'He Seems to Be Merely Thinking His Notes'

Three pages from the close of Charm: The Elusive Enchantment, published in 2018, Joseph Epstein concedes that our era delivers “a paucity of charm.” In the subsequent two years, charm – Epstein says it contains “an element of delight beyond mere niceness” – has moved ever closer to extinction. There’s nothing charming about arson, vandalism, race hatred, theft and assault, or their endorsement by purportedly educated people.

To compensate for the charm deficit, Epstein suggests we look to the past – to Fred Astaire, for instance; to Harold Arlen, Philip Larkin, Duke Ellington, Max Beerbohm, Evelyn Waugh and Blossom Dearie. All reliable carriers of what Epstein calls, in a timely fashion, “the lovely charm virus.” Another name on his list is an inspired choice, though it may be unfamiliar to younger readers – the tenor saxophonist and occasional clarinetist Lester Young, known with fond respect by fellow musicians as Prez.

Watch “Jammin’ the Blues”(1944), a short film that opens with the camera focused on Young’s trademark porkpie hat. Young is joined by, among others, Harry “Sweets” Edison and “Big” Sid Catlett. If more charm is called for, move on to the Aladdin Sessions on Blue Note, recorded by Young between 1945 and 1947. Don’t worry about the finer points of musicology, especially if the music is new to you. Just get comfortable and listen. Whitney Balliett in Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000 (2000) writes of the Aladdin Sessions:

“Young doesn’t bother with stating the melody. He launches immediately into his improvisations, and they are such complete reworkings that sometimes it is impossible to tell what he is playing. He literally creates new and fascinating compositions out of the composer’s chords.”

Elsewhere, Balliett writes that Young “plays so softly he seems to be merely thinking his notes.” That’s charm.

Lester Young was born on this date, August 27, in 1909 in Woodville, Miss., and died in 1959 in New York City at age forty-nine.