AMERICA'S ALL-TIME GREATEST PRESIDENT #5 - POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER?

Lester Young, my favourite jazz musician, has been one of the running themes of these musings and we had got up to chapter 4.

That was some time ago, since when I have been diverted by others subjects and ideas.

But now I want to resume and to remind you that, one fateful night in September 1944, Lester and drummer Jo Jones had just been nabbed as draft-dodgers on a gig with the Basie band and told to report for army service immediately with a threatened penalty of five years prison if they failed to show up.

A civilian prison term might, you could reasonably speculate, have been preferable in hindsight. Because his nightmare experience of fifteen months in the Army did appalling damage to Pres’s psyche. He was a shy, sensitive, other-worldly artist who was brutally hurled into a macho, racist, bullying environment and savagely punished for not conforming to it.

He did his best to be declared unfit by admitting to alcohol and marijuana addiction and putting on an exaggerated act of dissociative jive-talk before the recruiting board but to no avail. Having evaded call-up for a whole year, he was to be made an example of.

Much has been written about what he then endured.

Alan Plater and Bernie Cash even wrote a play called “Prez – a jazz opera” which was screened on TV in 1985. I watched it and  remember the improbable sight of Mark Taylor in a bulging Lance-Corporal’s uniform playing a side drum. Other musicians involved included Stan Robinson, Dave Cliff and Nick Weldon.

Anyway, the reality was that, after a few miserable weeks of defaulters’ exercises  and square-bashing, Pres was busted for possession of illegal pain-killers and sentenced to a year at the infamous detention barracks at Fort Gordon, Georgia and a dishonourable discharge. (That’s where the title D.B.blues comes from)

Private 39729502 Young was finally released from hell on earth in December 1945. On his reappearance in society, friends, family and fellow musicians described him as a changed man – bitter, broken and, after persecution in the deep south military prison, nursing an intensified hatred and distrust of the white race..

Amazingly, his playing emerged from the personal ordeal relatively unscathed – still full of ideas and rhythmic intensity. You could call him an older (still under 40!), wiser and sadder man and his melancholy increased over the years to come but there was plenty of spark left.

Take a little guest spot at a Jubilee concert in Hollywood in March 1946 with the Nat King Cole group. This was recorded and broadcast by the Armed Forces Radio Services (ARFS). The programme is hosted by a comical MC called Ernie Bubbles Whitman (aka “the stomach that walks like a man”) and the moment captured is of such nostalgic interest that I have added These foolish things to the playlist on my music page this week. Lester is forced to josh with Bubbles and awkwardly jokes about GI war paint. But he plays sublimely.

Shortly afterwards, Pres made a full studio recording just with Nat Cole and Buddy Rich (no bass or guitar). With this line-up, the session has a strange feel to it but again the tenor sounds confident and fluent.

Despite the army hiatus of over a year, Lester was still a hero from his Basie days and he was a big name in the business. He found it necessary however, as many musicians do, to follow current stylistic fashions and accordingly he was soon fronting a sextet including trumpet and trombone playing rather strident and choppy up-to-the-minute be-bop arrangements. These were frankly ill-suited to his legato phrasing. The drummer was a young Roy Haynes, dropping loud bombs almost as relentlessly as Roy Porter.

Examples of how this group sounded can be found on a number of live broadcasts from the New York Royal Roost club in 1948.

I have to say it is my least favourite phase in Lester’s career and I can’t help recalling with amusement what he was regularly reputed to turn round and say only a few years later: “Now, Lady [name of drummer], don’t drop no bombs on me! Just give me that titty-boom titty-boom all night and I’m cool.”

As early as 28th January 1946 in Los Angeles,  Lester took part in his first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert for promoter Norman Granz.

J.A.T.P was to prove a lifeline for Pres from then on, providing plenty of regular well paid work. Granz respected his stable of top musicians and looked after them well, even if he demanded a fairly low common denominator of music in return.

The formula was an all-star line up and a rather synthetic atmosphere of competition. Lester was one of the most popular attractions and he played the game. He knew that, having enjoyed a brief ballad slot of 1 or 2 choruses, he was required to solo on an up-temp blues or Rhythm changes number by sooner or later honking a single note in repetition for a number of bars. This was unfailingly a trigger for Pavlovian salivation in the audience which would stamp and cheer on cue.

Well we’ve reached the onset of the 1950s.

Lester now has less than ten years to live (he would die at only 49) but there are highs (quite a few of them) as well as some lows to chronicle in that final period and I will stop now and devote Chapter Six of this tribute in due course to that last period.

To be continued…………………………