Dramatic Angles: Lester Young’s Approach to Jazz Solo Development

Introduction: Approaching Lester Young

Lester Young was a master of solo structure and development. But, being Lester Young, he had his own approach. I will call Young’s solo structure “dramatic” and suggest that this approach is one reason his music still sounds fresh and fertile.  

I will suggest some typical solo devices or directions Young uses and why they can be considered “dramatic.” He is known for telling a story. But a good story cannot rely on a mere formula to hold itself together. To grasp the heart of a story, one needs to get at the bonds, junctures, and transformations between the parts. It is those transitions or contrasts I call “dramatic.”

Some or all of the dramatic elements I hear in Young are present in almost any solo in his career, early or late, short or long.  A thorough, finished article on this subject, with notated examples, would show how individual temporal devices add up to create a solo that in some sense can be perceived as an effectively developed “whole.”

For now, I am simply suggesting an approach to Young’s music, and mine may be only one among many possible ones. I do not claim to have found a single “key” to Lester Young’s greatness: that would diminish it. What I aim to say here is inspired by Young’s music, just like a another solo might be. Like my own derivative solo, my words have an equally humble status alongside the richness of this horn player’s legacy. I hope they inspire more improvisation.

Backdrop: Development, Time, and Classic Drama

I am not the first to bring up Lester Young in a discussion about jazz solo development. George Russell claimed there are two main approaches of generating material and building a solo: vertical and horizontal. Russell thought Coleman Hawkins embodied the former and Lester Young the latter. But I wish to take the idea of “horizontal” improvisation a little further. The term horizontal is suggestive, I acknowledge, but it is poorly defined as Russell employs it.

Russell’s use of the term “vertical” is clear enough. It implies a “harmonic” approach to an improvised solo. It means that the material is derived from the bass movement, chord quality, and cadential sequence of the underlying song’s harmonic form at any given moment. It is “vertical” because it is rooted at a particular local segment of the chord progression where there is a reasonably clear harmonic basis to be stated or embellished. The solo can be interpreted by referring to this harmonic substructure. But what is “horizontal” improvisation derived from?

To say that a horizontal approach is “melodic” rather than harmonic is redundant: a melody implies a sequence of pitches across time rather than at the same time. “Melodic” is also an ideologically loaded word, implying “taste” or “accessibility”. These memes do get tagged to Young and are meant positively, but they obscure what is most remarkable about him. Moreover, to say that Young’s horizontal approach “simplifies” the underlying structure by avoiding stating each chord, without talking about what it is that he does instead, implies that what he is doing is simple, which it is not.

The glory of Lester Young’s art is his control of time. When we speak of a hypothetical horizontal axis of musical development, we are speaking of its unfolding in time. The meaning of any particular event or idea is framed by what has gone before. Young puts the perception of time, both in rhythm and in overall development, in the service of his own expression. And outside of music, the art form that yields insight into this control, the one that depends on the skillful presentation and manipulation of events within a defined temporal framework, is drama.

There are other things beside the sense of dramatic time in drama: familiar human failings embodied by noble or archetypal individuals; the elevation of quotidian pursuits to the level of public spectacle. But drama has a special relationship with the sense of time.

A conventional dramatic performance like a play or opera carries the explicit fiction that historical time can be expressed within the space of a two-hour performance. Given that objective, expected time of any performance from start to finish, the dramatist manipulates that expectation, with moments that are more or less intense that will punctuate or dilate the otherwise relentless flow of time. That is part of the heady satisfaction of attending the theatre and a source of our identification with the characters. They have lived: they have grown and changed through challenges and digressions from their wants or goals (“episodes”). Any successful drama depends on some element of deliberate control of exposition and event to convey its most central object: catharsis does not happen at the beginning of a tragedy, after all. The feeling we experience is tied to, even dependent on, the unfolding of the intended structure. Perhaps that expectation of temporal development could be applied to a three-minute solo improvisation, especially for a master “storyteller” like Young.

