Recountings of a Legendary Jazz Man

...Hammond brought the Barons east in 1936...

...One would think there were at least a few anecdotes to tell...

...I was always game...

...Among the big band leaders, not even Duke Ellington had a longer active career...

...Bill was troubled by his mother's working so hard...

...They were right...

...Nonetheless, with his collaborator Albert Murray (the author of some fine works on jazz and blues) Basie covers every performing date, studio session and shift in personnel...

...No one can capture such performances in words, and Basie knew it...

...Roseland Ballroom, where the band made its Manhattan debut, wasn't ready for Kansas City swing...

...But evidently not...

...Reviewed by Bruce Cook Author, "The Beat Generation," "Listen to the Blues...

...William Basie was amodestpersonwho accepted his limitations...

...Basie hired most of its members in forming his ow n group at the Reno Club—Count Basic and his Barons of Rhythm—which quickly grew from combo to big band size...

...Six years later, the Moten band had folded and its leader died...

...I told her that all the time," he recalls...

...As is true of so many accounts of this kind, the struggle to make it to the top is more interesting than the subsequent inevitable routine of tours, recordings and occasional offbeat engagements...

...Although hundreds of musicians came and went, including numerous outstanding jazzmen—Harry Edison, Dickie Wells, Don Byas, Clark Terry, Wardell Gray, Thad Jones—at no time was the Basie band in better shape than during its exciting beginning...

...If something came up, I was willing to try it...

...He admits he still "wasn't really very sharp about reading music" when he got his lucky break in Kansas City with one of the top territorial bands of the time, the Blue Devils...

...His piano style was calm and understated, reflecting his personality...

...Gotham Jazz aficionados, however, had the feeling there was something special on the scene...

...a dark night or two of the soul...

...Soon Basie was collaborating with trombonist Eddie Durham on originals: Basie played out his musical ideas, and Durham wrote them down...

...Thus, in 1929, did his formal education get under way...

...Jazz is music of the moment...

...No group Count Basie ever had equaled, let alone surpassed, that one...

...some climactic moments even at the pinnacle of success...

...Although the two grew up in the small town, there is no hint in this long, detailed autobiography that the musician ever heard of Red Bank's other famous son...

...He could not have held his band together through the years, with its succession of great soloists, had he in any respect attempted to upstage them...

...But it is possible the Wilsons were among the local white gentry whose clothes Mrs...

...Like the Duke, the Count played the band—that was his instrument...

...It featured Lester Young and Herschel Evans dueling on their tenor saxes, Buck Clayton on trumpet, Durham on trombone and electric guitar, plus a Gibraltar-solid rhythm section boasting Jo Jones on drums and Walter Page, the former leader of the old Blue Devils himself, on bass...

...When he praises a Fats Waller or a Willie "The Lion" Smith or an Oscar Peterson as superior performers, and lauds Duke Ellington's musicianship, he is not being falsely humble...

...I have to put that in here, too...

...As a leader must, he invariably sought to stretch himself, andset the kind of standard that enabled his musicians to grow...

...is the music...

...His band always featured good—sometimes great—soloists and superlative section players, who gave lusty treatment to often routine material...

...The Count put together his first swinging aggregation in 1935, at Kansas City's Reno Club...

...The music, ultimately, is all...

...Indeed, it was spirit, rather than musicianship or any mark of creativity, that accounted for the Basie organization's enduring appeal, and this it owed directly to the leader's influence...

...Moten recorded and toured nationally, and he demanded a high standard of craftsmanship...

...That's what keeps me going...

...William Basie, the band leader known the world over as "Count," was born in 1904 in Red Bank, New Jersey, where nine years earlier writer and critic Edmund Wilson first saw the light of day...

...It hardly matters where one plays or under what circumstances...

...By its very nature the jazz life is monotonous...

...Second, the nature of the man himself may help explain the even, uneventful later sections of the book...

...The outfit, heard on Basie's initial Decca recordings, turned out to be almost an all-star band...

...As a boy...

...Basie certainly succeeded...

...except for a break of less than a year, he was up front until his death two years ago at age 79...

...And he played it well right to the end, when infirmity forced him to ride up to the bandstand in a golf cart and he had to be helped to the piano...

...Basie used to wash and iron every single day, winter and summer...

...Basie was fully aware that he was not really in their class, and keeping his ego down made him a better leader...

...A soloist may give the best performance of his lifetime on a particular night, improvising more brilliantly than he ever has before or will ever again, yet unless someone is taping that music, the astonishing twists and turns will simply drift up and waft away...

...Like many jazz players of his youth, Basie started out professionally unable to read music...

...That's what excites me...

...They did not quite take Chicago or New York by storm...

...I was always game," he tells us...

...William Basie had ambition, and achieved great success...

...It was only after he hit the major leagues, signing on with the rival Bennie Moten band, that Basie really had to take his deficiency seriously...

...And there are two good reasons why this really may be the case...

...Why Count Basie and not Andy Kirk or Jay McShann or Lucky Millinder, or any of the others who came out of Kansas City about the same time...

...But there were many who competed for the limelight in those years...

...All through the early days —gigging in Harlem, traveling with acts on the entertainment circuits—he managed handily to do whatever was required of him playing by ear...

...Not surprisingly, therefore, he merely says, "the main thing...

...Once, he "drew a picture of an automobile and showed it to her and said, 'One of these days I'm going to get you a car just like that, and I'm going to stop you from working.'" His keeping the promise, in the sense of seeing to it she had a comfortable old age, helps fix the memoir firmly in its specific literary category: an American Success Story...

...Therein may lie the problem with Good Morning Blues—because all the action, all the interest and all the drama Basie's story has to offer are contained in the first half of the book...

...A late-night radio hookup provided national exposure, resulting in Ba-sie's coming to the attention of John Hammond, a wealthy young Yale graduate and budding jazz impresario who would be his biggest booster...