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| Think of the date as beyond time... |
This chapter introduces another member of jazz royalty (Duke Ellington, who's early days I covered earlier), if only to the first part of his long career. Even on that shortened timeline, the biography of the auteur in question touches so many members of his musical generation that it tells not just his story, but the story of his times.
William James “Count” Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1904, son to Harvey Lee Basie, who worked as a coachman and a caretaker, and Lillian Childs Basie, who took in laundry; seeing how hard his parents worked (and quite possibly for who) motivated Basie to help them get ahead. Despite being a solid student, the younger Basie didn’t see education as the path for getting there; he dropped out after junior high school and started knocking around the Palace Theater in Red Bank, trading chores and odd jobs for free admission and learning things like changing the reels and working the spotlight for the live shows. His parents did play a part in his future as both of them played instruments, the mellophone for his dad, the piano for his mom. His mother took music seriously enough to pay a quarter a piano lesson.
Those lessons paid off in two ways. First, and to lift a good anecdote from his official bio, Basie volunteered to play the music to accompany a silent movie one afternoon when the regular player called in sick. The manager said no, but Basie snuck into the pit unnoticed and played through the movie; the manager invited him back to play the evening show. Second, and more consequential in the grand scheme, he preferred playing the drums…until he met, Sonny Greer, another Red Bank (or Long Branch; depending on the source) native destined for fame. Knowing he would never touch Greer on the drums, Basie doubled-down on the piano as his instrument.
For as long as Greer stuck around, he and Basie played as a duo at little gigs around town - they even landed a show at Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore - but Greer got called up to the bigs (New York City) before long and started his professional career - with Duke Ellington, no less. Basie wasn’t too far behind, moving to Harlem at the fresh-faced age of 16. He filled those years playing shows and rent parties with Greer and others, picking up stride piano from James P. Johnson and Fats Waller (profiled earlier) - who also taught him how to play the organ - and landing his first real work as a musician at a place called Leroy’s, where he sharpened his playing and steeled his nerves competing in cutting contests. Around the same time (1925), Basie started a two-year stint with an act called Kittie Krippen and her Kiddies, playing a revue called the Hippity Hop Show. Whether by luck or fate, the last tour he was on petered out in Kansas City, Missouri. Where big things would happen…
First things first, all the sources I read agreed to that Basie picked up the “Count” nickname during his time in the Midwest, but I have two stories and a wrinkle in the time-line on that: Wikipedia only acknowledges he picked up the name, but puts it during his time in Tulsa, Oklahoma when he played for a minute with Walter Page and His Blue Devils; Basie’s official biography sets it in his time with Benny Moten (profiled earlier) by way of this anecdote:
“Though stories abound at the genesis of his nickname, Basie later recalled it as a tribute to his penchant for slipping off during arranging sessions with Moten. As soon as they got a few good bars down, Basie recalled, he’d slip out, leaving Moten to exclaim, ‘Where is that no ‘count rascal?’”
Another source, a bio on a Rutgers University website, dates the story just a little later and more prosaically:
“The Barons of Rhythm were regulars at the Reno Club and often performed for a live radio broadcast. During a broadcast the announcer wanted to give Basie’s name some style, so he called him ‘Count.’”
That compacting of the timeline actually serves the story, because everything came together for Basie in Kansas City and seemed to happen all at once. While he didn’t stick with the Blue Devils long, the members he called back from that outfit did come back and stayed for years. A year or two later (circa 1929), Basie took his first step into the majors when joined Benny Moten’s orchestra (profiled earlier). Getting in took some work, not least because Moten played piano, just like Basie, but he got his foot in the door by offering to help with arranging the music. He didn’t even write music at the time, but, thanks to the “incredible ear” the Rutgers bio goes on about, he carried his weight as co-arranger with Eddie Durham, another future collaborator. Before long, he earned the confidence of Moten to the point where he’d play dual piano with/against him, but also the rest of the band, who once voted him the new bandleader after voting Moten out. To his credit, the latter ran his band as a full democracy and honored the vote; a brave choice that gave Basie his first shot as a bandleader. It didn’t last that long - they handed the reins back to Moten again and Basie signed on again - but that first band shared its name with the one he’d ride to fame: the Count Basie Orchestra and His Barons of Rhythm.
