Being Prez - The Life and Music of Lester Young - Dave Gelly
‘Well, okay. So now we’ll find out what happens’
Being Prez - The Life and Music of Lester Young - Dave Gelly
Dave Gelly [+]
Writer and Journalist
Dave Gelly writes about jazz in The Observer and other newspapers and journals. He has written and presented many features for BBC radio and hosted a weekly Radio Two show. He was a leading writer on the Sony Award-winning ten-part BBC radio series Sinatra: Voice of the Century and is the author of several books, including Masters of the Jazz Saxophone (Miller Freeman, 2000) and Stan Getz: Nobody Else but Me (Backbeat 2002). He was named Jazz Writer of the Year in the 1999 British Jazz Awards. Dave Gelly was appointed MBE in the 2005 New Years Honours.
Description
In February 1936, when Lester Young joined him at the Reno Club, Bill Basie was thirty-one years old. Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, he had been a protégé of the great Fats Waller when they were both still teenagers. Indeed, he had literally sat at Waller’s feet, observing those extremities as they worked the organ pedals in the pit of New York’s Lincoln Theater.