They also braided it with harmonic beauty influenced by classical music, a development that left most swing bands in the dust. When alto saxophonist Charlie Parkerand trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie came along, they cranked up danceable swing to whiplash tempos. Then, you start getting arrangers who were arranging harmonically different than these earlier recordings.” “It’s just that the arrangements, harmonically, are of that era – the bebop era. “In, when you get to the New Testament band, that pulse is still there,” Lawrence explains. “Man, you look funny up there… This is small garbage for you, Basie.”īasie took his advice and formed the New Testament Band, which was heavier and richer than the Old while reflecting the harmonic innovations of the bebop movement. “Get your goddamn big band back together,” Eckstine told Basie, according to Good Morning Blues. Gradually, member by member, the Count Basie Orchestra was born, and almost a century later, the group is still humming along as one of jazz’s most prestigious repertory orchestras.Ĭount Basie pulled the plug on the OId Testament band in 1949 as the swing era declined and flirted with eight-piece, seven-piece, and six-piece groups – until the singer and big-band leader Billy Eckstine told him to cut it out. Many of the members, like Lester “Prez” Young, drifted into Basie’s orbit around the time of Moten’s death in 1935. In 1928, he joined Walter Page’s Blue Devils, and the following year, he joined Bennie Moten’s band. Listen to the best Count Basie songs on Apple Music and Spotify.īasie turned his attention to the piano, absorbing the stride-piano style of Fats Waller, and eventually hit the road with vaudeville acts. “I could see that playing drums was not going to be my gig.” “Everybody knew he was the champ,” Basie wrote of the percussionist who would go on to play in Duke Ellington’s band. After watching Sonny Greer play, Basie gave up his dreams of drumming.
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To get closer to show business, he dropped out of middle school and performed menial tasks at a movie theater. “I always used to go down there and frustrate the hell out of myself dreaming about leaving with them,” Basie wrote in his 1986 autobiography Good Morning Blues. He also badly wanted to get out of Red Bank, and he contemplated joining the circus to do so. William James Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1904.
When you leave a Basie concert, you’re supposed to feel better than you did when you first walked in there.
“It makes you want to tap your foot and snap your fingers. “His music makes you want to dance,” says Scotty Barnhart, who has led the Count Basie Orchestra since 2013. The Count Basie Orchestra, simply, has the ineffable ability to make your day better. I was gone, and I’ve been gone ever since that night.”īy the mid-’70s, Miles would join the band himself, part of an ever-growing list of talented musicians that played bluesy, swinging, and hotter than hot. “It was something for a 16-year-old kid to sit right in front of the band and hear that. Sonny Payne was on drums,” the 76-year-old drummer recalls with a hint of awe. As a teenager, he first saw the Count Basie Orchestra perform songs at a jazz festival in Virginia Beach.
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When asked how to explain the pianist and bandleader Count Basie for the average listener, Butch Miles finds it difficult to be dispassionate.
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