Skip to main content

Lester Young - Ad Lib Blues

With blues, rock, and blues rock bands all vying for the same white audiences in the States, England, and Europe, it wasn’t surprising that touring blues acts sought to make the transition from black clubs and festival stages to rock halls like the Fillmore Auditorium and later the Fillmore West in San Francisco, the Fillmore East in New York, and the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. In the late sixties and early seventies, the lineups for concerts in these rock halls often included traditional black blues bands as well as white blues rock bands... all counted on playing white rock venues, making decent pay at the same time they were giving blues lessons to white kids anxious to hear the real thing.

The late sixties were a high water mark for the blues. For more than twenty years, the music enjoyed unprecedented artistic and commercial growth. The blues was remarkably resilient, it exchanged one fan base for another without missing a beat... The blues had been an essential part of perhaps the most creative period in rock history, the sixties, and had influenced virtually every major rock artist, British and American, of that period.
Source: A Century of the Blues by Robert Santelli


Lester Young - Ad Lib Blues
  • Release on: October 17, 2005
  • Recorded on: November 28, 1952
  • Genre: Jazz


"Lester Willis Young was an American jazz tenor saxophonist and sometime clarinetist. Famous for his hip, introverted style, he invented or popularized much of the hipster jargon which came to be associated with the music."

See previous Song of the Day

Labels:
Location: United States

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ry Cooder - Available Space

It all started with gospel music. After the American Civil War, in the mid 19th century, people moved north from the plantations to the cities, St Louis, Chicago and Memphis. By the end of the 19th century the syncopated rhythms of ragtime and the improvisational nature of jazz had arrived. Hard times in the great depression of the 1930s drove many swing jazz big bands out of business. Jump blues filled the gap. Patrons of dance halls needed small groups who could match the volume and atmosphere of the departed big bands. Singers would shout and saxophonists would honk. This gave performers names like shouters and honkers. Jump blues was an uptempo jazz tinged style of blues. Usually characterised by a vocalist in front of a large horn driven orchestra or medium sized combo with multiple horns. The style had a driving rhythm, intensely shouted vocal and honking tenor saxophone solos. There was also less reliance on the guitar as a lead instrument. It also had a hard, rhythmic drive and...
Post a Comment
Read more

Copyrights and Public Domain

Copyrighting and Public Domain Music A song is the combination of melody and words. Each is protected by copyright, the melody as a musical work and the lyrics as a literary work. One or the other could be used separately and still be protected. Image by Markus Spiske Public Domain Music Public domain essentially covers creative works that are no longer protected by intellectual property laws, compositions and musical recordings in which the claim to intellectual property has either expired, been forfeited, or been waived. Most people recognize the term public domain in reference to published works, including sheet music or musical recordings, which once were protected by copyright, but the copyright expired several decades after the artist’s death or a considerable length of time after the work’s creation. Once copyright expires on a work like a recorded song, you can use it for any purpose without paying the publisher, the artist, or another institution. The Two Types of Copyright ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lester Young - Ghost of a Chance (Take 1)

Philadelphia was well positioned to play a leading role in popular music. The city had long been one of the nation’s most important musical centers, with strong traditions in both European derived and African American music dating back to the eighteenth century. In the early twentieth century Philadelphia saw a dramatic increase in its Black population as a result of the Great Migration. By the 1940s, Philadelphia’s large and diverse Black population had created thriving scenes in jazz and gospel music. From these traditions a new kind of music emerged in the 1940s, in Philadelphia and across the nation. Usually played in small combos called jump bands, the music featured rollicking dance rhythms coupled with fairly simple blues based harmonies and melodies. The adaptation of this style, known as rhythm and blues or R&B, by white musicians essentially created rock and roll. In Philadelphia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, jump bands played dance halls, nightclubs, and corner bars...
Post a Comment
Read more