demands of society, he turned to eccentricity as a facade for his uncertainty.

Many who thought they knew him well believed him to be a junkie. He wasn't, but he matched the stereotype. The washed-out, parchment complexion and generally distracted manner made him seem vaguely Asian. His eyes, heavy-lidded and resting stoically on gray bags, would become illuminated unpredictably with a gentle twinkling that accompanied quiet, slow laughter. Often Prez would shuffle onto the bandstand with ridiculous, mincing little movements, or move across the stand with crablike sidesteps until he reached his destination. Once he'd reached it, he'd stop and shiver slightly. As drummer Dave Bailey put it, "like a chicken spreading its feathers."

His idiosyncrasies were part of the masquerade, the massive characterization. Prez used an almost entirely personal language most of the time, a language that's become standard jazz argot. "Bells!" and "Ding-dong!" signified approval. "No eyes" indicated reluctance. He sprinkled his speech with double-talk words, punctuating with "oodastaddis!" or "vout" or the suffix "oreeny." "I feel a draft" was his signal flag for racial discomfort, when Jim Crow was watching him. White musicians weren't "ofays" to Prez, but "gray boys." He greeted strangers with "How are your feelings?"

The more Prez declined in his battle with the forces of life, the more he depended on such hip talk to help him exclude any intruders. He struggled to forget the intrusions: tortuous Army experience, countless rebuffs from his non-jazz peers, days in Bellevue and nights on booze.

Prez was earning more than $50,000 a year during his better days with the Norman Granz troup in the early part of the Fifties, but the income dissolved as Prez withered. The beginning of the end was signaled when he entered Bellevue in the winter of 1955. Liquor, marijuana, and the masochism they fed had humbled the tenor saxophonist no other jazzman could defeat in blues combat. After a brief respite at Bellevue, Prez returned to the same destructive environment. A complete nervous collapse put him in Kings County Hospital late in 1957. Almost totally inactive before his collapse, Prez had left his third wife Mary, son Lester, Jr., and a daughter Yvette, born in December 1956. He was living in a dingy room in a cheap hotel. He had been fired after a few nights on a job in Harlem because, too weak to stand, he had attempted to lead his combo from a chair.

The hotel room was desolate. Prez' horn, his phonograph and a few snapshots of his parents were his only possessions. Drinking constantly, he spent most of his time staring at Birdland, across the street.

His career had ended. His life would soon follow.

• • •

Prez, born Lester Willis Young, had come far from his Woodville, Mississippi, birthplace. Born on August 27, 1909, he moved to New Orleans with his family when still a child. He remembered his family, particularly his father and the family band he headed, in conversations with Dr. Luther Cloud, a psychologist-physician who attempted to save Prez during his last days of degradation.

"My father was a fine musician," Prez told Cloud. "He studied at Tuskegee Institute. He knew a lot about music and he tried to teach me everything. He taught all the instruments and could play them all, especially trumpet and violin... . He traveled with carnival minstrel shows, a week in each town... ."

Prez started playing drums when he was 10. The family band needed a drummer. "They were too much trouble to carry around, so when I was 13 I switched to alto," he once told Cloud. "And all the time I was learning, with my brother Lee and my sister Irma. My father would try to teach me scales and I'd goof off and learn everything but the scales. One day my father discovered that I wasn't really learning to read--I was doing it all by ear. He got so mad he put me out of the family band." After being fired by his father, Prez did learn to read music, out of revenge for the incident.

As a child, he attended church with his family, but did so more as a chore than as a matter of belief. "There was some shyness about him when it came to church-going," his mother recalls. "I think it was shyness, too, that made him drink later on--it gave him courage with which to face the public."

The official break with the church came during his teens and was linked closely to his extreme sensitivity to Jim Crowism. Prez and his sister visited a small country church and were among the few Negroes present. When Prez heard the minister shout "black sin" and (continued on page 68)Prez(continued from page 54) "black as hell" he sensed a personal and racial slight. In later years, he owned religious figurines and spoke of God, but rarely attended church.

The initial flight from paternal discipline and Jim Crow came when Prez was 18. His father told him that the family band had been booked on a string of dates in the South. Prez fled, to join a band known as the Bostonians. He played baritone, alto and tenor, and the band was based in Salina, Kansas.

