CHAPTER 15 | JAZZ IN THE SWING ERA 379
Basie’s rhythm section was a four-man accompanying unit, and within it he
played his part as a group member to perfection. In opening the door for his
soloists, inviting them in to hang around for a while, and then showing them
the way out, Basie was acting as an accompanist-in-charge, a role that suited his
temperament and personal style. Described as one of the great “comp artists”
of all time—to comp, in jazz lingo, is to play a background, usually chordal, as
a complementary accompanist to a soloist—Basie deftly blended artistic control
with restraint as he led from behind.
The chief soloist during the band’s early years was tenor saxophonist Les-
ter Young, a Mississippi native who played with Basie from 1936 until 1940.
Young was a highly original jazz improviser, a musician of striking individual-
ity. Playing with little vibrato, Young managed a sound both light and intense.
He proved that swing did not require high volume and that understatement
could be commanding. Young might improvise against a tune’s phrase struc-
ture as well as with it, stay silent on beats where accents were expected, and
signify (comment ironically) on musical clichés. The joy of a Lester Young
performance, whether with Basie’s big band or with a small group drawn
from that band (as in Lester Leaps In, LG 15.4), lies in the contrasts between the
hard-driving rhythm section and Young’s cool relaxation, and between the
foursquare symmetry of the tune and Young’s idiosyncratic, asymmetrical
phrases.
By the 1930s it had become standard practice for jazz musicians to impro-
vise new melodies over the chord patterns, or changes, of popular songs, which
typically fi t a thirty-two-bar structure of four equal sections: statement, restate-
ment, contrast, and return (aaba). A favorite example was the chord progression
of George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” (1930), on which many new melodies were
composed and given fresh names. The harmonic progression was used so often
as a framework that it earned its own name: rhythm changes. For Lester Leaps
In Young composed a new tune based on a repeating riff, which functions as
the head, a composed thirty-two-bar melody that opens and closes the perfor-
mance, bracketing a series of improvised solo choruses.
Varying the length of the solos is one way to maintain formal interest within
this simple format. Besides taking one or more consecutive choruses, a soloist
may take a half chorus, for instance playing aa, leaving the second half chorus
(ba) to another soloist or the full ensemble. Occasionally a soloist takes only the
b section, or bridge. A common device used effectively in this recording is trad-
ing fours, in which two soloists, or a soloist and the full band, alternate four-bar
phrases.
In an interview long after Young’s death, Basie mentioned him as a player
who could be counted on to swing. The rhythmic energ y of the Basie band freed
Young to explore asymmetry as a solo improviser. Or perhaps one could say that
the rhythmic security provided by Basie and company allowed Young to signify
on a more sophisticated, even structural level than would otherwise have been
possible. Young was a gifted improviser because he possessed a sovereign com-
mand of both vocabulary (melodic inventiveness) and syntax (the adroit place-
ment of notes and phrases in the musical structure). With another supreme
master of syntax behind him at the piano, he ventured as a soloist into terrain
that no jazz soloist before him had visited.Lester YoungLG 15.4rhythm changestrading fours172028_15_361-385_r3_ko.indd 379 23/01/13 8:36 PM