Which jazz bassist composed “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” as a tribute to Lester Young?

Charles Mingus composed “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” as a tribute to saxophonist Lester Young.

Young died in March 1959, and Mingus wrote the elegiac composition soon afterward. It appeared on Mingus Ah Um, recorded in 1959 and released that year by Columbia Records. The title refers to Young’s distinctive pork-pie hat, an item strongly associated with his public image.

The piece is built as a slow blues and became one of Mingus’s best-known compositions. Its expressive melody has attracted many later interpretations, including versions by jazz musicians and artists working outside traditional jazz settings. Mingus’s writing combines blues feeling with complex ensemble color and carefully shaped melodic lines.

The tribute is sometimes confused with Mingus’s other memorial works. “Open Letter to Duke” honors Duke Ellington, while “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” specifically commemorates Lester Young, one of the major tenor saxophonists of the swing era.