"It's too bad more people couldn't have heard Lester play alto sax," says Benny Carter. "When I was on the road with McKinney's Cotton Pickers in 1932 we hit Minneapolis and somebody told us about a wonderful alto player in a local club. I went to hear Prez and was enraptured. It was the greatest thing I'd ever heard. He had a definition and a mastery that I don't think he ever felt necessary to display on the tenor."

During the early Thirties, Prez wandered through Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Minnesota with King Oliver's band, Water Page's Blue Devils and several others. "Those were tough times," he said once. "The Blue Devils band was getting bruised, I mean really bruised, playing to audiences of three people. One time all our instruments were impounded and they took us right to the railroad tracks and told us to get out of town. There we were, sitting with those hobos, and they showed us how to grab the train. We made it--with bruises. We got to Cincinnati, no loot, no horns, all raggedy and dirty, and we were trying to make it to Kansas City."

Prez moved on alone. In Kansas City he acquired a tenor and borrowed clothes from Herschel Evans. And at this time, Prez played his first job with Basie.

"I was working at the Cotton Club in Minneapolis and I used to hear Basie on the air," Prez remembered. "Everything sounded great except his tenor man [one of Evans' predecessors], so I sent him a wire. He'd heard me before, so I joined the band. It was very nice. Just like I thought it would be."

"When Prez first came to me at the Reno Club in Kansas City," Basie recalls, "it was like nothing we'd ever heard. And it was consistent. In all the years he was with our band he never had a bad night. No matter what happened to him personally, he never showed it in his playing. I can only remember him as being beautiful."

Prez took his first wife with him when he left Minneapolis to join Basie in Kansas City, but all that is known about the marriage is that it soon failed. Prez never talked about it. The accumulating traumas of racial pressures, parental discipline, woman trouble and musical rebellion were aggravated when he left Basie to accept an offer of more money from Fletcher Henderson in 1934. He replaced Coleman Hawkins in the Henderson band, but he could not erase Hawkins' image.

"I came to New York with the band and I got bruised because I didn't play like Hawkins," he said. "They rang the bell on me. So I really did a lot of teardrops there, you know? Some people just didn't have eyes for certain things. I was rooming at Fletcher's house and Mrs. Henderson would come in every morning and start playing me them records with Hawkins and everything, to show me what to do, and I would listen, because I didn't want to hurt nobody's feelings."

But Prez had feelings, too. Proudly bearing a letter from Henderson stating that he had not been fired, Prez returned to Kansas City. After six months with Andy Kirk's band, he rejoined Basie. Within a year jazz patron John Hammond had arranged for the band to head East. A combo record date, with Prez and Basie, was held along the way, in Chicago, and the first Basie big-band date was cut in New York early in 1937.

Later, bop-era tenor man Dexter Gordon said, "Hawk had done everything possible and was the master of the horn, but when Prez appeared we all started listening to him alone. Prez had an entirely new sound, one that we had been waiting for, the first one to really tell a story on the horn."

It was during these decisive years with Basie that Prez reached his peak. His pork-pie hat became his symbol, but it was his unique sound and conception on tenor that attracted musicians, fans and critics. He leaped and they followed. With fame came an expansion of eccentricity. He claimed to have psychic and prophetic powers. When he left the Basie band in 1940 it was ostensibly because a recording session had been called in defiance of one of his superstitions--the date was Friday, the 13th of December. But, according to drummer Jo Jones, a Basie compatriot and one of Prez' closest friends, the reason for Prez' walkout was the culmination of a sorrow Prez had been bearing for almost two years, since the death of Herschel Evans.

"They were supposed to be battling on the bandstand, but actually Lester had the greatest respect and admiration for Herschel. It was just like a twin dying. Soon after, Lester would be so restless that he would keep his coat and hat underneath the music stand and other guys would have to pull him back down to his seat to keep playing." According to Jones, Prez didn't drink heavily until Evans died.

Jones feels that "after Herschel died, Lester felt it was his duty to play Herschel and Lester. He had a dual thing going--he'd play four bars of himself and four for Herschel. He was lost."

After leaving Basie, Prez tried heading his own combo. When this proved unrewarding, he sat in on jam sessions at Minton's and the Village Vanguard, then he went on the road with Al Sears' band, touring for USO camp shows. He engaged in musical battles with tenor man Budd Johnson and spent his nights warming dice. "He had the damnedest bad luck," recalls Johnson. "I never saw him win once, though he'd stay up all night long. He wouldn't quit; he just loved to see 'em roll."

