Beating the Winter Blues with Count Basie
Now that the holidays are over and winter’s settling in, I often find myself seeking seasonal solace in swing music, particularly the music of William Allen “Count” Basie (1904-1984). One of jazz’s greatest bandleaders, who led one of the finest rhythm sections in the business, Basie started his career in 1935 and played for nearly half a century. This month’s column explores websites dedicated to Basie and his legacy.
For a comprehensive overview of Basie’s lengthy career, spend some time with the website ‘One More Once’: A Centennial Celebration of the Life and Music of Count Basie, compiled by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. A multi-faceted, award-winning website created in 2004 to celebrate the centennial of Basie’s birth, the Rutgers site contains biographical information, an appreciation by Albert Murray, a number of audio clips, a selected discography, and videos of live performances. The Rutgers site also contains a number of impressive photo essays from such notable jazz photographers as bassist/photographer Milt Hinton, as well as photos from the extensive collection of Frank Driggs.
Jazz critic Francis Davis wrote an excellent elegiac assessment of Count Basie’s musical impact after the Count’s death in 1984. Reprinted in The Atlantic Magazine’s online archives, Davis’s “The Loss of Count Basie” describes what made Basie’s band and sound so unique, especially in comparison to Duke Ellington’s band:
Ellington and Basie represented contrasting approaches to the jazz orchestra. For Ellington, the big band was a blank page, upon which he wrote the most enduring body of orchestral literature in jazz history. Basie functioned more as an editor, although his signature was just as plain. Even in the 1930s, when the Basie Orchestra was enjoying its first national triumph with its largely unnotated arrangements (the bulk of them credited to Basie), the leader’s piano was less pad and pencil than general-assignment desk, according to the testimony of his sidemen. “Basie would start out and vamp a little, set a tempo, and say ‘that’s it!’” the trombonist Dicky Wells remarked in his 1971 autobiography, Night People.
Wondering what albums to listen to first in Basie’s catalog? All About Jazz provides a succinct entry point to Basie’s extensive recording career . You can also wander over to the Internet Archive, which has a handful of Basie’s early 78rpm recordings available as streaming content or as downloadable audio files.
Basie’s band was typically known for its rock-steady rhythm section and its great soloists. Two websites highlight stars from each. Perhaps the best known of Basie’s sidemen was saxophonist Lester Young. NPR did a nice article on Young in 2009, and the audio file and transcript are available on the NPR website. Basie’s guitarist Freddie Green is memorialized on the website Freddie Green: Master of Rhythm Guitar. This expansive site includes a wealth of information about the guitarist, including biographical information, an extensive discography, photographs, a number of audio files, interviews, and links to the Freddie Green Papers at the University of South Carolina’s archives. For guitarists, there are dozens of transcriptions of Basie songs, lots of essays and lessons on his playing style, and tips on how to play and sound like Green. Very impressive.
– Gene Hyde
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Count Basie is a great reminder of why it’s important to remember that the Billboard charts measure popularity and not quality. Viewed only from his chart performance, Basie was a one-hit wonder. That said, Frank Sinatra’s 1966 live album “Sinatra At The Sands with Count Basie” is remembered by me as one of his finest.