Excerpt from piece on Billie Holiday and Lester Young

Wednesday 2/11/26

I am writing well.

But when they met and made music together, it was as though all magically became right with the world, which is how we feel when we love someone whom we know loves us as well.

To Billie Holiday, Lester Young was “Pres,”; to Lester Young, Billie Holiday was Lady Day and their symbiosis proved unique. Each came of age musically in the 1930s. This was a time when a tenor saxophonist was supposed to have a big, stomping tone, which Young decidedly did not.

Instead, his was airy, all clouds and fermatas, simultaneously vaporous and dense. A rival teased him for his gossamer flourishes, prompting Young to riposte, “Some of you guys are all belly—I got stuff going on up here,” as he pointed at his head.

No one sang like Lady Day, because no one thought to and no one could. Her phrasing wrested maximum meaning from words such that an ordinarily jejune tune now resonated as some aural pipeline to the soul itself.

Put another way: her voice and his horn were made to go together.    

I mean, you gotta laugh. Who's doing that? Who can do that? And these frauds are just being handed deals and awards and gigs and accolades.