Lester Young had these dramatic devices that manipulate or confound regular time: suspense, surprise, discontinuity, ellipsis, episodic presentation (the division of total dramatic time into discrete, diverging units) and transfiguration (the reinterpretation of materials introduced earlier in a new light or context). Young deftly superimposes these active elements over the rhythm section’s more insistent regular “ride” (ostinato figures that imply pulse within a varied framework or “groove”). The dynamism of his varying statements depend on a sense of constant dialogue and tension with this more regular stated pulse or time feeling (and they also depend on there being a sympathetic, well-tuned rhythm section). Of course, Young assumes his listeners are careful ones, and can both “hear” time, and hear across the time span of a whole solo. He knows their attention can be manipulated in artful ways—just as a playwright assumes the theater audience will follow a plot through various digressions, unexpected developments, and singularities. For this post, I will simply describe each of the dramatic devices Young uses and suggest how they might be related or intertwined. 

Dramatic Angles

Suspense. Lester Young makes you wait. He is by many accounts the original “cool” soloist. But his degree of cool is only relative. Young starts with singable, simple motifs, often in the happy upper reaches of the diatonic octave, and always in strong command of the basic beat. He emphasizes intervals of a second, sixth, or ninth without ever resolving to or stating the triadic chord tone. While not gratingly dissonant, these are also not final or cadential (i.e., the tonic or fifth tones of the main key). They are suspensions, in other words: these intervals as scale tones make important components of suspended chords. Young then introduces more challenging or bizarre material later.  This is presumably what Mary Lou Williams, whose opinion ought to count, was referring to when she said that Young was the equal of direct competitors like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins—but, she claims, only after taking time to warm up. What Williams seems to have missed about Young’s approach was that the striking portions later on in his solos was all the more so because of the contrast with less challenging, sanguine material he tends to open with. But exactly when he introduces this material is not predictable. Hence the element of surprise.

Surprise. Ira Gitler, channeling an eloquent boxer, said of Young that he “floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee/Long before the day of Muhammad Ali.” I am referring in this instance to the “sting” part. It is a “dramatic” contrast, in the conventional usage: startlingly different. After coasting gently, Young will suddenly play something fiercely percussive and unrelated to what has just happened. It might be a single note, or he might dwell on riff for 4 or 8 bars, then move on quickly to other material that is equally distinctive. (More on that “other material” in a moment.) The point is that there is no surprise without suspense: such startling effects would be less interesting if the solo began with them (and often are, in the case of musicians who borrow Young’s effects without his subtle sense of the relation of parts to the whole).

Ellipsis. One often hears in regard to Lester Young and other economical players that “he knows what to leave out.” That is ellipsis: leaving out something important. It is essential to theater, which is expected to achieve its effects with limited means of bodies and props on a circumscribed platform. But it is hard to say anything precise about what is left out: that could be almost anything that can be played or acted or thought. It’s more fruitful to speak instead what artists like Young leave in. This material is what he has made the listener wait for, where the suspense is now released. It is still more compelling, though, for what it suggests one rather than what it finishes or states directly. Young accomplishes this by introducing a new, short motif with tense but unresolved intervals like fourths, flatted fifths, or flatted sixths or a combination of them (and in contrast to the comfortable consonance of major seconds, sixths and ninths I noted in discussing “suspense” above). Those who take Young to be simple are not fully listening if they miss these odd harmonies that are highly wrought but work against comfortable tonal cadence.  Moreover, this elliptical motif will be strongly rhythmic or percussive but work against the prevailing beat or groove of the rhythm section and what Young himself set up earlier.  After raising these eloquent, enigmatic items, he then goes on to other things. I would call that a singularity: it compresses time by commanding attention around it just as suspension distends it. I would hazard a guess that this delicate balance between the stated and unstated was a prime topic of conversation between Lester Young and Miles Davis during their frequent breakfast meetings during the early 1950s.

Episodes.  Alongside and around his short, tantalizing interruptions, Young also sustains longer sections of his solo with a single distinct rhythmic and harmonic feeling, then changes to a new one in a new whole section.  I call this approach “episodic” because these segments “digress” from each other, yet sustain interest over a long significant “scene,” and form part of the overall progression of the story, just as episodes do in dramatic narratives from Greek tragedy onward.  Young’s approach is the opposite of the so-called “vertical”—and rhapsodic—soloists like Hawkins of Coltrane, who rapidly change mood and feeling within a very short space. He thinks instead in these fairly large blocks of 4, 8, or 16 bars, which usually correspond very closely to the bar length structure of the underlying song form. These blocks in turn are the building blocks for his overall solo structure.