When Moten met an untimely demise in 1935, Basie became the natural choice to take over, so he got his band back together again. Several of the guys came over from the Blue Devils - e.g., Walter Page (bass) and Jimmy Rushing (vocals) - but the rest - e.g., Freddie Green (guitar), Jo Jones (drums), and Lester Young (tenor saxophone) - continued with him from Moten’s orchestra. Finally, and to circle back to a venue named above, Basie and that orchestra landed a steady job at the Reno Club in 1935, a platform that gave them a radio national broadcast. It didn’t take long for said radio broadcast to make another, still-more fateful introduction.
John Hammond was a music writer based on Chicago when he heard a broadcast of the Basie orchestra. After trying to catch his attention by writing about him (imagining rave reviews), Hammond reached out directly, inviting Basie to Chicago where he thought he could open a few doors. When Basie finally responded to Hammond, the latter got on the train to Kansas City the same day and, according to one source (I didn’t note and I’m not about to dig it up), sat down to talk with Basie in between sets at the Reno Club on the same day he arrived. Basie relocated to Chicago in 1936 shortly thereafter, where he recorded as a bandleader for the first time, and in the session that Hammond called “the only perfect, completely perfect recording session I’ve ever had anything to do with.” Vocalion released the four songs that came out of that session - “Shoe Shine Boy,” “Evening,” “Boogie Woogie,” and "Oh Lady Be Good" - first as 78 rpms singles and, after Basie got on to the map, as a four-album compilation (though, because 78s, it was just the same four songs). Working his connections, Hammond got Basie and his orchestra settled at Chicago’s Terrace Ballroom.
One of Count Basie’s more famous innovations happened during his Chicago days. From Wikipedia:
“Another Basie innovation was the use of two tenor saxophone players; at the time, most bands had just one. When Young complained of Herschel Evans' vibrato, Basie placed them on either side of the alto players, and soon had the tenor players engaged in ‘duels’. Many other bands later adapted the split tenor arrangement.”
Hold that thought because a lot of things happened in Count Basie’s life between 1936 and 1940. For one, he moved again, this time to Harlem, New York, where he took up a residency at a place called the Woodside Hotel. Hammond followed him over, apparently, because he used Carnegie Hall as the venue for his culture-changing revue, From Spirituals to Swing, first in 1938 then again in 1939. Hammond also shaped the direction Basie’s band took in the late 1930s. The story starts with a Christmas show the Basie Orchestra booked in 1937. The venue was the Roseland Ballroom, a place where the famous Fletcher Henderson Orchestra had apparently played before. Because Basie’s reputation had proceeded him, that cleared a shot for a music critic at a New York paper to write this catty masterpiece:
“We caught the great Count Basie band which is supposed to be so hot he was going to come in here and set the Roseland on fire. Well, the Roseland is still standing”
Whether it was that review, or what Hammond heard happening in the world, this also happened:
“The producer John Hammond continued to advise and encourage the band, and they soon came up with some adjustments, including softer playing, more solos, and more standards. They paced themselves to save their hottest numbers for later in the show, to give the audience a chance to warm up.”
Honestly, the history becomes kind of whirlwind from here; the one thing that’s clear was that, courtesy of an avalanche of offers from all over the country, Basie’s band played something close to non-stop. With semi-regular appearances at the Apollo Theater for a foundation, they recorded some more famous songs for Decca Records - e.g., “Pennies from Heaven” b/w “Honeysuckle Rose”- but also moved to a theater that Hammond pretty much bought for him. Named the Famous Door, it boasted not just an-in-house CBS feed, which further boosted Basie’s national profile, but also air-conditioning. This same period also saw a lot of comings and goings - e.g., Durham left to hook up with Glenn Miller, while Jimmy Mundy (formerly with Benny Goodman) came in (and with songs like “Cherokee,” “Easy Does It” and “Super Chief”), and Helen Humes replaced Billie Holliday (who never recorded with Basie), who’d picked up an offer to join Artie Shaw’s outfit. Bllie Holliday segues wonderfully to one of the great stories I found researching this stuff.