Prez rejoined Basie as abruptly as he had departed three years earlier. Jo Jones ran into him at a 52nd Street bar and, in behalf of Basie, invited Prez to return. "I bought him a short beer," Jones says, "and told him, 'Now don't forget we're at the Lincoln Hotel. Be at work tonight at seven.' And at seven o'clock there he was."

The stint with Basie was his last regular tour of duty with a big band. When he was asked if he might form his own big band, he said "Would I care to form a big band? Oooh, I would love to, but I wouldn't go for the okey-doke--them headaches, them evil spirits. I can barely make it with five. Like the old lady told me, there's always a bastard in the bunch, and you never know who it is... ."

But he discovered several in the bunch when the Army called him in 1944. He survived for 15 months, beginning as a mess orderly in the infantry, but the experience sent him plummeting downhill.

"First he had his horn and they took that away from him," says Charlie Carpenter, Prez' manager from 1946 to 1957. "They wouldn't let him play in the band. And he had his hair long and they made him cut it off. Maybe that's why later on he let it grow so long it started to curl up and he told me he wanted to braid it real long down his neck like an Indian. Anyhow, the Army was a terrifying experience for him."

Prez entered an Army hospital for minor surgery and, in completing a routine form, admitted to having smoked marijuana. Despite a move by a sympathetic officer-jazz fan to have Prez discharged, several Army men were waiting for him when he emerged from the hospital and returned to the barracks. Jo Jones, who was stationed at Fort McLellan, Alabama, with Prez at the time, remembers the details.

"I got back before noon and all hell had broken loose. Lester's locker had been searched. The major who made the search found some photographs. 'Who is this?' he asked Lester, and Prez said, 'That's my wife.' Well, the major was from Louisiana and this was Lester's second wife, also named Mary, who (continued on page 106)Prez(continued from page 68) was white. [Ironically, Prez later claimed to have had little affection, at any time, for the girl, a jazz follower much younger than Prez. He was conscious of her whiteness and experienced uncomfortable times because of it during the brief period the couple lived in California prior to Prez' Army tour. The marriage ended during that Army term.] The major just slammed down the pictures and said, 'Place this man under arrest.' His excuse was that he had found some pills. Actually, there was nothing that Prez hadn't obtained from the dispensary -- they were just pills to deaden the pain from the surgery. In addition, the major resented the fact that people had tried to arrange a discharge for Prez.

"So he found an article of war that gave him a chance to bring charges against Lester. They might as well have turned him in for having aspirin on him, but somehow it was maneuvered so he got a five-year sentence. Later on, when the truth came out, to save face for the major, they didn't reverse the decision entirely, but reduced it to one year and sent Prez to the detention barracks at Camp Gordon, Georgia. It was the most agonizing period in his life.

"A soldier at Camp Gordon who was a bass player and knew Prez managed to send him out on a detail to build a bridge. By this time he was so terrified that he actually tried to run away. I don't think he ever told a soul about this except me. 'But then I got into the bushes and I saw those people with the guns,' he said, 'and I came back.'"

In a desperate search for escape, Prez managed to swap candy bars for liquid cocaine. With a friend (a dental corpsman) he rigged up a still behind his bunk, mixed the cocaine with 180 proof alcohol from surgical supplies, and fermented whatever fruit the amateur distillers could find. Inevitably, the MPs found the still. Prez' sentence was extended several months. Eventually, Prez was granted a dishonorable discharge. Too distraught to appeal, he returned to New York. "I'm out," he would repeat, "I'm out. That's all that matters."

But it wasn't all that mattered. Prez returned to a jazz world in upheaval. "It was pitiful," says Billy Taylor, "to see him walking along 52nd Street, hearing all those young kids playing the ideas he had discarded. He came back looking for some roots, and he failed to find them; you could see him wondering where to turn."

Away from fans and reporters, Prez found little time for his imitators. He preferred to listen to records by Frank Sinatra or Dick Haymes. Lured by the economic promise of Norman Granz' Jazz at the Philharmonic tour in 1946, he found himself pitted for a string of hopeless years against honking, crowd-begging tenor men. He played his best after hours. When not on tour, he had trouble maintaining his own group. His sidemen invariably were less intense about the music than Prez was. "It takes pretty people to make the music pretty," he said after a dismal rehearsal, "and ain't a single pretty bastard in my band."

