Lester Young - Boogie Woogie (1936)
Monday, July 5, 2010 at 3:19PM 
A couple months back I posted about the "Do the Math" Blog run by the Bad Plus' Ethan Iverson, who transcribed 18 different pre-1941 Lester Young solos. I've been very slowly working through some of the transcriptions, and I wanted to share some of my progress.
Here is my guitar version of Ethan's "Boogie Woogie" transcription:
Lester Young - Boogie Woogie 1936 (pdf)
This version dates to the November 9, 1936 session of of "Jones-Smith, Inc." which was the same as Lester's famous "Lady Be Good" and "Shoe Shine Boy" solos. Not bad for a day's work, right?
Here is a soundclip of the solo excepted:
Lester Young - Boogie Woogie 1936 Solo (mp3)
And here is the solo in context:
I think two hard parts about transferring Lester to guitar are the bends and the vibrato. With a little practice it sounds pretty good. Good luck and happy woodshedding.
Reader Comments (8)
Hi there, great site! Thanks for putting up such great info!
Having been googling swing in search of rhythm guitar resources I also came across this "Expanding Basic Chords" article on what I guess is your old blog: http://swingguitar.blogspot.com/2005/08/expanding-basic-chords-all-of-me.html . Any chance of putting the PDFs up again? Looks like an interesting and useful comparison!
Thanks,
Jacob
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Great info! Keep it coming!
By the way, I got a Loar archtop. I hope it's a decent enough guitar for this type of stuff.
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I got into Pres by way of studying Lee Konitz, and wow he's amazing. The in depth article by EI was great, and it's awesome that another guitarist is into Pres! Sometimes I feel like the weirdo saying 'stop checking out Kurt! Listen to Lester!' Anyway, keep it up man!