A venue called the Savoy, which had Chick Webb's orchestra for a house band, arranged a battle of the bands with Basie's outfit. I’ll leave it to Wikipedia to tell the tale:
“In early 1938, the Savoy was the meeting ground for a ‘battle of the bands’ with Chick Webb's group. Basie had Holiday, and Webb countered with the singer Ella Fitzgerald. As Metronome magazine proclaimed, ‘Basie's Brilliant Band Conquers Chick's’; the article described the evening:
'Throughout the fight, which never let down in its intensity during the whole fray, Chick took the aggressive, with the Count playing along easily and, on the whole, more musically scientifically. Undismayed by Chick's forceful drum beating, which sent the audience into shouts of encouragement and appreciation and casual beads of perspiration to drop from Chick's brow onto the brass cymbals, the Count maintained an attitude of poise and self-assurance. He constantly parried Chick's thundering haymakers with tantalizing runs and arpeggios which teased more and more force from his adversary.’”
Count Basie’s continued its upward trajectory from there as he rode the peak of the big band/swing era. And he was big. From the Rutgers bio:
“Count Basie is considered one of the greatest bandleaders of all times. He was the arbiter of the big-band swing sound and his unique style of fusing blues and jazz established swing as a predominant music style. Basie changed the jazz landscape and shaped mid-20th century popular music, duly earning the title “King of Swing” because he made the world want to dance.”
West coast tours followed - he even dabbled in the movies, starting with 1942’s Reveille with Beverly (starring Ann Miller), and continuing in several - but then World War II came around and pushed entertainment toward supporting the war effort. Basie’s orchestra played USO shows, including a “command performance,” also in 1942, where he played with stars like Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Carmen Miranda, Jerry Colonna, and the singer Dinah Shore.
After reading about the Musicians’ Strike of 1942-44, I decided that’s how and when I wanted to close this chapter. Disputes over royalty payments prompted the strike, and it was directed almost exclusively at the recording industry: musicians were free to play shows, both live and live on the radio, but they refused to record for any label until their demands were met. No one expected the strike to last as long as it did; not even a personal intervention from FDR could end it. The labels, especially the established heavyweights, RCA Victor and Columbia, thought they could outlast the union, the American Federation of Musicians - surprisingly, with some help from musicians (including Basie’s orchestra), who joined in a two-week frenzy of recording sessions to stockpile a catalog of new releases before the strike kicked off. The record labels burned through those, and, as the strike continued, they reached deeper and deeper into their archives, releasing any old material they thought would sell. When that revenue stream dried up, they grew either desperate or inventive by 1943, when “record companies bypassed the striking musicians by recording their popular vocalists singing with vocal groups filling the backup role normally filled by orchestras.”
A couple quirky things happened before the strike ended in 1944 - e.g., one label dug up a recording by Harry James featuring a theretofore lightly-known singer named Frank Sinatra, which launched his wartime career; said war moved the AFM to make political concessions like allowing musicians to record V-discs for GIs starting October 27, 1943, etc. - but that layoff, along with changes in popular taste, ended the first half of Count Basie’s career/legend. Bankruptcy forced him to break up his orchestra in the early 1950s and he downsized to playing in smaller outfits. He went quiet then…but only for a while.
About the Sampler
Count Basie’s catalog is dauntingly massive, even (especially?) on Spotify. Spending two days picking blind at songs within collections provided…about a third of the motivation for cutting off this chapter, as well as the sampler where I did.
After some work, I whittled it down to 25 songs. Most of the selection came from songs noted in the source material - and, to round out that list, I included Basie’s first collaborative, spontaneous composition and, later his signature song, “One O’ Clock Jump,” but also “Taxi War Dance” and “Lester Leaps In.” The rest of the Count-Basie specific selection came in because I liked it. Those include: “Live and Love Tonight” (which opens with organ, which continues to play under), up-tempo jazzy numbers like “Miss Thing, Pt. 1,” “Riff Interlude,” and smarter, more-multi-tonal (cooler?) updates on the same sound, “Lester’s Dream” and “Broadway,” (the frankly non-committal) “Pound Cake,” the smoldering “I Left My Baby,” Basie’s “swinging” stab at “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (wth Helen Humes, btw), and his touching farewell to Kansas City, “Goin’ to Chicago Blues.”
Finally, and because I was able to find them, I added a couple songs by Walter Page’s Blue Devils (which was all Spotify had at the time), “Blue Devil Blues” and “Squabblin’,” which aren’t too bad. I also included “Moten Swing,” because Count Basie claimed credit for that one…“an invaluable contribution to the development of swing music,” apparently.
