In March 1959, Lester Young flew home to New York from an engagement in Paris. He was bleeding internally and very ill. He went back to his room at the Alvin Hotel, on Broadway across the street from Birdland, and died there in the early hours of 15 March. He was 49.
Charles Mingus and his band were playing at the Half Note when the news came. “We went to the bandstand and played a blues for Lester,” Mingus later recalled.
That blues became “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”. It’s sometimes said that Mingus recorded it the day Young died. He didn’t: the studio recording came two months later.
The President
Lester Young had changed the sound of the tenor saxophone. In the late 1930s, with Count Basie’s band, he played light and airy where Coleman Hawkins had been big and heavy, floating his phrases over the beat. Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and a whole generation of cool-jazz players learned from him. Billie Holiday called him “Prez”, short for President.
By 1959 he was worn down by years of heavy drinking and poor health, and he had been living at the Alvin, away from his wife and son in Queens. Our article on 10 defining moments of his career tells the longer story.
The hat
The title would have meant something instantly to anyone in jazz in 1959. For years Young had worn a flat-crowned, wide-brimmed black hat, which he made himself by pushing down the crown of an ordinary hat. In 1949 the magazine Our World even ran a feature showing how he did it.
It was as much a part of him as the tilted saxophone. We’ve told the story of the pork pie hat in full in a separate piece.
Mingus in 1959
That spring Mingus began his first album for Columbia Records, going into its 30th Street Studio in New York with producer Teo Macero on 5 and 12 May. The sessions produced Mingus Ah Um, which also includes “Better Git It in Your Soul” and “Fables of Faubus”.
“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” was recorded on 12 May by a quintet: Mingus on bass, Horace Parlan on piano, Dannie Richmond on drums, and two tenor saxophonists, Booker Ervin and John Handy. Handy usually played alto in the band. For this piece he switched to tenor, Young’s instrument.
What you hear
“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” is a slow blues, but not an ordinary one. Mingus said he had written it with different types of chord changes from a standard blues, and the harmony keeps sliding into unexpected keys, so the music never quite settles.
Handy takes the main solo, unhurried and full of sighing phrases, while the theme returns at the end without any comforting resolution. On the original 1959 LP, Macero edited the track down to under five minutes. The complete take, closer to six minutes, has been restored on later CD reissues.
You can hear more of Mingus as a composer in our guide to Charles Mingus songs, and the album sits in good company in our look at 1959, the year that changed jazz.
A second life
Mingus kept playing “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”, and other musicians took it up. John McLaughlin recorded it on acoustic guitar for My Goal’s Beyond (1971), and Rahsaan Roland Kirk sang his own lyrics to it on The Return of the 5000 Lb. Man (1976).
That same year, Jeff Beck included “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” on Wired, his electric jazz-rock album produced by George Martin. It introduced the tune to a rock audience who might never have heard of Lester Young.
The most famous version was released after Mingus’s death. In 1978 he asked Joni Mitchell to work with him, and they settled on “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” as one of the pieces she would write words for. She struggled with it, later telling Rolling Stone she had a block on the song for three months.
The final verse came from something she saw. One night in New York, she and percussionist Don Alias got off the subway early and found a group of men watching two young boys dance outside a bar. When she looked up, the bar was called the Pork Pie Hat.
Mingus died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on 5 January 1979, aged 56. Mitchell said he had heard all but one of the album’s songs before he died. Mingus came out that June, with Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock among the musicians, and Mitchell took Pastorius and Alias on the road with her that summer in one of the great touring bands.
For the man who inspired it, start with “Lester Leaps In”, recorded with Count Basie’s Kansas City Seven in September 1939, and then watch Wayne Shorter remember meeting Lester Young.
