Fine and Mellow

Ben Webster, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Billie Holiday.

The 1957 CBS-TV program The Sound of Jazz featured a group of true giants: Billie Holiday, vocals; Ben Webster, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, tenor saxophone; Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax; Roy Eldridge, trumpet; Vic Dickenson, trombone; Mal Waldron, piano; Milt Hinton, bass and Osie Johnson, drums.

During the performance of "Fine and Mellow", Ben Webster played the first solo. "Then", writer Nat Hentoff remembered:

Lester got up, and he played the purest blues I have ever heard, and he and Holiday were looking at each other, their eyes were sort of interlocked, and she was sort of nodding and half–smiling. It was as if they were both remembering what had been—whatever that was. And in the control room we were all crying. When the show was over, they went their separate ways.

Within two years, both Young and Holiday had died.

Here is Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow.”