Basie, Count

Source:

 African American National Biography

Basie, Count

(21 Aug. 1904–26 Apr. 1984),

jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader, was born William James Basie in Red Bank, New Jersey, the son of African American parents Harvey Lee Basie, an estate groundskeeper, and Lillian Ann Chiles, a laundress. Basie was first exposed to music through his mother's piano playing. He took piano lessons, played the drums, and acted in school skits. An indifferent student, he left school after junior high and began performing. He organized bands with friends and played various jobs in Red Bank, among them working as a movie theater pianist. In his late teens he pursued work in nearby Asbury Park, but he met with little success. Then, in the early 1920s, he moved to Harlem, where he learned from the leading pianists of the New York “stride” style, Willie “The Lion” Smith, James P. Johnson, Luckey Roberts, and especially Fats Waller, his exact contemporary.

Basie remained undecided between a stage or musical career. Until 1929 he alternately combined playing in Harlem nightclubs and theaters (on piano and organ) and touring with bands for vaudeville and burlesque troupes, which took him as far from New York as New Orleans, Kansas City, and Oklahoma. In Kansas City, during a layover in 1927 or 1928, Basie was stricken with spinal meningitis. After recovering, he worked solo jobs and eventually joined Walter Page's Blue Devils, a major regional dance band. The Blue Devils featured the southwestern boogie-woogie style of relatively spare blues-based melodies, effortless dance rhythms, and “swinging” syncopation (all hallmarks of the later Basie band style). Basie worked at devising arrangements for the band, assisted by the trombonist-guitarist Eddie Durham. Basie's ability to read and write music improved over the years, but he continued to rely on staff and freelance arrangers. At this time Basie lost interest in the musical stage and dedicated himself to dance music.

Kansas City, a wide-open hub of speakeasies, gambling, and prostitution, offered an active job market for black musicians who specialized in the aggressively swinging southwestern (or Kansas City) blues style. While with the Blue Devils, Basie blended this style with his New York “stride” piano background, and in 1929 he was hired by Bennie Moten, who led the most successful Kansas City band of the time. Basie later called this move both the greatest risk and the most important turning point of his career. The Moten band toured extensively and played to large crowds in Chicago and New York.

About 1930, while working as Moten's second pianist and arranger, Basie married Vivian Wynn, but they soon separated and later divorced. Also in 1929 or 1930, he met a young chorus dancer, Catherine Morgan. She and Basie married in 1942 and had one daughter.

During a touring break in 1934, Basie took some Moten band musicians to Little Rock, Arkansas, for a longer-term job at a single location, after which the Moten band broke up. Back in Kansas City, Basie worked as a church organist and was preparing to join Moten's newest group when the bandleader died unexpectedly in 1935.

Count Basie, at the Aquarium in New York City, c. 1947. (© William P. Gottlieb; www.jazzphotos.com.)

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Since 1928 Basie had called himself “Count” in imitation of royal nicknames used by other Harlem musicians, but only on taking over the Moten band did he bill himself by that name. Basie soon had the best players from the Moten unit working for him at the Reno Club in Kansas City. This nucleus included the trombonists Dan Minor and Eddie Durham, who was the band's chief arranger during its early years; the tenor saxophonists Herschel Evans and Lester Young, a key innovator in jazz history; and the inimitable blues vocalist Jimmy Rushing.

To many listeners, however, the heart of the band was its superb rhythm section: on drums, Jo Jones, a keenly knowledgeable musician who revolutionized both big band and small group drumming; on guitar, Claude Williams, who was replaced in 1937 by Freddie Green (the mainstay of the Basie group for five decades); and on bass, Walter Page, former leader of the Blue Devils. These three men, in concord with Basie's own idiomatic piano work, synchronized their playing with unmatched skill, lightening and shading the driving, four-to-a-bar Kansas City beat, and infusing the band's ensemble play with supple, flowing, danceable rhythms.

In 1935 the white writer, critic, and record producer John Hammond heard a Basie radio broadcast and made arrangements to give the band national exposure. Expanding the group to thirteen men, Basie took his musicians to Chicago, where six of them made their first, classic recordings under the pseudonym (for contractual reasons) Jones-Smith, Inc. In New York City the band played at the Roseland Ballroom and recorded for Decca Records, with which the inexperienced Basie signed a demanding, long-term contract that paid no royalties. Included in the larger band's initial recordings was Basie's signature tune, “One O'Clock Jump,” which featured the leader's slyly spare opening piano solo and the repeated, haunting melody played by the band. By this time Buck Clayton's often muted trumpet solos had become another of the band's features, while Ed Lewis on trumpet, Earle Warren on alto saxophone, and Jack Washington on baritone saxophone anchored those instrumental sections. The band later formed an association with Columbia Records, which continued into the 1940s.