"Lester had already reached the point of no return by 1946," says Charlie Carpenter. "He was tired of the responsibilities of the world and was looking for an escape. It just seemed that everything had to go wrong for him."

Prez continued to ramble. And decay persisted, physically and artistically. On a concert package tour with the Basie band and several name combos, he worked a set in front of the band. His performance, a frightening, distorted image of his past, inspired laughter within the band. Some laughed with Prez, as he played absurd, audience-taunting figures. Some of them laughed at him.

Yet the obsession with beauty continued to compel him. On one occasion, he found a wounded bird and took it to work with him. He nursed it between sets, admiring its beauty and pitying its helplessness. Later, when the bird disappeared, he explained that he had given it the strength to fly--with a small nip of bourbon.

After his second marriage failed, Prez found hope in yet a third. It produced two children, and it provided Prez with a potentially satisfying home life in St. Albans, Long Island.

But after his second trip to the hospital -- for liquor consumption leading to malnutrition and a nervous breakdown -- and apparent cure, Prez left his third wife and St. Albans. She was a fragile, introspective, proud woman, the closest thing to a housewife Prez had known. She wanted to create a home for him. But she never fully understood him, nor was she able to lead him. "It wasn't that the marriage ever really broke up," she points out, "he just wanted to be in New York where things were happening."

The final year of Prez' life was spent with Elaine Swain, whom he had known for a few years. Miss Swain had been a companion of several well-known jazzmen, including at least two Prezian tenor men, and had maintained a close friendship with Billie Holiday. She confined her activities to Prez during his last year, spending hours recording his rambling reminiscences in notebooks, to date unpublished. Yet, she was unable to save him. Despite her care, his physical condition deteriorated rapidly. He was unable to get out of bed without aid. Elaine and his doctor persuaded Prez to eat, and attempts were made to dilute his gin with water. Prez spent time listening to popular records. He continued to stare out of his window at Birdland. Tranquilizers and vitamin pills by the dozen helped. Gin and bourbon were replaced by wine. Prez began to gain weight.

The operators of Birdland staged a tribute to him. Dozens of jazzmen attended and a jam session ensued. Set after set passed and Prez played valiantly. Stepping forward to cut the special cake prepared for the occasion, he held the knife with one hand and with the other fingered his horn to play I Didn't Know What Time It Was to express his surprise on being so honored.

Late in 1958, improved still more, Prez prepared to fulfill a booking in Paris. Eager to return to the sympathetic environment he had relished on earlier visits to Europe with JATP units, he planned his trip. At this time, his brother Lee, now a solid success as Nat Cole's drummer, visited Prez and upbraided him for his way of life. It was their last meeting. Prez resumed his heavy drinking. When Dr. Cloud told him "we all have worries," Prez said bitterly, "You have no problems. You're a white man."

He departed for Paris early in '59. Refused permission to cook meals in his room at two Paris hotels, he forgot about food. He found little time for sleep. Too feeble to travel, he required a week to muster sufficient strength for the trip home. He cabled Elaine that he would leave Paris for New York. The cable was dated Friday, the 13th of March.

He shuffled weakly from the plane at the New York airport. Back in his hotel room, he returned to the glance-at-Bird-land, records-on-the-phonograph, bottle-in-hand routine. That first afternoon he began to fade. By midnight he had consumed a fifth of vodka and most of a pint of bourbon, but had not eaten. At one o'clock the following morning, March 15, lying in his bed half asleep, he began to move his mouth as if he were playing his horn. Elaine, alarmed, anxiously phoned for aid. Twenty minutes after Prez stopped breathing, a doctor arrived and pronounced him dead.

The police were concerned with tangible items. They impounded $500 in traveler's checks, Prez' horn, a ring and a wallet--pending settlement of the $76 hotel bill from Prez' earlier stay at the same hotel.

Four days later, at a funeral home on East 52nd Street, those who had heard Prez and had not forgotten him listened to Al Hibbler sing In the Garden and trombonist Tyree Glenn play a muted solo of Just A-Wearyin' for You.

"Prez would have liked that part," said one musician later. "But the photographers snapping flashlight pictures while it was going on--he wouldn't have wanted that to happen. Wasn't no beauty in that and Prez wouldn't have wanted anything that wasn't pretty."