Count Basie: Shoe Shine Boy

By convention, Swing Era jazzmen improvised harmonically, grinding through chord progressions as implacably as a train on its tracks, never veering from their predetermined path. Which, to Lester Young, was much too rigid. His frisky, mischievous solos kittenishly skimmed the harmonic cream, leaving him and his listeners poised, as musicologist Scott DeVeaux observes, "to savor the pleasant ambiguities of the moment." Here, in his inaugural recording, Pres juts from the old-fashioned surface of Basie's stride piano like bas relief, projecting his individuality without overshadowing anyone. Lester was part of the group, yet slightly apart from it. The first modernist.