And if his sections have a sustained feeling, it is the rhythmic feeling Young creates that sustains them.  Young controls the groove—even to the point of adroitly shifting grooves—over a sustained but definite period of time.  It’s one thing to get a groove, or to hit a groove with someone else: that is, to achieve that hypnotic effect of minute changes or discrepancies in a shared, felt underlying pulse that may relate back to the roots of jazz in dance.  Young goes further, subtly shifting patterns of rhythmic emphasis over his solo, but sustaining a distinctive pattern, usually four or eight bar segments that correspond neatly to the divisions of the underlying song form.

Young’s fans will surely recall his eight bars of floating, evenly spaced eighth notes, then eight bars of stabbing, staccato or percussive figures. Or eight bars that are busy, with space occupied by complex figures that span a large range, then eight bars where one or a handful of notes are sounded. Or, coupled with this variation in rhythm by section, Young will state four bars of melodic material based on a conventional major scale emphasizing seconds, sixths or sevenths, then shift toward four bars of blues inflections such as flatted fifths or thirds, or bent notes to or from these chord tones. 

To control the groove is control of expectations about time. Varying material is contrasted, but also integrated into a single whole to sustain interest. Young’s genius is to show that rhythmic feeling or groove is not simply a sub-layer or raw material for a horn soloist to build on, but can be right out there in the foreground as the main material for his improvisation. He plays with the sense rhythmic expectations he himself and his rhythm section have set up and delights in circumventing them. Beboppers like Parker and Gillespie broke up their phrases and jumped over the song form’s bar lines still further, but they learned first how to control the groove and link it to the song form from Lester Young.

Transfiguration.  If episodes are the larger building blocks of Young’s solos, his quality of transfiguration points toward the relation among episodes and to a sense of progression among these elements. Young transforms already familiar elements so they take on new significance. He signifies on them. A section of the standard “I Got Rhythm” chord progression that is centered around or resolves to a B flat major triad is reinterpreted as having a sustained, insistent E flat—a profoundly blue note to choose and a radical rejection of the underlying tonality of the song.  His very personal habit of applying “floating” harmonies in relatively long notes, such as whole or half notes, noted in our section of suspension above, will recur in transformed fashion in a surprising place—such as in the bridge section of the I Got Rhythm progression, whose cyclic motion tempts many improvisers toward chromatic material. Young takes a different tack. His floating, long notes recur in the last bridge of his solo, yet is now revealed to have a different character, and different possibilities. Just as the characters we identify with in a dramatic performance, I’m tempted to say, who are transformed by the journey they take. Coleman Hawkins build solos to a climax, but is more architectural, even athletic: a steady, deliberate accumulation of tightly related, short motifs toward a peak of energy, very much following the classical ideal of motivic unity. If we accept analogies to Western art music, Young is closer in spirit to the poetic association and disjoined, metaphorical contrasts of the Symbolism and Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel.

If Young’s music can be understood as a story, perhaps any narrative art might inspire comparison. Fiction can accomplish far more, however, within the leisurely space of forms like novels or even short stories. It would stretch the idea of musical story telling too far to say that a horn player, moving ahead in real time and sounding only one note at a time, could pull off devices a novelist uses, like atmospheric description or elaborate commentary on a character’s psyche. So I have chosen drama, with its restricted set of tools but elevated sense of presentation to compare with Young’s work and to understand why it is compelling.

By alluding to dramatic art, I am relying on Western concepts of drama and storytelling and perhaps Western cultural baggage, like Aristotelian ideas of unity of time and place, etc. For this exploratory piece, I accept the risks. I would still say there are storytelling devices that might be found in any narrative. A griot has many functions in African society, of which telling stories is only one. It still seems that basic elements of suspense and revelation can be found—in some form—wherever people sit still to hear a good story.

Lester Young once backed King Oliver, who was reportedly a fount of black folklore. It is a tantalizing lead that the younger man gained something in his music from tales he heard from Oliver during this apprenticeship. At any rate, Young clearly knew that people need stories as a template to understand the brute stuff of the world—or to make sense of a string of potentially disconnected, improvised semiquavers.