Don Byas: A Celebration

By Fritz Byers

The recent death of Sonny Rollins prompted the kind of grand homage that a career of that magnitude warrants. For nearly seven decades, Sonny was the — or at least a —  dominant voice on the tenor saxophone, not immune from the whims of musical fashion or the occasional eclipse of a brighter new star, but always present, active, recording, performing, forever searching. His fame was proportionate to his genius.  It grew as he aged, and it will survive his passing.

Not every genius is so fortunate. The history of jazz is replete with musicians of the highest order whose reputations did not, and do not, match their abilities — some because of misfortune, some because of changing tastes or trends, some because the world just wasn’t paying attention.  To take Kurt Vonnegut’s wisdom far out of context, you can always trust the crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle. 

Don Byas belongs in that company, and this Friday evening’s Jazz Spectrum offers a chance to spend an hour with his music and understand its brilliance, if not why the world mostly missed it.

Don came of age as a tenor saxophonist in the 1930s and early 1940s, emerging between two waves of the instrument’s great voices. Behind him stood Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Ben Webster — the defining titans of the swing era and its adjacencies, each in possession of a style so complete it was difficult to hear anything outside their realms as being entirely independent. Ahead of him, though not yet fully emerged, were Coltrane and Rollins, who would carry the tenor into entirely different territory.  They would soon rise to prominence, and in that rising take with them the fascinated appreciations that might otherwise have attended to Don’s music.

Don found himself buffeted by those two waves, caught between the swing tradition and the bebop revolution that remade jazz in the mid-1940s. He was present at the Minton’s Playhouse sessions where bebop was being invented, and he was comfortable enough in that world to hold his own.  But his sound and his musical vision were rooted in the harmonic and melodic sensibilities of the swing era.  In a real sense, he belonged to both worlds.  But he was claimed fully by neither.

This Friday we’ll hear the Classic Don Byas Sessions, recorded between 1944 and 1946 and collated by Mosaic Records with their typical care.  During the 10pm hour, we’ll hear nineteen tracks spread across three sets, each a complete statement of Don’s improvisational brilliance.  Recorded in the abbreviated format of the 78 rpm era, none of these tracks runs longer than three and a half minutes. That constraint, which in time would disappear, freeing later musicians to go on and on, only concentrates Byas’s considerable powers.

Two of the tracks we’ll hear Friday illuminate Don’s gifts with particular clarity. “Body and Soul,” which closes the evening, puts Byas in direct conversation with Coleman Hawkins, whose 1939 recording of that tune is one of the most celebrated in jazz history — the performance that, more than any other, established the tenor saxophone as an instrument capable of harmonic sophistication and lyrical depth. Don’s version arrives five years later.  In it, we hear him fully in command of everything Hawkins established, and bringing to the tune his own distinctive warmth and harmonic intelligence. The inheritance is audible, and so is the individual voice.

“Embraceable You,” from the middle set, illuminates the other side of his stylistic position. Charlie Parker recorded the same Gershwin standard within a year of Byas’s version, and the contrast is instructive: Bird’s approach fragments and transforms the melody, using it as loose scaffolding for invention that is pure bebop. Byas honors the tune more directly, but with a harmonic richness and improvisational freedom that goes well beyond the swing tradition. He is in the territory between those two worlds, drawing from both, and producing something distinctly his own.

In 1946, Don left the United States for Europe — initially on tour, then permanently. He settled in the Netherlands, where he was revered, and spent the rest of his life there. Unlike Dexter Gordon, whose long Copenhagen expatriation ended with a triumphant return to American audiences in 1976, Byas never came back to reclaim his place in the American imagination. Europe knew what it had. America, largely, forgot.

This Friday from 10 to 11 on Jazz Spectrum, you have the opportunity to remember — or to discover for the first time — one of the great tenor saxophonists in jazz history. The recordings are eighty years old. They are as alive as ever, and as alluring.