Wayne Shorter's work, both as a saxophonist and as a composer, stands out within jazz. Despite the broad recognition of his importance and the influence his work exerts on others, in-depth analysis of his work is still relatively sparse. In this paper I present an analysis of “Lester Left Town” (Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, The Big Beat, 1960), a tribute to Lester Young written shortly after his death. The paper focuses on how the material is completely original on the one hand but uses and refers to the work of Lester Young on the other. It

is possible to substantiate the references not only by analysis but also by comparing the recorded version of “Lester Left Town” with the copyright deposit (held in the Library of Congress). By “incorporating” these references to Lester Young’s work, Shorter engages with an important feature of jazz, to wit, the tradition of what we can broadly term “quoting.” In “Lester Left Town,” Shorter’s original way of quoting creates both a sophisticated network of intertextuality and a strong composition in its own right.