‘Classic Don Byas Sessions, 1944-1946’
Mosaic Records

Stanley Crouch told me a story once about the legendary tenor saxophonist Don Byas. According to the late writer and sage, Byas was such an aggressive competitor that he made sure that his business card was placed close to the telephone in every Harlem saloon. He then instructed every bartender to be on the lookout for anyone carrying a saxophone case. He made it his business to keep tabs on every sax player in the city, just to make sure that none of them were a possible threat to him.  

Now, the latest release from Mosaic Records, “Classic Don Byas Sessions, 1944-1946,” clearly proves that the great man had nothing to worry about — with the possible exception of Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, he could outplay every sax man around, then or now.

In recent years especially, Mosaic Records has consistently offered ambitious packages that are essentially treasure troves of rare and wonderful music, mostly material that even the most hardcore of us aficionados haven’t heard. In 2022, it was 10 CDs worth of “Classic Black & White Jazz Sessions,” and then last year, the 11-disc “Classic Jazz At The Philharmonic Jam Sessions 1950-1957” won my personal prize for reissue of the year.  

The new set is all the more notable in that it features 10 CDs of rare and remarkable music centering around a single soloist, recorded in a mere 27 months, between June 1944 and September 1946.

If Byas isn’t commonly regarded as one of the all-time saxophone colossi, it’s only because his best music has been hard to hear; this amazing set should go a long way towards correcting that. Up to now, most of the received wisdom concerning Don Byas (1913-72) is that he was one of Hawkins’s most noteworthy disciples; then too, most of the scholars who might say such a thing are those who would divide the entire history of the saxophone into two schools, Hawkins and Young. 

Many of us first encountered the amazing prowess of Byas on a performance not in this package, but issued on an earlier Mosaic set — his duets with bassist Slam Stewart from during a live concert in 1945 at Town Hall. You never heard a wind player chew up the chord changes and parse the melody so ferociously as Byas does on “Indiana” and “I Got Rhythm”; he is all over the tunes and the harmonies so overwhelmingly that everyone who hears these landmark tracks immediately coronates Byas as the Art Tatum of the tenor. 

Indeed, Loren Schoenberg, in his invaluable liner notes here, quotes an interview with Byas wherein he confesses — as if it wasn’t already obvious — the source of his inspiration: “Art Tatum really turned me on. That’s where my style came from … I haven’t got any style. I just blow, like Art. He didn’t have any style, he just played the piano, and that’s the way I play.” 

Byas further adds that his musical kinship with Tatum amounted to a kind of secret weapon. “There was nobody playing what I was playing because I played all that stuff from Tatum … everybody was saying, ‘What is that? Where did that cat come from? Who is he?’ There weren’t any horn players following piano players at that time, so I was ahead of everybody.”

The miracle of this current package is that the Town Hall duets were hardly a singular pinnacle; rather, here are nearly 200 additional tracks wherein Byas consistently plays at a comparable level. Recorded on a variety of independent labels at a moment when small group jazz was flourishing, Byas is heard in a wide range of settings, from small group swing to nascent bebop, backing singers, blues shouters, and even comedians. 

His major strength is not only that he seems to have started with a piano virtuoso, rather than another saxophonist, as his point of departure, but that he fits into every possible situation, with early modernists like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, both heard here, as well as pure R&B groups. 

One particular strength of the new set is nearly four hours of material privately produced by a Danish expat jazz entrepreneur, Timme Rosenkranz, who staged elaborate jam sessions at his Manhattan apartment and thoughtfully documented the results for posterity. Byas gets to stretch out at surprising lengths, not only much more so than 78s but also probably more than on most conventional live gigs.  

By now, his ability to burn up a tune with more energy and imagination than practically anyone is hardly a surprise — though something we can never take for granted, as on a performance of “I Got Rhythm” from 10 months prior to Town Hall that’s possibly even more electrifying. But his nonpareil playing on slow ballads really comes to the fore here. There’s a romantic “Don’t Blame Me” and an even more rhapsodic “Moonglow,” to cite just two out of many.

That “Moonglow” is previously unissued, but, indeed, some of the sessions originally recorded for short-lived independent labels are nearly as rare. It’s an amazing job of production — a probable future Grammy for producer Scott Wenzel — 12 hours of essential jazz by one of the most powerful yet underappreciated soloists jazz has ever known. The package ends with four slow, intimate ballads, among them a lesser-heard Ellington gem, “Don’t You Know I Care?” 

On September 8, 1946, Byas sailed for Europe as a member of Don Redman’s Orchestra; he wound up staying there, ultimately living in the Netherlands and marrying a Dutch woman — and not even paying his home country a visit for another 25 years.   

There’s another great story about Byas that bears repeating. Famously, he first attained the absolute upper brackets of jazz royalty when he replaced Lester Young for two years in Count Basie’s orchestra. When he felt the need to move on, the story goes, he supposedly informed the leader, “Basie my man. …” Basie then answered, “Yes, Don,” and he continued, “In four weeks, I will have been gone two.”