Lost and Found: Don Byas

They weren’t exactly legendary, but back in the days of mixed tapes, my friends could instantly recognize mine by two signatures: 1. The tape would run out before the last song completed on each side; 2. I spent time culling out rare and lesser known tracks. The former became a running joke, but the latter earned me some respect for finding and appreciating recordings that went otherwise unheard. As I continue to salvage tracks from my music library, I will share them here for you in an ongoing project: Lost and Found. Have a favourite deep track (no hits please) you’d like to share with other basement-dwellers? Send us an email.

Artist:  Don Byas
Title:  A Night in Tunisia
Album:  A Night in Tunisia
Released:  1963
Label:  Black Lion

Details:  Recorded at Montmartre in Copenhagen with Don Byas on tenor sax, pianist Bent Axen, bassist Niels Pederson (still a teenager) and drummer William Schiopffe.

“Years ago the game was vicious, cutthroat. Can you imagine Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Don Byas, and Ben Webster on the same little jam session? And guess who won the fight? That’s what it was–a saxophone duel. Don Byas walked off with everything.” — Sonny Stitt

Gary Giddins on Don Byas, from the liner notes, A Tribute To Cannonball, Columbia:

When he left for Europe in the fall of 1946 with the Don Redman band, Don Byas’ reputation was at its peak. Admired by the modernists at Minton’s no less than by the swing-styled players of his own generation on 52nd Street, he was celebrated as a tireless, original and influential saxophonist. His solo on Basie’s “Harvard Blues” had created a stir in 1941 and he followed it with a remarkable series of recordings for small labels. In his romantic approach to “Laura,” he had something of a hit.

He stayed in Europe, becoming the first in a continuously expanding family of expatriate jazzmen, and although the great Don Byas was much in demand by the jazz-appreciative Europeans, he was largely forgotten back home. Few of his records were available here and without personal appearances it is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a following. He returned to the U.S. once, in the summer of 1970, received little of the money or adulation he might have expected, and returned to Holland where he died in August 1972 of lung cancer. He was 59.

Don Byas was a seminal figure in the development of the tenor saxophone and a transitional one twixt the schools of swing and bop. Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1912, he played alto as a teenager, subbing in territorial bands like Bennie Moten’s and Walter Page’s Blue Devils. As a student at Langston College, he led his own band, Don Byas and the Collegiate Ramblers. Between 1933, when he switched to tenor, and 1941, he worked with a variety of bands, first in California and then New York–among them: Buck Clayton, Lionel Hampton, Eddie Barefield, Eddie Mallory, Lucky Millinder, Andy Kirk and Redman. In January ‘41, he became Lester Young’s successor in the Count Basie band and quickly established his abilities, cementing his reputation.

Byas’ style evolved in the lush, rococo, full-bodied tenor tradition of Coleman Hawkins, but his sound was unmistakably his own, immediately recognizable. A master of technique, he accomplished both the tenderest warmth and the most strident sting. His sense of drama coupled with a brilliant use of dynamics and timbre, a deeply-felt romanticism–which on occasion dripped into sentimentality, his worst pitfall–and an unsurpassable sense of swing made his improvisations unique.

Byas was a masterful swing player with his own style, an advanced sense of harmony, and a confidence and adventurousness that found him hanging around the beboppers and asking to play. He held his own and did so while insistently remaining himself: he never picked up the rhythmic phrases, the lightning triplets, that are indigenous to bop. Yet Charlie Parker said of him that Byas was playing everything there was to play.