Background
William Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, on August 21, 1904.
(Presents the life and times of the great jazz musician an...)
Presents the life and times of the great jazz musician and band leader as told by the man himself, from his early days playing pickup at local social events, through his arrival--and eventual triumph--in New York
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394548647/?tag=2022091-20
((Music Minus One). Here is an amazing new offering from M...)
(Music Minus One). Here is an amazing new offering from Music Minus One, which is being released in separate versions for trumpeters, tenor and alto saxophone players and for trombonists. Play section lead and solos in eight new arrangements recorded by Peter Ecklund and the Messengers of Swing! Includes two swinging instrumentals made famous by Count Basie and Lester Young, and six original tunes. Written-out jazz solos with chord symbols supplied. Play the large notes for the easiest route through the arrangement; play the small notes for additional solos and leads. Improvise your own jazz solos using the provided accompaniment tracks. This collection of wonderful tunes in that classic Basie style are sure to thrill! The perfect gift for musicians interested in the great swing band tradition of the 30s and 40s. Includes a newly engraved, high-quality printed solo part, and a CD containing a complete version of each song as well as the accompaniments minus the soloist.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1596158077/?tag=2022091-20
((Artist Transcriptions). Features exact piano transcripti...)
(Artist Transcriptions). Features exact piano transcriptions of 14 classics from one of the original stride pianists who went on to become a legend in the swing jazz world. Includes the tunes: After You've Gone * Exactly like You * Honeysuckle Rose * I'll Always Be in Love with You * Indiana (Back Home Again in Indiana) * It's Only a Paper Moon * Jumpin' at the Woodside * Mean to Me * Memories of You * 9:20 Special * On the Sunny Side of the Street * One O'Clock Jump * Roots * and Poor Butterfly, plus a Basie biography.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0634059777/?tag=2022091-20
William Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, on August 21, 1904.
His mother was a music teacher, and at a young age he became her pupil. But it was in Harlem, New York City, that he learned the rudiments of ragtime and stride piano, principally from his sometime organ teacher, the great Fats Waller.
Basie made his professional debut as an accompanist for vaudeville acts. While on a tour of the Keith vaudeville circuit he was stranded in Kansas City. Here, in 1928, after a short stint as house organist in a silent movie theater, he joined Walter Page's Blue Devils, and when that band broke up in 1929, he was hired by Bennie Moten's Band and played piano with them, with one interruption, for the next five years. Moten's death in 1935 altered Basie's career dramatically. He took over the remnants of the band (they called themselves The Barons of Rhythm) and, with some financial and promotional support from impresario John Hammond, expanded the personnel and formed the first Count Basie Orchestra. Within a year or so the band had developed its own variation of the basic Kansas City swing style-a solidly pulsating rhythm underpinning the horn soloists, who were additionally supported by sectional riffing (i. e. , the repetition of a musical figure by the non-soloing brass and reeds). This familiar pattern is evident in the band's theme song, "One O'Clock Jump, " written by Basie himself in 1937, which has a subdued, expectant introduction by the rhythm section (piano, guitar, bass, and drums), then bursts into full orchestral support for a succession of stirring solos, and concludes with a full ensemble riffing out-chorus. Like any great swing band, Basie's was exciting in any tempo, and in fact one of the glories of his early period was a lugubrious, down-tempo blues called "Blue and Sentimental, " which featured two magnificent solos (one by Herschel Evans on tenor saxophone and the other by Lester Young on clarinet) with full ensemble backing. By 1937 Basie's band was, with the possible exception of Duke Ellington's, the most highly acclaimed African American band in America. In the racially segregated context of the pre-World War II music business, African American bands never achieved the notoriety nor made the money that the famous white bands did. But some (Ellington's, Earl Hines's, Jimmy Lunceford's, Erskine Hawkins's, Chick Webb's, and Basie's, among them) did achieve a solid commercial success. Basie's band regularly worked some of the better big city hotel ballrooms and shared with many of the other 1, 400 big bands of the Swing Era the less appetizing one-nighters (a series of single night engagements in a variety of small cities and towns that were toured by bus). Some of the band's arrangements were written by trombonist Eddie Durham, but many were "heads"-arrangements spontaneously worked out in rehearsal and then transcribed. The band's "book" (repertory) was tailored not only to a distinctive orchestral style but also to showcase the band's brilliant soloists. Sometimes the arrangement was the reworking of a standard tune-"I got Rhythm, " "Dinah, " or "Lady, Be Good"-but more often a bandsman would come up with an original written expressly for the band and with a particular soloist or two in mind: two of Basie's earliest evergreens, "Jumpin' at the Woodside" and "Lester Leaps In" were conceived primarily as features for the remarkable tenor saxophonist Lester Young (nicknamed "Pres, " short for "President") and were referred to as "flagwavers, " up-tempo tunes designed to excite the audience. Unquestionably the Swing Era band (1935 - 1945) was Basie's greatest: the superior arrangements (reflecting Basie's good taste) and the sterling performers (reflecting Basie's management astuteness) gave the band a permanent place in jazz history that even severe personnel setbacks couldn't diminish. Herschel Evans's death in 1939 was a blow, but he was replaced by another fine tenorist, Buddy Tate; a major defection was that of the nonpareil Lester Young ("Count, four weeks from tonight I will have been gone exactly fourteen days. ") , but his replacement was the superb Don Byas; the trumpet section had three giants-Buck Clayton, Harry "Sweets" Edison, and Bill Coleman-but only Edison survived the era as a Basie-ite. Perhaps the band's resilience in the face of potentially damaging change can be explained by its model big band rhythm section, one that jelled to perfection-the spare, witty piano of Basie; the wonderful rhythm guitar of Freddie Green (who was with the band from 1937 to 1984); the rock-solid bass of Walter Page (Basie's former employer); and the exemplary drumming of Jo Jones. Nor was the band's excellence hurt by the presence of its two great blues and ballads singers, Jimmy Rushing and Helen Humes. The loss of key personnel (some to the military service), the wartime ban on recordings, the 1943 musicians' strike, the economic infeasibility of one-nighters, and the bebop revolution of the mid-19406 all played a role in the death of the big band era. The number of 12 to 15 piece bands diminished drastically, and Basie was driven to some soul-searching: despite his international reputation and the band's still first-rate personnel, Basie decided in 1950 to disband and to form a medium-sized band (first an octet and later a septet), juggling combinations of all-star musicians, among them tenorists Georgie Auld, Gene Ammons, and Wardell Gray; trumpeters Harry Edison and Clark Terry; and clarinetist Buddy DeFranco. The groups' recordings (Jam Sessions [num ]2 & [num ]3) are, predictably, of the highest quality, but in 1951 Basie reverted to his first love-the big band-and it thrived, thanks largely to the enlistment of two Basie-oriented composer-arrangers, Neil Hefti and Ernie Wilkins; to the solo work of tenorists Frank Wess and Frank Foster and trumpeters Joe Newman and Thad Jones; and to the singing of Joe Williams. Another boost was provided in the late 1950 by jazz organist Wild Bill Davis's arrangement of "April in Paris" which, with its series of "one more time" false endings, came to be a trademark of the band for the next quarter of a century. There are also excellent pairings of Basie and Ellington, with Frank Sinatra, with Tony Bennett, with Ella Fitzgerald, with Sarah Vaughan, and with Oscar Peterson. In 1976 Basie suffered a heart attack, but returned to the bandstand half a year later. During his last years he had difficulty walking and so rode out on stage in a motorized wheelchair, his playing now largely reduced to his longtime musical signature, the three soft notes that punctuated his compositional endings. His home for many years was in Freeport, the Bahamas; he died of cancer at Doctors' Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, on April 26, 1984.
(Presents the life and times of the great jazz musician an...)
(April In Paris/King Of Swing/The Atomic Mr Basie/The Grea...)
((Artist Transcriptions). Features exact piano transcripti...)
((Music Minus One). Here is an amazing new offering from M...)
Quotations:
“Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues. ”
“I never thought innovation as such was very important. Not when you have to think about it. .. If you're going to come up with a new direction or a really new way to do something, you'll do it by just playing your stuff and letting it ride. The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves. ”
“The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves. ”
“Keep on listening & tapping your feet. ”
“If you play a tune and a person don't tap their feet, don't play the tune. ”
“I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch. ”
“I'll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I'd never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I'd never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn't much like it at first. ”
“If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul. ”
“I don't dig that two-beat jive the New Orleans cats play. My boys and I have to have four heavy beats to the bar and no cheating. ”
He was a stocky, handsome, mustachioed man with heavy-lidded eyes and a sly, infectious smile. Basie in his later years took to wearing a yachting cap both off and on the bandstand. His sobriquet, "Count, " was a 1935 promotional gimmick, paralleling "Duke" (Ellington) and "Earl" (Hines's actual first name). He was a shrewd judge of talent and character and, ever the realist, was extremely forbearing in dealing with the behavioral caprices of his musicians. His realistic vision extended as readily to himself: a rhythm-centered pianist, he had the ability to pick out apt chord combinations with which to punctuate and underscore the solos of horn players, but he knew his limitations and therefore gave himself less solo space than other, less gifted, leaders permitted themselves. He was, however, probably better than he thought; on a mid-19706 outing on which he was co-featured with tenor saxophone giant Zoot Sims he acquitted himself nobly.
On 21 July 1930, Basie married Vivian Lee Winn, in Kansas City, Missouri. They were divorced sometime before 1935. He married Catherine Morgan on 13 July 1940 in the King County courthouse in Seattle, Washington. They had one daughter.