Lester Young - The Complete 1936-1951 Small Group Sessions Vol.4 (2005)

01 - You're Driving me Crazy
02 - New Lester Leaps in
03 - Lester's Be Bop Boogie
04 - She's Funny That Way
05 - Sunday
06 - S. M. Blues
07 - Jumpin' With Symphony Sid
08 - No Eyes Blues				play
09 - Sax-O-Be-Bop
10 - On the Sunny Side of the Street
11 - Easy Does It
12 - Movin' With Lester
13 - One O' Clock Jump
14 - Jumpin' at the Woodside
15 - Confessin'
16 - Lester Smooths it Out
17 - Just Coolin'
18 - Tea for Two				play
19 - East of the Sun
20 - The Sheik of Araby
21 - Something to Remember You By
22 - Crazy Over J. Z.
23 - Ding Dong
24 - Blues 'n' Bells
25 - June Bug

Personnel:
    Bass – Rodney Richardson 
    Drums – Jo Jones 
    Guitar – Freddie Green     
    Piano – Count Basie ,Johnny Guarnieri 
    Saxophone [Tenor] – Lester Young
    Trombone – Dicky Wells
    Trumpet – Buck Clayton 

Versions of what followed vary but in 1944 Young was drafted and began a year-long nightmare in the US Army. A convenient mythology suggests that the army destroyed Young as a man and an artist and that the post-war recordings are sad dregs from a once-fine musician. Another tendency indicates that Young’s later recordings are actually much more experimental and exploratory as he attempts to come to terms with the rise of bebop (a music he is credited with having influenced). Listeners who have heard Young’s classic solos – the 1936 “Lady be Good”(Vol.1) with Jo Jones and Carson Smith, “Jumpin’ at the Woodside”(Vol.4) or “Lester Leaps Again” with Basie (Vol.2) – will have to judge how much of a falling-off is evident in the material on the Savoy sessions (1944-1950). The Aladdin sessions do, however, cover some of his best work as a leader, though some of these are for the singer Helen Humes. Young’s cool, wry approach still seems slightly out of synch with prevailing expectations, though he is absolutely simpatico with Willie Smith, another figure now routinely overlooked in accounts of how jazz developed into its modern phase.

The big pluses on the Aladdin collection are a rare glimpse of the 1942 Los Angeles session with Nat Cole (Vol 1 & 2), and an instrumental “Riffin’ Without Helen”, made as part of the Humes session presumably while she was off. Penguin Guide. Young's solos in "These Foolish Things"(1945, Vol. 3); "It's Only a Paper Moon" (1946, Vol. 3) and the blues "Easy Does It" (1947, in this Vol. 4) are classics, and the presence of a wild bop trumpetist, Shorty McConnell, in the last tracks pushes the music firmly towards Bop Kingdom. These records illustrate perfectly, as none other, the transition between swing and Bebop.M

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