But that hip godfather of the hepcats takes several hundred pages to distinguish from the heir apparent of the minstrel circuit presented at the outset of "Lester Leaps In." Daniels' academic credentials as a professor of history and black studies serve him spectacularly in the opening chapters, where he sketches Young's boyhood in the twenties with a touring family. Daniels devotes an entire chapter to Young's father, a religious Tuskegee graduate who believed music would allow his children economic transcendence, despite the drudgery and racism of minstrel performance. The extended family structures depicted in both southern black culture, and later, amongst Young's peers, imbue "Lester" with a genuinely fascinating social history. Jazz evolved in this milieu like a chord change in one of its own solos.

Young, who held the lifetime title of tenor saxophone "president," popularized the instrument by pioneering a light, spectral tone—inspiring later tenor men like Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. He rose to prominence primarily in the Basie Big Band, though never achieved the financial success of white soloists in analogous positions. However, fellow musicians acknowledged Young's preeminence on his instrument, according to Daniels, even after a supposed musical decline following a dishonorable discharge for marijuana possession during World War II.

Daniels consistently evinces a reverential tone toward Young, which is admittedly preferable to the vacuous, masturbatory tabloid style sometimes used for jazz biography. The voluminous research undertaken ("Lester" was a twenty-year project) is perpetually apparent, and nasty details, while sometimes glossed over, are faithfully presented. Young's later work, which sounds, incidentally, like castrated bebop, isn't vociferously denounced, but such critical pettiness isn't missed.

The length may daunt fair-weather jazz fans, and the endless minutia characterizing musical biography- despite intermittent insight-may incite snoozing. Also, Daniels isn't of the Jack Kerouac school of jazz spontaneity informing prose style—sentences are conservative, pragmatic, humorless, sometimes even—gasp—professorial. Nevertheless, "Lester Leaps In" gives the reader a finely fleshed account of Young's life amidst the evolution of early jazz.

"Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester "Pres" Young"
by Douglas Henry Daniels
Beacon Press, $30, 524 pages

Also by Rick Rucker