Gelly/Being Prez, 3. ‘Well, okay. So now we’ll find out what happens’

In February 1936, when Lester Young joined him at the Reno Club, Bill Basie was thirty-one years old. Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, he had been a protégé of the great Fats Waller when they were both still teenagers. Indeed, he had literally sat at Waller’s feet, observing those extremities as they worked the organ pedals in the pit of New York’s Lincoln Theater.