Pres: The Story of Lester Young

Rating:
Summary: A strong biography.
Review: Delannoy's biography brings together most of the information that can be verified about the life of Young and melds it with a poetic appreciation of his importance as an artist and his suffering as a human being. Simply by relating Young's life story, Delannoy leaves no doubt that major emotional crises transformed Pres from a hard working young musician with a sunny outlook into a paranoid who developed his already eccentric behavior and language as defense mechanisms. Delannoy's strenght as a biographer is in making it clear that the gifts left by Young's genius transcend his bedeviled life

Rating:
Summary: This is a meaty book.
Review: Not only is Luc Delannoy's LESTER YOUNG both scholarly and entertaining; it is a fresh, thought-provoking biography, penned with affection, that breaks new grounds. Delannoy is the first jazz historian I know of to show exactly what Lester meant when he'd quiet tell all those early, prying interviewers: "Frankie Trumbauer was my idol." Also, Delannoy has gone to the trouble of studying the transcript of Lester's Army court hearings, which brightens the light we can now shine into the darker corners of that dreadful wartime experience.