The Kid from Red Bank

THE KID FROM RED BANK / Michael Ullman BY THE TIME HE DIED in April of 1984, Count Basie had led a big jazz band for almost fifty years. A determined man with a shy, evasive smile, he epitomized swing, and every time he played he seemed to reiterate the importance of the blues. One of the music's great editors, as a player and as a bandleader, Basie played fewer notes in an evening than some pianists played in a chorus, but he rocked the rafters when he wanted to. His solos were terse, understated, impeccably timed. He liked to play a few ringing notes and then let them air out over the steady chug of his rhythm section. Sometimes he would hold a single note, listen to the harmony rearrange itself underneath, and then at the last second descend in a clump of chords to the tonic: his timing reminded one of a supremely confident batter who waits until a pitch is almost by him before poking it out to right field. Basie conducted unobtrusively from the piano, with an occasional enigmatic nod, a bemused glance or a seemingly noncommittal phrase on the piano. At the end of a piece, he might wave his arms, but that gesture was for the benefit of the audience, not the orchestra. At times oddly passive about his career, he might never have had a national reputation if producer John Hammond hadn't heard a broadcast from Kansas City of the first Basie band, playing at the Reno Club in 1936. But he was resolute when it mattered. Some years before he talked his way into the Benny Moten band, the top band in the Southwest. Moten was a piano player, and the hardest thing he ever did, Basie concluded later, was to become the pianist for a band led by a piano player. Basie's career falls neatly into three periods. The first began in the mid-thirties when as a young Eastern-born pianist—Basie came from Red Bank, New Jersey—he took over the remnants of the Moten band and gradually assembled the quintessential swing orchestra, notable for its stunning soloists and informal arrangements, and propelled by the best rhythm section in jazz. With bandmembers such as Lester Young and Herschel Evans on tenor saxophone, Buck Clayton and later Sweets Edison on trumpet, with trombonist Dickie Wells, and with vocalists Helen Humes, Jimmy Rushing, and for a short time Billie Holiday, the Count Basie band, though a late-comer to the swing era—it didn't hit New York until 1936—was inimitable, second in importance only to that of Duke Ellington. Its rhythm section— 202 - The Missouri Review Basie, guitarist Freddie Green, bassist Walter Page and drummer Jo Jones—was the best in jazz, producing a smooth, subtle four-four beat that sounded like a whisper but had the power of a train. When it was going right, Page's big-toned bass, the tasteful ching of Jones's high-hat cymbal, Green's steady, contained strumming, and even Basie's occasional chords seemed to merge into a single instrument. One of the most exciting effects in jazz can still be heard in recordings in which Basie's brass wails through a chorus then suddenly drops out, leaving the rhythm section to sweep along after it. Behind the ensemble, the rhythm floats, pushes and prods: alone it carries on sublimely, producing a subdued tension and excitement most jazz groups can only dream of. "You don't have to kill yourself to swing," Basie once said, and his band proved it every time they played. Basie's thirties band was what Albert Murray, collaborator on Basie's recently published autobiography, Good Morning Blues, calls his Old Testament band. It began to lose its character as its personnel changed during the war, and by 1950, after the bottom dropped out of the big band era, Basie ended up fronting a small group. Then, in 1951, prodded by Billy Eckstine, Basie began his second period with what Murray calls his New Testament band. There was no duplicating the old group, which depended heavily on its brilliant soloists and on informal arrangements thrown...