That's it for this one, and thanks to anyone who made it this far. The next chapter is already in the pipeline…the same players that Count Basie bested in 1938.
William James “Count” Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1904, son to Harvey Lee Basie, who worked as a coachman and a caretaker, and Lillian Childs Basie, who took in laundry; seeing how hard his parents worked (and quite possibly for who) motivated Basie to help them get ahead. Despite being a solid student, the younger Basie didn’t see education as the path for getting there; he dropped out after junior high school and started knocking around the Palace Theater in Red Bank, trading chores and odd jobs for free admission and learning things like changing the reels and working the spotlight for the live shows. His parents did play a part in his future as both of them played instruments, the mellophone for his dad, the piano for his mom. His mother took music seriously enough to pay a quarter a piano lesson.
Those lessons paid off in two ways. First, and to lift a good anecdote from his official bio, Basie volunteered to play the music to accompany a silent movie one afternoon when the regular player called in sick. The manager said no, but Basie snuck into the pit unnoticed and played through the movie; the manager invited him back to play the evening show. Second, and more consequential in the grand scheme, he preferred playing the drums…until he met, Sonny Greer, another Red Bank (or Long Branch; depending on the source) native destined for fame. Knowing he would never touch Greer on the drums, Basie doubled-down on the piano as his instrument.
For as long as Greer stuck around, he and Basie played as a duo at little gigs around town - they even landed a show at Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore - but Greer got called up to the bigs (New York City) before long and started his professional career - with Duke Ellington, no less. Basie wasn’t too far behind, moving to Harlem at the fresh-faced age of 16. He filled those years playing shows and rent parties with Greer and others, picking up stride piano from James P. Johnson and Fats Waller (profiled earlier) - who also taught him how to play the organ - and landing his first real work as a musician at a place called Leroy’s, where he sharpened his playing and steeled his nerves competing in cutting contests. Around the same time (1925), Basie started a two-year stint with an act called Kittie Krippen and her Kiddies, playing a revue called the Hippity Hop Show. Whether by luck or fate, the last tour he was on petered out in Kansas City, Missouri. Where big things would happen…
First things first, all the sources I read agreed to that Basie picked up the “Count” nickname during his time in the Midwest, but I have two stories and a wrinkle in the time-line on that: Wikipedia only acknowledges he picked up the name, but puts it during his time in Tulsa, Oklahoma when he played for a minute with Walter Page and His Blue Devils; Basie’s official biography sets it in his time with Benny Moten (profiled earlier) by way of this anecdote:
“Though stories abound at the genesis of his nickname, Basie later recalled it as a tribute to his penchant for slipping off during arranging sessions with Moten. As soon as they got a few good bars down, Basie recalled, he’d slip out, leaving Moten to exclaim, ‘Where is that no ‘count rascal?’”
Another source, a bio on a Rutgers University website, dates the story just a little later and more prosaically:
“The Barons of Rhythm were regulars at the Reno Club and often performed for a live radio broadcast. During a broadcast the announcer wanted to give Basie’s name some style, so he called him ‘Count.’”
That compacting of the timeline actually serves the story, because everything came together for Basie in Kansas City and seemed to happen all at once. While he didn’t stick with the Blue Devils long, the members he called back from that outfit did come back and stayed for years. A year or two later (circa 1929), Basie took his first step into the majors when joined Benny Moten’s orchestra (profiled earlier). Getting in took some work, not least because Moten played piano, just like Basie, but he got his foot in the door by offering to help with arranging the music. He didn’t even write music at the time, but, thanks to the “incredible ear” the Rutgers bio goes on about, he carried his weight as co-arranger with Eddie Durham, another future collaborator. Before long, he earned the confidence of Moten to the point where he’d play dual piano with/against him, but also the rest of the band, who once voted him the new bandleader after voting Moten out. To his credit, the latter ran his band as a full democracy and honored the vote; a brave choice that gave Basie his first shot as a bandleader. It didn’t last that long - they handed the reins back to Moten again and Basie signed on again - but that first band shared its name with the one he’d ride to fame: the Count Basie Orchestra and His Barons of Rhythm.
