Count Basie: America's #1 Band by Loren Schoenberg

The Count Basie band heard on these recordings has been frequently referred to as the "Old Testament" band, rather too neatly leaving the "New Testament" appellation for the unit of the 1950s. This is actually quite misleading, for in almost every way this group was far more creative and "modern" than any of the later Basie bands. The soloists were superior, the arrangements far more original and perhaps most significantly, the band's rhythm section was simply one of the best in the entire history of jazz. The man truly responsible for the concept that led to this era of musical miracles was neither the leader nor the band's resident genius, Lester Young. It was the bassist Walter Page (1900-1957), who had developed a unique approach that managed to sustain the spontaneity of a jazz small group within the more formal confines of a larger ensemble. Page, in his own words, was "enthused by the singing of folksongs and spirituals by my family. Stayed with me all the way through school." He played the bass drum, bass horn and bass violin. His inspiration for playing jazz on the bass was hearing the great New Orleans bassist Wellman Braud when he came through Kansas City long before his famous stint with the Ellington band. Page has been quoted as saying: "He hit those tones like hammers and made them jump right out of that box." Page's music teacher at Kansas City's Lincoln High School was the legendary Major N. Clark Smith. In 1918, shortly after graduating, the young bassist joined pianist Bennie Moten's orchestra and during five years there continued formal studies (piano, voice, violin, saxophone, composition and arranging) at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He then joined a road band. It broke up, he took it over, and this in turn led to the formation of Walter Page's Blue Devils, the band that brought together Basie, Eddie Durham, Jimmy Rushing, Hot Lips Page and many of the others who went on to develop what Page had created into what became known as "Kansas City Jazz." Ironically, the Blue Devils were based in Oklahoma City, though they certainly played far and wide, including KC. Fortunately, Ralph Ellison grew up in their home area and as a teen-ager briefly entertained dreams of playing trumpet in Page's band. It is from his writings on this magical period that we get some of our clearest pictures of what these men wrought. The bassist was particularly proud of his ability to sight-read difficult music, and his total professionalism was legendary in the region. The depression, plus various strings of bad luck, enabled Moten to steal Page's key sidemen, and eventually to hire Page himself.

The 1932 Moten records for Victor are commonly perceived as being the ur-Basie text, but in actuality the spark for that whole concept came from the bassist. Indeed, the other members of Basie's famous rhythm section — guitarist Freddie Green, drummer Jo Jones and the pianist himself — all have credited Page with teaching them how they should play their instruments in order to realize what he was hearing in his head. It began with bringing the volume down and the intensity up, giving them the space in which to create the meshing of timbres that resulted in one organic, indivisible whole. Later there would be the pacing of the performance, and the counterpoint of the bass lines, as well as the way that rhythm section made it sound as if they were breathing the beat — but all this was still a few years ahead.

The period from 1933 to 1936 would bring momentous change: the formation of the first Basie unit, the death of Moten, then the scattering of that nucleus of players to several different bands, and finally their regrouping into Count Basie's Barons of Rhythm at Kansas City's Reno Club. At this point, Lester Young, who had been spending most of his time in Minneapolis, came back to Kansas City, and shortly thereafter John Hammond and Benny Goodman heard the Barons on short-wave radio. Within a year and a half the enlarged Basie band would be playing on the stage of Carnegie Hall. But first they went to Chicago in the fall of 1936 to play at The Grand Terrace, and it was at that time that a quintet out of the Basie unit recorded four sides that would be released under the code name "Jones-Smith Inc." The reason for the subterfuge was that Basie had already signed a recording contract with another company, so they took the name from the band's drummer and trumpeter.

THE SMALL GROUPS

November 9, 1936

It is worthwhile to examine the legendary Jones-Smith date in full detail, since the precepts that governed all of Basie's extensive career as a bandleader/pianist are present here in their purest form. The first thing to keep in mind as you listen to these four selections is that nothing like them had ever been heard before. The rhythm section communicated in a unified fashion and presented a synergistic beat that is without precedent. And in the nascent Lester Young there can be heard the reinvention of the tenor saxophone as well the first recorded examples of a new vocabulary for jazz. Basie was a master of the stride piano style, which demanded equal command of the left and right hands and the ability to summon from the piano the same propelling beat associated with larger ensembles. It was during his years with the Bennie Moten band that Basie first glimpsed the possibility of a more spare approach to the instrument. Moten himself was an accomplished pianist and the two of them would play separate pianos during the band's theater engagements. At smaller venues, with just one piano, Moten would play the bass part, leaving the treble to Basie. Some of his fellow band mates later identified this as the beginning of the famously sparse Basie style, which came to fruition with his own band a few years later.

