“An account of Lester Young’s historical importance has often been given, but it is an account always worth giving again. He created a new aesthetic, not only for the tenor saxophone but for all jazz. One compares him usually with Coleman Hawkins, and the comparison is handy and instructive, but one might compare him with everyone who had preceded him.
Like any original talent, Lester Young reinterpreted tradition, and we may hear in him touches of King Oliver, of Armstrong (even of the most advanced Armstrong), of Trumbauer, and Beiderbecke. But in pointing them out, we only acknowledge a part of the foundation on which he built his own airy structures.
There seems to me no question that Lester Young was the most gifted and original improviser between Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. He simply defied the rules and made new ones by example. His sound was light, almost vibratoless. He showed that such a sound could carry the most compelling ideas, that one could swing quietly and with a minimum of notes, and that one could command a whole orchestra by understatement. His style depended on an original and flexible use of the even, four beats which Armstrong’s work made the norm. The beats were not inflexibly heavy or light in Young—indeed an occasional accent might even fall a shade ahead of the beat or behind it. And he did not phrase four measures at a time. (If he had any important precursor in the matter of flexible phrasing besides Armstrong, by the way, it was trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen, Jr.)”
– Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition