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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."

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