I’ve waited for this song to be posted on YouTube for a long time, as it’s one of the earliest recorded solos of one of my favorite jazz saxophonists, Lester Young (1909-1959) Like so many jazz greats, he died too young from substance abuse—alcohol in his case. Just the other day I discovered that the song had at last been posted—about three weeks ago.
“Dark Rapture” exemplifies the African motif into which many black performers were forced in the early and mid 20th century. Several generations removed (forcibly) from their African origins, they nonetheless were forced to act out African roles and sing songs about Africa (the great Paul Robeson acted in some demeaning roles of this type). And so the words of this song hearken back to “Dark Rapture”: an African romance enacted “in the Congo night,” “under the bamboo tree” and to the beat of “the tom toms”.
That said, the music itself is a wonderful, driving jazz song, recorded by Count Basie’s band in 1938. The vocalist was one of his best: Helen Humes (1913-1981), who wasn’t a belter but had a light and lovely lyrical voice. And the best part of all is Lester Young’s smoking jazz solo— short, but so good it helped make his career (you can har it between 1:41 and 2:12 in the recording below). Young, like Humes, was known for a light touch rather than loudness.
Below: Lester Young and his tenor sax. Two of his peccadillos can be seen in this photo: he always held his sax at an odd angle to his mouth, and he often sported a distinctive “pork pie” hat:
Nice!
(I’ve found it on Spotify, which means I can listen to it when I’m moving around.)
“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” was Mingus’ tribute to the great tenorist
Nice.
Very nice.
Off Mingus’s great Ah Um album released in 1959, the annus mirabilis of post-bop jazz — same year as Miles’ Kind of Blue, Brubeck’s Time Out, and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come.
And don’t forget Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Incidentally the elegiac tenor solo on ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ is by John Handy, usually an alto man.
Yeah, my favorite Trane side. Toward the end, with the second quartet, he and Pharoah Sanders went places I’m still working to fathom.
Oooh, I like the emphatic ending and the vibrato to the tenor sax from 2:41 to 3:00.
This isn’t a tune I could play while moving around in space, though it would be fabulous as background dinner music.
The subdued, soft, and meandrous saxophones make it dreamy, and I can hear a bit of residual spit rustling in one of them, giving it an even more informal and relaxed mood.
The deep melancholy of Goodbye Porkpie Hat evoked so movingly by Mingus’s band also finds a sensitive interpreter in Jeff Beck.
Count Basie was the best also. Use to have a lot of my folk’s old 78s but they were really worn out. Always had a machine to play all three rpms – 78, 45, & 33. It’s gone now.
Didn’t some Open source software nerds and hardware hackers get together a few years ago to create a witch’s brew of an old scanner, a stepper motor and a small shipload of (Free) software to do non-contact scanning of analogue discs and recreate the appropriate sounds? I seem to remember …
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Dark Rapture has a fine Lester Young solo, which I had not heard before, even though I have been collecting and listening to his recordings since the 1950s. Thanks for posting this. My favorite solo by Young is with the Kansas City Seven, the original “Lester Leaps In.” It is available on YouTube at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKH33E7zJM
Count Basie’s piano is an important presence on this recording. The other musicians are Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, Freddie Green, Walter Page, and Jo Jones.
How does wearing a pork pie hat qualify as a “peccadillo” unless the fashion police are passing judgment on his sartorial style? And he must have had a good reason for holding his sax sideways. Idiosyncrasies,yes, pecadilloes, not.
I teach jazz at my university. I’ve never read or heard *why* Lester held his sax sideways, so I’m not sure what the good reason would have been. My best guess is that, like so many other things, Lester was interested in the alternative to whatever was mainstream. One online commenter referenced Lester’s biography in which he said he just needed some stage presence to make him stand out.
Your best guess works for me: “that, like so many other things, Lester was interested in the alternative to whatever was mainstream.” Probably ditto for his hat.
OTOH, “The Embouchure Peccadillo” would work as the title for a mystery or spy novel …
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Great tune!
Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins established the tenor sax in jazz, paving the way for the next generation of great bop and post-bop saxophonists — Parker, Coltrane, Getz, Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, et al.