Crash Course Timeline, No. 29: Basie, A Count and a King

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…

Crash Course Timeline, No. 27: Bennie Moten, the 20th-Century Kansas City Pioneer

Press!

In just about every way I can think of, Benjamin “Bennie” Moten rightly belongs in the 1920s. He formed his first band as early as 1918, his first recordings (for the ubiquitous Okeh Records) moved the New Orleans jazz sound to the Midwest, though another, even earlier influence from his native Missouri came in as well: ragtime. He enjoys a niche reputation to this day: according to Wikipedia’s entry on Moten, his 1923-25 recordings for Okeh count among “the more valuable acoustic jazz 78s of the era.”

Full disclosure, I dropped Bennie Moten in the 1930s for no better reason than overlooking him while digging into the 1920s. Still, he and his Bennie Moten Orchestra hit its peak the same year the decade started. More significantly, Moten carried forward the “riffing” approach to popular music and gave jazz a Midwest-inspired spin with the “stomping beat” then popular in Kansas City. A site called The Pendergast Years (one of the few sources for this post, sadly) sums up his beginnings and influence with this intro:

“On September 23, 1923, the Bennie Moten Orchestra made its first recording consisting of eight songs. By strict musical standards, the songs themselves were unrefined and not much removed from existing blues music. But the Bennie Moten Orchestra would soon build upon its earliest recordings to develop a distinct Kansas City style of jazz that later dominated the jazz scene in the late 1930s and 1940s.”

Those two innovations became foundations for a lot of the big band sound - including that of his protégé, and future member of jazz royalty, Count Basie. While I don’t think the phrase “stomping beat” confuses anyone, I want to pause here to confirm that, yes, “riffing” means about what a casual reader thinks it does. Wikipedia’s explainer on the subject gives people from the rock era some examples (e.g., Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or AC/DC’s “Back in Black”), as an aural hook for the basic definition:

“…it is a pattern, or melody, often played by the rhythm section instruments or solo instrument, that forms the basis or accompaniment of a musical composition.”

[Ed. - While that’s broad, digestible and accurate, I'm compelled to include this: “A riff is a short, repeated, memorable musical phrase, often pitched low on the guitar, which focuses much of the energy and excitement of a rock song,” because “excitement of a rock song.”]

Crash Course Timeline, No. 26: Blanche Calloway, as Big as Her Brother's Shadow, Maybe Bigger

Damn legend.

As noted in the prior chapter on Cab Calloway, he grew up in the shadow of his older sister, Blanche Calloway. Pulling from multiple sources, first quoted from a website called Jazz Rhythm:

“Cab Calloway borrowed key elements from his elder sister’s act -- her bravura vocal style and Hi-de-Ho call and response routines. His 1976 memoir acknowledges her influence, declaring Blanche ‘vivacious, lovely, personality plus and a hell of a singer and dancer,’ an all-around entertainer who was ‘fabulous, happy and extroverted.’”

Now, from a site called The LeEMS Machine:

“She is relentlessly written about as residing in the shadow of her younger brother Cab Calloway. However, scholars and researchers have pointed out that, at one point, Blanche Calloway had attained more fame and renown, helping her brother in his show business breakthrough and inspiring his famous style.”

She would wind up living in Cab's shadow by the end of the 1930s, but, all things considered, Blanche Calloway arguably had the bigger life; it wouldn’t surprise me if neither one of them cared one way or the other. He borrowed from her style, she borrowed phrasing and characters from his songs (see cameos by Minnie the Moocher and the King of Sweden in Blanche Calloway’s hit, “Growlin’ Dan”), and so on. Both Calloways made their mark during the period when white audiences finally woke up to what black artists had been doing for decades. In this chapter, the “Hi De Ho Man” makes room for the woman who started her famous “Just a Crazy Song” with “Hi Hi Hi.”

Like her younger brother, Blanche Calloway was born in Rochester, New York, only five years earlier, in 1902. The family returned to their real home, Baltimore, Maryland, when Blanche was a teenager, with their mother, Martha Eulalia Reed, and her second husband, an insurance salesman named John Nelson Fortune.A church organist, Ms. Reed taught her children to play and love music, while trying to steer them away from careers in music, and she failed with at least three of them. In Blanche’s case, the betrayal came at the hands of a music teacher who pushed her to audition with a local talent scout. After Blanche dropped out of Morgan State College in the early 1920s, she wouldn’t hold another straight job until somewhere around the end of World War II.