Thirty seconds of pure beauty: it has been defined as “the most beautiful silent solo in the history of jazz”: Video, Photos

It was January 12, 1957. A program called “The Sound of Jazz” was on American screens. The CBS television network had assembled a cast of giants: Ben Webster, Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan, Roy Eldrige, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Pee Wee Russell, Thelonious Monk, Mal Waldron. A parade of legends.

At a certain point, about halfway through the program, Billie Holiday began to sing. The piece was a blues, called Fine and Mellow: one of the rare blues in Billie’s repertoire, a great blues singer who almost never sang real blues.

In the band, among the saxophonists, there was also Lester Young. Who was sick that day and didn’t even want to play. He was forty-eight years old, but it was as if he were a hundred.

Too much life, too much suffering, too much music, too much junk in his veins. Billie was forty-two, but not much had changed: she no longer had more than a thread of a voice, her art had been consumed by alcohol, drugs, a life lived without holding anything back.

It seems that the two, once close friends (some say lovers), had hardly spoken to each other for some time.

But there comes a moment, after the theme sung by Billie, after Ben Webster’s solo; a moment in which Lester Young stands up, reaches the microphone and begins to play, swinging a little from one side to the other.

And he does one of the most beautiful solos of his life.

It’s just over thirty seconds: four or five blues phrases, very simple, elementary. No more than fifty notes, in all. But each one seems squeezed from the marrow of an entire existence spent between the smoke of the clubs and the bottom of the bottles, each one arrives slightly late, as if it didn’t want to leave the instrument, give way to the next one (the technical term is to lay back, but on its own it says little or nothing).

And then, Billie’s face. As soon as Lester starts playing, she turns and looks at him, tilting her head, with a tenderness that tightens the heart: she half-closes her eyes, nods. Yes, she seems to think, it’s always him, it’s the old Prez. What would the world be without that sax?

It’s a moment. And it has been defined as “the most beautiful silent solo in the history of jazz”.