Lester Young

If Coleman Hawkins played the tenor big and full, Lester Young played it light, dry, and floating – and in doing so opened a second path that ran straight to cool jazz and bebop. His tone was airy, his lines relaxed and behind the beat, and his phrasing felt like speech. Younger players heard the future in it.

He made his name in the Count Basie band, where his solos rode the rhythm section like a man strolling. He also made some of the most tender recordings in jazz with Billie Holiday – the two were soulmates, and you can hear them finishing each other’s musical sentences. It was Holiday who gave him the nickname Pres, short for President, the greatest.

Young was an original off the bandstand too: he coined slang, wore a porkpie hat, held his horn at a strange sideways angle, spoke in a private poetry. He was sensitive in a way the world wasn’t kind to. Army service during the war was a trauma he never recovered from, and his later years dimmed.

But the influence only grew. The cool school worshipped him. Bebop borrowed his logic. That soft, swinging, conversational sound became one of the main rivers jazz still flows down.