The Basie orchestra had come to New York City at the height of the big band era, but the group's relaxed, unembellished, freely swinging style reportedly puzzled those mostly white East Coast listeners who were enthusiasts of the strictly disciplined, thoroughly professional Benny Goodman orchestra. Hammond worked with Basie to tighten the band's section work and solo presentations. Such New York musicians as the trombonists Dicky Wells and Benny Morton and the trumpeter Harry Edison were hired. Billie Holiday, who already had forged her own deeply personal jazz singing style, became the band's first woman vocalist, to be replaced a year later by Helen Humes. They each joined Jimmy Rushing, who solidified his position as the leading male blues singer of the big band era. The changes paid off in the late 1930s with successful stints at New York's Famous Door and Savoy Ballroom (“the home of happy feet”), followed by engagements in Chicago and San Francisco.

Basie later recalled that by 1940 “what that name [Count Basie] stood for now was me and the band as the same thing.” The band undertook almost constant tours throughout the country and continued its prolific recording work. Among bandleaders Basie was matched only by Duke Ellington as a careful, tenacious master of a group of disparate individual artists. Both men were ambitious leaders who defined the basic sounds of their groups, and each of them was ready to step back and allow great freedom to their soloists. But although Ellington was a composer of major stature, Basie was the more successful in integrating his band into the lucrative, white-dominated entertainment industry of the 1940s through the 1970s.

With the start of World War II, Basie, like many other bandleaders, had to cope with myriad difficulties; some of these included restrictions on travel, the musicians' union's two-year recording ban, and above all the military draft's continual disruption of the band's roster. Basie again showed great skill in choosing talented replacements, at different times bringing in the trombonist J. J. Johnson, the trumpeter Joe Newman, the tenor saxophonists Lucky Thompson, Paul Gonsalves, and Illinois Jacquet, and the drummer Shadow Wilson, among others. All through the 1940s the orchestra worked at choice locations such as New York's Ritz-Carlton and Philadelphia's Academy of Music, while it also maintained nearly continuous nationwide touring. After the recording ban was lifted at the end of 1943, the band resumed making records until the close of the decade. In addition, the Basie group was featured in several Hollywood films—Reveille with Beverly, Crazy House, and Top Man (all 1943)—and made frequent appearances on Kate Smith's national radio show.

Following the war Basie continued to revise personnel and shuffle arrangers; he allowed younger players like Wardell Gray on tenor saxophone and Clark Terry on trumpet to introduce a few new bebop ideas. But by the late 1940s the band had become relatively unadventurous. That development coincided with waning public interest in swing-era orchestras, and in 1950 Basie was forced to disband.

Basie remained active for more than a year with a sextet that showcased Gray, Terry, and the clarinetist Buddy DeFranco. In 1952, at the urging of singer Billy Eckstine, he assembled a new orchestra, which eventually would include Marshall Royal as first alto saxophonist and rehearsal director; the highly original trumpeter Thad Jones; the tenor saxophonists Frank Foster, Frank Wess, Paul Quinichette, and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis; Basie's longtime rhythm colleague Freddie Green; the drummer Gus Johnson, soon replaced by Sonny Payne; and the blues and ballad singing of Joe Williams. Birdland, then the most thriving club for jazz in New York, served as an effective home base, though the band often played the Blue Note in Chicago and the Crescendo in Los Angeles as well.

This edition of the Basie orchestra placed new emphasis on arrangers and precisely played ensembles. The arrangers Neal Hefti, Ernie Wilkins, Quincy Jones, and “the two Franks” (Foster and Wess) played key roles in making the band sound more appealing to a wider audience. The Basie orchestra now served a varied range of popular tastes, recording with celebrity singers such as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and featuring everything from Wild Bill Davis's crowd-pleasing arrangement of “April in Paris,” to popular television theme songs, to jazz versions of rhythm and blues hits. In 1963 the Basie orchestra was featured in four best-selling albums, including two instrumental records arranged by Quincy Jones. Such popularity had not been attained by any big band since World War II, and, with rock music coming to dominate the record industry, it was a feat not to be duplicated.

Basie and his musicians had made the first of thirty successful European tours in 1954, and in 1963 they made the first of eight trips across the Pacific Ocean. Frequent national tours continued, usually reaching the West Coast twice each year. By 1961, when it performed at one of President John F. Kennedy's inaugural celebrations, the band had become part of America's official culture. Further appearances at the White House culminated in a reception for Basie in 1981, which celebrated a Kennedy Center honor for his contributions to the performing arts. In 1982 he was given a tribute, sponsored by the Black Music Association, at New York's Radio City Music Hall.

Six years earlier, in 1976, Basie had suffered a heart attack that kept him away from the band for half a year. After returning, he continued the band's touring on a reduced schedule, while remaining active at work in the recording studios. But various illnesses further weakened him, and a year after his wife's death, he died in Hollywood, Florida.

Basie's unique ability to inspire a large jazz band with the rhythmic drive and ease of 1930s Kansas City small combos, to select and lead an ever-changing roster of talented and complementary musicians, to adapt to rapidly evolving and diverse musical tastes while maintaining artistic integrity, to integrate his band into the mainstream of American entertainment, and to give the band matchless worldwide exposure all show him to have been one of the major figures in twentieth-century American music.

This entry is taken from the American National Biography and is published here with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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