Basie starts "Shoe Shine Boy" with a brilliant opening gambit that contains more than a dollop of rhythmic, harmonic and formal ambiguity. What seems to be a statement of the melody turns out to be a 16-bar introduction, and as Walter Page (with walking bass lines) and then Jo Jones (with shimmering hi-hat work) settle in, Basie gradually jettisons the striding left hand figures for a far leaner accompaniment. Here is the genesis of the contemporary jazz piano style. Over the years, Basie's tinkling style eclipsed the strongly linear and melodic playing heard here. Jo Jones frequently told about this rhythm section's penchant for rehearsing, and there are many subtle touches throughout these recordings that provide the sort of convergences of phrase that only happen in truly unified ensembles. The sprung rhythms in Basie's left hand during the bridge lead to the descending whole-tone run that later became a trademark of one his greatest disciples, Thelonious Monk. This is immediately followed by the very first recorded Lester Young solo, on one of his most tightly constructed compositions. Building around a three-note cell of D-Db-C (all notes referred to are in concert pitch), Young unleashes two 32-bar choruses of untrammeled cohesion. He telegraphs a feeling of restraint and rhythmic repose, but places himself squarely on top of the beat, and reveals himself to be in Louis Armstrong's league when it comes to letting the rhythm flow at fast tempos. Indeed, some hear this entrance as a reference to Armstrong's famous "Cornet Chop Suey" solo. Young uses repetition to good advantage to air out his more complex phrases, and there are echoes of his early days as a drummer, especially in the second eight bars of his second chorus. A subtle touch is the way the rhythm section catches his accents during the bridges. As Carl Smith starts his trumpet solo, Basie switches to a totally different background. All this provides a clear picture of the Walter Page concept of a rhythm section creating contrast to keep a performance interesting. Not content to maintain one pattern throughout an entire performance, Page taught Basie and Jones (and later guitarist Freddie Green) to think orchestrally and in terms of counterpoint. Lester also piles in with a never-ending set of riff variations, creating a tapestry not unlike the New Orleans jazz he had grown up with during the previous decade. Smith, both in this fast company and in later work with Skeet Tolbert's Gentlemen of Rhythm, proves himself to be an exemplary player who responds to everything going on around him. The next episode finds Smith, Young and Basie trading seamless two-bar phrases for sixteen measures. Jones, echoing his original entrance, lays out for the first eight, and with that small gesture creates a symmetry that presages the end of the performance. His eight-bar solo is played exclusively on the snare drum (he plays the whole session on snare and hi-hat only — anticipating by several decades Leon Parker's minimalist experiments of the 1990s). The band jams out in true New Orleans fashion, before a short reprise of the trading and the coda.

"Evenin'" had already been recorded by Cab Calloway's band in a wonderful arrangement by its composer, Harry "Father" White, and this seemingly informal but highly structured rendition seems to indicate that the quintet is playing a pared-down version of the Basie band's arrangement. At the center of this performance is Basie's right hand. What he chooses to play is so enthralling that the absence of the left goes almost unnoticed. The first chorus is bookended by Basie's melodic variations backed by Page's two-beat figures and Jones's airy hi-hat, with Young's bridge providing a switch into 4/4 time. The saxophonist uses a panoply of articulations and rhythms (the grace notes in the third and fourth measures, the thrilling and cleanly played descending arpeggio and the closing triplets) that are unique to this stage of his career.

Composer/guitarist/trombonist Eddie Durham used to talk about Basie's talents as an "idea man" during their Moten days. Not inclined to write music down, Basie would play things on the piano for Durham, who would then orchestrate them. You can hear the high quality of Basie's compositional concept throughout this recording as he continues playing right hand only (with the exception of a few plunging bass notes) behind the vocal. Again, there are hints of ideas that would lead to the universe Monk was to create several years later, while also hearkening back to the traces of the stride of James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith and Fats Waller that found their way into the mature styles of both Basie and Ellington. Indeed, the Basie orchestra had played in a battle of the bands with Ellington less than two weeks earlier, so the two men may have shared the same piano. We know that Ellington had an extraordinary ability to hear the essence of things, and it seems certain that Basie put something into his mind that night.

The appearance here of Jimmy Rushing brings to mind Ralph Ellison's late 1950s reminiscence about his first encounters with the singer in Oklahoma City some three decades earlier. "Rushing is known primarily today as a blues singer, but not so in those days. He began as a singer of ballads, bringing to them a sincerity and a feeling for dramatizing the lyrics in the musical phrase which charged the banal lines with the mysterious potentiality of meaning which haunts the blues." Rushing also knew how to pace two consecutive choruses of the same lyrics so that they didn't sound redundant. He is aided by the band, which falls into a riff formation behind his second chorus. All of Page's lessons about structure and contrast bear fruit. When they drop the riff during the bridge, a feeling of freedom ensues, with a dancing Young obbligato, before they revert to the riff for the last eight bars. These things don't happen by chance, and it is one of the wonders of this early Basie band that they could make it all sound so spontaneous. There is a quick cut back to the bridge, where Basie builds castles on top of Page's ostinato figure, and then Rushing returns to swing it on out with a modified return of the riff -- all of this within the course of less than three minutes. Ellison again: "One of the significant aspects of his art is the imposition of a romantic lyricism upon the blues tradition, a lyricism which is not of the Deep South, but of the Southwest: a romanticism native to the frontier, imposed upon the violent rawness of a part of the nation which only thirteen years before Rushing's birth was still Indian territory. Thus there is an optimism in it which echoes the sprit of those Negroes, who, like Rushing's father, had come to Oklahoma in search of a more human way of life."

This is precisely what we hear throughout Rushing's choruses on "Boogie-Woogie." In Rushing's hands (or throat), each bending of pitch and approach to a higher or lower note implies harmonies and emotions that define what separates jazz blues from blues blues, exemplified by the way he varies the repetition of the "Baby, what's on your worried mind" strain.

By his own admission, Basie knew very little about the blues when he arrived in Kansas City in the mid-1920s. But he was a quick study, and in much the same way as he had absorbed jazz piano and organ techniques from Fats Waller a few years earlier in Harlem, Basie drank up the blues wherever he could find them. Particularly strong is the influence of pianist Pete Johnson, as reflected throughout "Boogie Woogie." This arrangement was later adapted for the full band, and variants of it remained in their library for the rest of Basie's life. Like the other performances from this session, it sounds quite simple, but underneath the surface lies a variety of ever-shifting detail. Basie's accompaniment to the vocal is notable for its middle-register sustained chords and the way he breaks out into little cadential figures at the end of each chorus. Young plays throughout the entire performance. His background behind the vocal is faintly recorded, which makes its beautiful melodies all the more intriguing. When Smith joins in the riffing, we get three-way counterpoint in which the two horns and the piano quite remarkably avoid getting in each other's way while creating a swinging web of lines that helps rather than hinders Rushing's vocal. At the end of the chorus, at the exact moment when Rushing sings "she can call so easy and so doggone plain," Young anticipates where Basie is going and plays one of the pianist's famous closing piano fills with him — a small triumph, perhaps, but one that speaks volumes for the unity this band had attained.

One remarkable element of Young's style in evidence here is the way he used sounds as equal partners with the notes he actually played in conveying the message of the music. Young's two blues choruses on "Boogie Woogie" are full of oddly vocal tones that are never served up the same way twice. He lays especially heavy on a G, and Smith picks up on not just the note but the sound when he follows with his own solo, underlaid by more tenor chanting. The band goes back to the top to take it out, and a new way to jazz the blues has been born.

The session's final performance, "Lady Be Good," is sheer perfection from first note to last. While the first three selections were widely copied by young musicians, this one took on an even greater patina, and elements of it were lifted verbatim by everyone from Charlie Parker on down. The first chorus appears on the surface to be a piano solo. And that it is, but the real melodic message is coming from Page's bass lines, throwing Basie's piano figures into the role of accompaniment — raising the question of who is really in the foreground and who in the background. Page walks four notes to the bar, and each one has a different pitch. When Young enters, the bassist doubles up on his notes and Basie switches from his sparse solo style to a four-to-the-bar guitar-like accompaniment, aided by a stricter drum feel. It is from the ascending and descending arc of Page's bass notes that Young creates one of his definitive recorded solos. Just three of the many wonders to be found in its 64 bars are the sighing C's that dot both choruses, the blue F natural that rises four measures before the end of the first chorus, and the totally original phrase that kicks off the second. As in the other pieces, Young keeps playing underneath the trumpet solo, adding an almost inaudible texture that nonetheless has a definitive quality, even when heard only in the shadows. The rhythm section elides the end of Smith's solo into a return to the bridge with a syncopated note that sounds like a gunshot and culminates in one of Page's definitive descending bass lines, leading to the final jam ending.

