Count Basie & His Orchestra

Red Bank to Kansas City

William Basie was born on August 21, 1904, in Red Bank, New Jersey. His mother gave him his first piano lessons, and as a boy he did chores at the town's Palace Theater, where he learned to improvise music to suit the acts and the silent films. He preferred drums, but, discouraged by the talent of Sonny Greer, he switched to piano at fifteen. In 1928 he heard Walter Page's Blue Devils in Tulsa, with Jimmy Rushing singing, and was invited to join.

In 1929 he became pianist and co-arranger in Bennie Moten's band in Kansas City. After Moten died in 1935, Basie formed a nine-piece group, the Barons of Rhythm, with Page on bass, Jo Jones on drums, Lester Young on tenor saxophone and Rushing. They played the Reno Club and were broadcast on local radio. Late one night, with time to fill, the band started improvising, and Basie named the result One O'Clock Jump. It became his signature tune.

New York and swing

The producer John Hammond heard the band on the radio and travelled to Kansas City. In October 1936 he recorded them in Chicago, and Lester Young's earliest records came from that session. Hammond called it the only perfect recording session he ever had anything to do with. In 1937 the orchestra moved to New York and based itself at the Woodside Hotel in Harlem, which gave a title to Jumpin' at the Woodside, recorded in 1938. Basie's innovations included two tenor saxophonists, Young and Herschel Evans, placed on either side of the altos, and a rhythm section that came to include Page, Jones and the guitarist Freddie Green.

In early 1938 the band met Chick Webb's in a battle of the bands at the Savoy, and Metronome ran the headline "Basie's Brilliant Band Conquers Chick's". The war years brought heavy turnover. Jo Jones and Young were both conscripted in 1944, and after the recording ban of 1942 to 1944 Basie disbanded the orchestra for a time and led smaller groups.

The New Testament band

In 1952 Basie reformed as a sixteen-piece orchestra, later called the New Testament band. He credited Billy Eckstine for prompting the return, and Norman Granz got the band into Birdland and promoted it on records. The new band leaned on written arrangements and was more of an ensemble than its predecessor. Joe Williams became the featured singer on Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings, whose opening track, Every Day I Have the Blues, spent twenty weeks on the R&B chart.

Neal Hefti's charts defined the band's late-1950s sound. The Atomic Mr. Basie, recorded in October 1957 and issued by Roulette in 1958, won two awards at the first Grammy ceremony. Six months later came Basie Plays Hefti. Wild Bill Davis arranged April in Paris, a best-selling instrumental, and the band's first European tour came in 1958. The orchestra played one of the Kennedy inaugural balls in January 1961, and Basie became the first African-American to win a Grammy.

Singers and standards

Basie's band backed the leading vocalists of the day. Sinatra-Basie, arranged by Hefti, appeared in 1962, followed by It Might as Well Be Swing in 1964 and the live Sinatra at the Sands in 1966. Ella and Basie!, with arrangements by Quincy Jones, came out in 1963. Basie also recorded with Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Bing Crosby, Sarah Vaughan and Jackie Wilson, and in the 1970s he made a run of small-group and big-band albums for Pablo, among them 88 Basie Street in 1983. The standards he wrote or co-wrote include Blue and Sentimental, recorded in 1938.

After Basie

Basie died on April 26, 1984, aged 79. In November of that year the Monmouth Arts Center in Red Bank was renamed the Count Basie Center for the Arts, and in May 1985 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously. One O'Clock Jump entered the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2005, and he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2019. He won nine Grammy Awards and also received Kennedy Center Honors and an NEA Jazz Masters Award.

The orchestra never stopped. It has been led by Thad Jones, Frank Foster, Grover Mitchell, Bill Hughes and Dennis Mackrel, and since 2013 by the trumpeter Scotty Barnhart. Gunther Schuller called the later band perfected neo-classicism and a glorious dead end, while Martin Williams wrote that it was perhaps the greatest brass ensemble of the century.