Lester Young's Christmas Comeback

The story of Lester Young’s last great album starts in an unexpected way. It begins with a pianist named Bill Potts—a name even most serious jazz fans won’t recognize. Potts was a workaday musician, bouncing around low-level gigs in the Washington, D.C. area over a period of many years. His biggest break came when United Artists hired him to make a big band recording of George Gershwin’s music—but the draw was Gershwin, not Potts. His name wasn’t even put on the cover, and the album is forgotten nowadays. As far as I can tell, most of what Potts recorded under his own name (not much) is out-of-print, at least in legal editions.