When Moten met an untimely demise in 1935, Basie became the natural choice to take over, so he got his band back together again. Several of the guys came over from the Blue Devils - e.g., Walter Page (bass) and Jimmy Rushing (vocals) - but the rest - e.g., Freddie Green (guitar), Jo Jones (drums), and Lester Young (tenor saxophone) - continued with him from Moten’s orchestra. Finally, and to circle back to a venue named above, Basie and that orchestra landed a steady job at the Reno Club in 1935, a platform that gave them a radio national broadcast. It didn’t take long for said radio broadcast to make another, still-more fateful introduction.
John Hammond was a music writer based on Chicago when he heard a broadcast of the Basie orchestra. After trying to catch his attention by writing about him (imagining rave reviews), Hammond reached out directly, inviting Basie to Chicago where he thought he could open a few doors. When Basie finally responded to Hammond, the latter got on the train to Kansas City the same day and, according to one source (I didn’t note and I’m not about to dig it up), sat down to talk with Basie in between sets at the Reno Club on the same day he arrived. Basie relocated to Chicago in 1936 shortly thereafter, where he recorded as a bandleader for the first time, and in the session that Hammond called “the only perfect, completely perfect recording session I’ve ever had anything to do with.” Vocalion released the four songs that came out of that session - “Shoe Shine Boy,” “Evening,” “Boogie Woogie,” and "Oh Lady Be Good" - first as 78 rpms singles and, after Basie got on to the map, as a four-album compilation (though, because 78s, it was just the same four songs). Working his connections, Hammond got Basie and his orchestra settled at Chicago’s Terrace Ballroom.
One of Count Basie’s more famous innovations happened during his Chicago days. From Wikipedia:
“Another Basie innovation was the use of two tenor saxophone players; at the time, most bands had just one. When Young complained of Herschel Evans' vibrato, Basie placed them on either side of the alto players, and soon had the tenor players engaged in ‘duels’. Many other bands later adapted the split tenor arrangement.”
Hold that thought because a lot of things happened in Count Basie’s life between 1936 and 1940. For one, he moved again, this time to Harlem, New York, where he took up a residency at a place called the Woodside Hotel. Hammond followed him over, apparently, because he used Carnegie Hall as the venue for his culture-changing revue, From Spirituals to Swing, first in 1938 then again in 1939. Hammond also shaped the direction Basie’s band took in the late 1930s. The story starts with a Christmas show the Basie Orchestra booked in 1937. The venue was the Roseland Ballroom, a place where the famous Fletcher Henderson Orchestra had apparently played before. Because Basie’s reputation had proceeded him, that cleared a shot for a music critic at a New York paper to write this catty masterpiece:
“We caught the great Count Basie band which is supposed to be so hot he was going to come in here and set the Roseland on fire. Well, the Roseland is still standing”
Whether it was that review, or what Hammond heard happening in the world, this also happened:
“The producer John Hammond continued to advise and encourage the band, and they soon came up with some adjustments, including softer playing, more solos, and more standards. They paced themselves to save their hottest numbers for later in the show, to give the audience a chance to warm up.”
Honestly, the history becomes kind of whirlwind from here; the one thing that’s clear was that, courtesy of an avalanche of offers from all over the country, Basie’s band played something close to non-stop. With semi-regular appearances at the Apollo Theater for a foundation, they recorded some more famous songs for Decca Records - e.g., “Pennies from Heaven” b/w “Honeysuckle Rose”- but also moved to a theater that Hammond pretty much bought for him. Named the Famous Door, it boasted not just an-in-house CBS feed, which further boosted Basie’s national profile, but also air-conditioning. This same period also saw a lot of comings and goings - e.g., Durham left to hook up with Glenn Miller, while Jimmy Mundy (formerly with Benny Goodman) came in (and with songs like “Cherokee,” “Easy Does It” and “Super Chief”), and Helen Humes replaced Billie Holliday (who never recorded with Basie), who’d picked up an offer to join Artie Shaw’s outfit. Bllie Holliday segues wonderfully to one of the great stories I found researching this stuff.
