We won’t reach the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lester Young for another five years. But no one needs the excuse of a centennial to pay tribute to this major American musician – he is challenged only by Coleman Hawkins and the young John Coltrane as the greatest of all tenor saxophonists.

One of our most thoughtful contemporary jazzmen, clarinetist Don Byron, is honoring Young this week, with a concert at Symphony Space. Mr. Byron is hardly the type to just stage a basic jam session and call it a tribute; instead, he is celebrating a very specific subsection of the Lester Young discography, his collaboration with the brilliant pianist Nat King Cole.

Lester “Pres” Young’s sound and style are frequently described in terms that go beyond jazz or even music. He is characterized in the lexicon of what are traditionally regarded as the finer arts: a ballet dancer, a sculptor in sound, a poet of the tenor saxophone. What bothers me about such metaphors is the unstated implication that these pursuits are somehow higher-minded than being a mere sax player. By praising Young in such a way, we demean the whole of jazz, suggesting that it is somehow less refined and respectable than ballet or poetry.

If there’s any one musician who proves that jazz is as aesthetically pure as any of the traditional fine arts, it’s Young (1909-59), and he never made that point more resoundingly clear than in two sessions he made in 1942 and 1946 with Nat King Cole (1919-65).

By the start of World War II, both Young, born in Mississippi and raised in New Orleans, and Cole, born in Alabama and raised in Chicago, were champions of the jam session scenes in New York and Los Angeles. Young was already one of the jazz world’s greatest stars, and Cole was on the verge of a career breakthrough beyond jazz into American pop music – stardom would soon follow.

Cole had only briefly worked as a utility band pianist; he progressed relatively quickly from total unknown to keyboard superstar. By 1942, his trio had already recorded 16 classic tracks for Decca, and was in residence at L.A.’s 331 Club.

Norman Granz, then working as a film editor at MGM, brought them both into the pool of musicians he was using for a series of jams at the Trouville Club in the summer of 1942. Granz followed the live sessions by taking the daring step of producing a recording session with the two on July 15 – daring because he had no affiliation with any record company and financed the date with no assurance that he would be able to do anything with the resulting masters. The four sides recorded that day – four standards rendered with extended improvisations in the extra-long 12″ 78 format – were of interest only to the hardcore jazz market.

Granz had originally hired two other musicians for the date, bassist Red Callender and the Cole Trio’s guitarist, Oscar Moore. “We waited for hours but Oscar never showed,” as Callender later wrote, ” ‘Let’s go ahead and do it,’ I said, since I was the rhythm section. We got a balance and played, having no notion that it would be for posterity. “The four sides were originally issued on a small label called Philo, but they got enough attention from the jazz press for Granz to produce Cole and Young together in a second session after both Young and Granz had returned from the army in 1946.

By this time Granz was a well-known jazz impresario, thanks to his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts (launched in summer 1944). He also had begun a relationship with the aggressive new label Mercury Records. Cole was beginning to infiltrate the pop mainstream – “The Christmas Song” would follow a few months later. He was also contractually obligated to Capitol Records and officially billed on the first releases as “Aye Guy” (on other occasions, Cole would be pseudonymically billed as “Lord Calvert” and “Shorty Nadine,” his nickname for his first wife). The 1946 date included the drummer Buddy Rich.

The total output of both the Young-Cole sessions is 12 songs, plus an alternate take of “I Cover the Waterfront.” There are an additional two tracks of the two men playing together on an AFRS Jubilee Show from the same period. Nothing like these 12 tracks had ever been recorded before.

Young’s ethereal style is evident in his earlier records, most famously with Count Basie and Billie Holiday, but nothing would have prepared listeners for the extended eloquence of his sound in a trio. His playing is at once abstract and completely transparent; you hear the original melodies more with your heart than with your ears. Any communication boils down to decisions about saying and not saying, fully stating or merely outlining. Young’s tenor lines just seem to hang in space, motionless and directionless, yet there’s never any question about exactly where he’s going.

Cole’s playing here reminds us that he was among the greatest jazz pianists of his day, in this transition period between swing and bebop. It suggests forebears like Earl Hines as much as descendants like Bud Powell and Bill Evans. His lines are brilliantly conceived, his note and chord choices astonishing, and his time something else again.

The King Cole Trio was notable throughout its existence for not carrying a drummer. Cole and his bassist and guitarist made a point of stressing the time in such a way as to compensate for that lack. With Young, contrastingly, Cole positively revels in the absence of first drums and then bass. Both soloists bask in the silences and wide-open spaces in a way that anticipates Miles Davis. “Peg O’ My Heart” is especially valuable because the long stretches of unaccompanied piano are virtually the only recording we have of Cole playing that way.

The 1946 tracks with Buddy Rich are, not surprisingly, more rhythmically driven. Rich supports these giants with appropriately translucent playing, all sensitivity and no bravura. “I Want To Be Happy” is the swinging climax of the session, with all three participants showing off. Rich starts with prominent cymbals, then Cole takes the Vincent Youmans melody for himself. Young grabs just the bridge of the first chorus, making his real entrance all the more memorable. He comes roaring in his inimitable way, giving off incredible energy, like he’s barely even breathing hard, all with the combination of cool and hot that no one else has ever been able to master.

Young and Cole put the melodies over with utter conviction and sensitivity, in a way no vocalists beyond Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra had yet been able to achieve. Great soloists like Armstrong and Hawkins had “played” blue or mournful, but they were rarely sad in a directly personal way. Young and Cole were among the first men to express such feelings in jazz (Sinatra was doing it vocally at the same time), and their solos here are some of the happiest and saddest music ever recorded.

The total of 15 tracks recorded in collaboration by a King and a President are a high-water mark in the history not just of jazz, but in all music. I would think that the highest praise one could pay some poet or ballerina would be to compare them to the great Lester Young.