WILLIE NELSON: COUNTRY 'OUTLAW'

...and older listeners, farmers, who remembered Flatt and Scruggs when they were just beginning with Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys...

...Making movies, you can't get up and go somewhere every day...

...But Willie, who's on the bus 250 days a year, also keeps checking in with the rednecks along the road...

...Carter is characteristically magisterial, a player whose command of the instrument gives him enormous authority...

...From a certain degree of disappointment, and from many other causes, he died in 1959 when he was only fifty...

...Yes, it did, and to this day Young is a key influence on many young tenors...

...The preeminent fiddler in all country-dom, Johnny Gimble, is also on hand, as well as Emmylou Harris (a country convert) in a couple of guest shots...

...But I didn't get a real sense of the roots of these stories until, years ago, I traveled for a time with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs on their band bus...

...Two musicians unknown here, Boulou Ferre and Elios Ferre, are French guitarists in their twenties...

...This set is a compelling rebuttal to that misconception...

...This does not mean, however, that Willie is any less of a romantic than the more predictable country songsters...

...Young families, including tots fascinated by these sudden, vivid visitors...

...Anywhere...

...There are ballads that could even move the Joint Chiefs of Staff, especially a duet with Dyan Cannon, "Loving You Was Easier (Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again...

...In one significant way, Willie is different from most of the older country bards...

...Willie has a much wider audience than Flatt and Scruggs ever had, reaching some of today's young hipsters, along with the resplendently dressed big spenders in the Nevada casinos...

...He doesn't go by corporate rules...

...These cats really know how to tell stories...

...Having come to a club date in Washington in 1956 and having found three musicians in their twenties who respected and even revered him, Lester was so energized by their warmth that he created a series of lyrical, buoyant performances that are among the most appealing in the Lester Young canon...

...In his early years, the tenor saxophonist felt overshadowed by the huge-toned saxophonists who dominated the jazz scene then—particularly Coleman Hawkins...

...They recognize, as Django would have, that the worst tribute is imitation and the best—if you have the equipment and the ear—is to be yourself...

...II (Pablo...

...But his good friend Billie Holiday used to tell Lester, "You have a beautiful tone and you watch...

...All night long, these rednecks, as some might call them not too kindly, were as immersed in the music as blacks recharging themselves with the blues in a club on Chicago's South Nat Hentoff writes regularly about music for The Progressive...

...But musicians marvel at his crackling energy, ceaselessly acute musical intelligence, and incisive dramatic sense...

...The quintessential Willie Nelson can be heard in Honeysuckle Rose (Columbia), the two-volume sound track of his first starring motion picture of the same name...

...For reasons nobody, least of all Haynes, knows, he has never achieved widespread renown...

...But the drama ain't made up...

...But Willie makes it all cohere, makes it all sound as natural as watching the towns go by on the bus, or making love on the other end...

...Legendary as he became, Young never profited much financially from the fulfillment of Billie's prophecy...

...A fiddler with Flatt and Scruggs said to me later, on the bus, "We're not just musicians, you know...

...Side...

...After a while everybody's going to be copying you...

...Collectively, this is a trio date that will survive all fads and changing styles...

...And they carry it in their heads until we come back...

...In Trinity (Inner City Records), Flanagan is joined by bassist Ron Carter and drummer Roy Haynes...

...and in no way does it try to overpower or surprise the listener with virtuoso effects...

...We bring them themselves, only in somewhat more dramatic form...

...And Billie delighted in recalling years after, "It came to be...

...Pour Django (Steeple Chase) is their tribute to that utterly singular gypsy, and it is the most astonishing guitar album of many years...

...We mean more than that to the people who come hear us...

...The main reason for that tag, though, was that Willie was one of the first of a band of singer-writers (Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, et al...

...The same is true of Lester Young in Washington, D.C., 1956/Vol...

...Their father was the gypsy guitarist Pierre Matelot who made many recordings with Django Reinhardt—the only non-American jazz musician so far to be accorded the status of a true original by native jazz players...

...He decides what he wants to record, and how to record it...

...And so it still is with country music, whose most fabled current practitioner is Willie Nelson, a weathered forty-seven-year-old, originally out of Abbott, Texas...

...In such songs as "These Foolish Things," "Lullabye of Birdland," and "Lester Leaps In," Young's swift wit, lean phrasing (full of supple surprises), and sheer joy in inventing and reinventing melodies make this an indispensable set for even the most meager jazz library...

...Willie just gets inside your head and then plays on your memories as if he were softly chording a guitar...

...You have to get up and stay somewhere every day, and that goes against my grain a little bit...

...But it is Haynes who ignites the session...

...He'll do some more movies, he says, but "mainly, I'm going to play music...

...That's .one of the reasons they used to call him an "outlaw" in the business...

...He's in total charge of himself...

...And it is generally believed that in his last years, Young was already a ghost of his musical self...

...Both Ferres play with Django's ardent, often rhapsodic, romanticism, but they add the further harmonic and rhythmic vocabularies of their own generation...

...What makes his appeal so far-flung is both the immediate credibility of his spare, knowing lyrics and the fact that he's singing them...

...His voice is grainy but cuts clean...

...Short Cuts At fifty, Tommy Flanagan is considered by his jazz peers to be one of the masters of melodic improvisation, powered by a flowing, flawlessly swinging beat that, on up tempos, is crisply, exhilaratingly driving...

...Without any of the spangles and extravagantly decorated costumes of old-time country superstars, Willie comes on in well-worn, eating-in-the-kitchen clothes, long hair ending in a pony tail, a red beard, and a most authentically easeful way of being with the audience...

...who changed the direction of the music from high keening and soft desiring to hard-edged, unsparingly autobiographical tales that had even more of the true grit of what it takes to survive...

...He didn't have to convert me, because I'd been listening to Bob Wills, Jimmie Rodgers, and other country wanderers ever since I was a kid...

...Acknowledging, but transcending, your debts...

...Not too dramatic, mind you...

...I can still see, at twilight, most of the white folks in a small Alabama mill town waiting expectantly, on their seats in the high school football field, for their very own music to start...

...Adding to that presence is a warm, richly resonant sound that few symphony players can approach...

...He'd play a Hank Williams record on the jukebox in a jazz musicians' hangout, and while everyone else hooted, Parker would say, "Listen to the stories, man...

...These folks know the story line, just from living, but they like to hear it put to music...

...His musical preferences were commands—except for one thing: This demonic improviser, who could hear between the notes and whose jazz time was more careeningly complex than that of anyone before, loved country music...

...We bring them something they can't get on TV or in movies...