A venue called the Savoy, which had Chick Webb's orchestra for a house band, arranged a battle of the bands with Basie's outfit. I’ll leave it to Wikipedia to tell the tale:
“In early 1938, the Savoy was the meeting ground for a ‘battle of the bands’ with Chick Webb's group. Basie had Holiday, and Webb countered with the singer Ella Fitzgerald. As Metronome magazine proclaimed, ‘Basie's Brilliant Band Conquers Chick's’; the article described the evening:
'Throughout the fight, which never let down in its intensity during the whole fray, Chick took the aggressive, with the Count playing along easily and, on the whole, more musically scientifically. Undismayed by Chick's forceful drum beating, which sent the audience into shouts of encouragement and appreciation and casual beads of perspiration to drop from Chick's brow onto the brass cymbals, the Count maintained an attitude of poise and self-assurance. He constantly parried Chick's thundering haymakers with tantalizing runs and arpeggios which teased more and more force from his adversary.’”
Count Basie’s continued its upward trajectory from there as he rode the peak of the big band/swing era. And he was big. From the Rutgers bio:
“Count Basie is considered one of the greatest bandleaders of all times. He was the arbiter of the big-band swing sound and his unique style of fusing blues and jazz established swing as a predominant music style. Basie changed the jazz landscape and shaped mid-20th century popular music, duly earning the title “King of Swing” because he made the world want to dance.”
West coast tours followed - he even dabbled in the movies, starting with 1942’s Reveille with Beverly (starring Ann Miller), and continuing in several - but then World War II came around and pushed entertainment toward supporting the war effort. Basie’s orchestra played USO shows, including a “command performance,” also in 1942, where he played with stars like Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Carmen Miranda, Jerry Colonna, and the singer Dinah Shore.
After reading about the Musicians’ Strike of 1942-44, I decided that’s how and when I wanted to close this chapter. Disputes over royalty payments prompted the strike, and it was directed almost exclusively at the recording industry: musicians were free to play shows, both live and live on the radio, but they refused to record for any label until their demands were met. No one expected the strike to last as long as it did; not even a personal intervention from FDR could end it. The labels, especially the established heavyweights, RCA Victor and Columbia, thought they could outlast the union, the American Federation of Musicians - surprisingly, with some help from musicians (including Basie’s orchestra), who joined in a two-week frenzy of recording sessions to stockpile a catalog of new releases before the strike kicked off. The record labels burned through those, and, as the strike continued, they reached deeper and deeper into their archives, releasing any old material they thought would sell. When that revenue stream dried up, they grew either desperate or inventive by 1943, when “record companies bypassed the striking musicians by recording their popular vocalists singing with vocal groups filling the backup role normally filled by orchestras.”
A couple quirky things happened before the strike ended in 1944 - e.g., one label dug up a recording by Harry James featuring a theretofore lightly-known singer named Frank Sinatra, which launched his wartime career; said war moved the AFM to make political concessions like allowing musicians to record V-discs for GIs starting October 27, 1943, etc. - but that layoff, along with changes in popular taste, ended the first half of Count Basie’s career/legend. Bankruptcy forced him to break up his orchestra in the early 1950s and he downsized to playing in smaller outfits. He went quiet then…but only for a while.
About the Sampler
Count Basie’s catalog is dauntingly massive, even (especially?) on Spotify. Spending two days picking blind at songs within collections provided…about a third of the motivation for cutting off this chapter, as well as the sampler where I did.
After some work, I whittled it down to 25 songs. Most of the selection came from songs noted in the source material - and, to round out that list, I included Basie’s first collaborative, spontaneous composition and, later his signature song, “One O’ Clock Jump,” but also “Taxi War Dance” and “Lester Leaps In.” The rest of the Count-Basie specific selection came in because I liked it. Those include: “Live and Love Tonight” (which opens with organ, which continues to play under), up-tempo jazzy numbers like “Miss Thing, Pt. 1,” “Riff Interlude,” and smarter, more-multi-tonal (cooler?) updates on the same sound, “Lester’s Dream” and “Broadway,” (the frankly non-committal) “Pound Cake,” the smoldering “I Left My Baby,” Basie’s “swinging” stab at “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (wth Helen Humes, btw), and his touching farewell to Kansas City, “Goin’ to Chicago Blues.”
Finally, and because I was able to find them, I added a couple songs by Walter Page’s Blue Devils (which was all Spotify had at the time), “Blue Devil Blues” and “Squabblin’,” which aren’t too bad. I also included “Moten Swing,” because Count Basie claimed credit for that one…“an invaluable contribution to the development of swing music,” apparently.
That's it for this one, and thanks to anyone who made it this far. The next chapter is already in the pipeline…the same players that Count Basie bested in 1938.
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