February 13, 1939

It is now two and a half years later. The Basie band has come to New York and quickly established itself as a first rank unit. One key to the band's success was the series of tenor sax battles between Young and his ill-fated section mate, the Texas-born Herschel Evans, who had severe heart problems and became fatally ill in January of 1939. He tried in vain to rejoin the band on the road during a one-nighter in Connecticut, where he collapsed, and died just days after this small group session was held in Chicago. Their swinging abandon in here then is eloquent testimony to music's transformative powers.

However, there were a multitude of technical problems with the studio, and the recording balance the engineer had settled for was deemed sub-standard, so these performances were initially rejected and withheld from release for over 30 years. Fortunately, they were not destroyed, and they eventually saw the light of day when their original producer, John Hammond, had them reworked, taking advantage of greatly improved equipment and techniques, and persuaded the company to make them available. They reveal "Basie's Bad Boys" to have been in rare form that day. "I Ain't Got Nobody" was a tune Basie liked to play, and after an eight bar introduction, he charges right into it. This is the first time we encounter what was already known as the All-American Rhythm Section. While the original flaws here still limit the clarity, it should be noted that on this session in particular, as indeed on this four-CD reissue collection as a whole, the material has undergone impressive upgrading, enabling us to hear nuances never before audible. And although this session still retains some aural challenges, the playing is a revelation. It was not merely piano, guitar, bass and drums playing at the same time; it was actually one single breathing unit. Lester Young made a handful of recordings in 1938-39 on which he played both clarinet and tenor sax, and this number finds him soloing on both. His clarinet sound is harder than on tenor and he phrases closer to the top of the beat than usual. The bridge of the clarinet solo provides a wonderful example of the uncanny communication between Young and Basie. The next individual to step forward is Buck Clayton, a superior improviser with a fragile and immediately identifiable sound, who plays a sensitive cup-muted solo, after which Young follows on tenor. The stark studio sound shows his acute rhythmic sense in greater detail than usual, with less ambient aural distractions. There is a lot of riffing going on during this session, and during the last chorus Basie plays fills over the trumpets until Lester can put down the tenor and pick up the clarinet again. Shad Collins, who was a favorite of Young's, plays the closing bridge. Sessions like these took on greater meaning for the players as the band's fame grew and there were far fewer outlets for this kind of spontaneity. Basie played the organ that was available in the studio, and despite all the sonic problems of this session, we do get to hear his command not only of its keyboard but of the stops that determine its tonal quality. It would be two years before the full band got around to recording its classic version of "Goin' to Chicago," but here we have the blueprint. Among its highpoints are some rare Young clarinet (hear the band marching behind him on the out-chorus), a brief appearance by trombonist Dicky Wells, and a definitive Rushing vocal. Clayton plays a chorus on open horn and, as was his wont, Basie varies his accompaniment throughout to great effect. In his hands, the blues are not a chord sequence repeated endlessly but an outlet for many different thoughts and sounds.

On "Live and Love Tonight" Basie uses the organ as if it were a big band. Page turns the melody chorus into what amounts to a duet between his bass and the rest of the rhythm section, after which Clayton elegantly paraphrases the melody. Young didn't get to record this kind of song at this tempo very often during his early Basie years, and the interesting chord sequence and contrapuntal variety of Basie's backing inspire him to yet another classic statement. As previously noted, Young was very much concerned with sound, and there are places where he merges with the organ's sonority — most notably the lone low note in the eleventh measure of his solo. The bridge is so pure that it summons thoughts of Beiderbecke and Armstrong. Both Collins and Clayton play a chorus on "Love Me or Leave Me," Clayton being the more elegiac. This session has the free-flowing vibration of a jam session, and in Young's wind-blown 32 measures, one can imagine him — horn held high in his famous posture, casting to the winds yet another classic utterance, couched in eccentric sounds and thrilling rhythms, in one of the many hundreds of joints, ballrooms, theaters and clubs he graced with his genius. From this point on, the legacy of Kansas City and the Basie Reno Club band will gradually recede as the uniformity that was essential to the success of a big band usurped the spontaneity that originally personified it. But the change was a slow process and there was still much brilliant music ahead.

September 5, 1939

Although there were a few small group jams issued during the band's previous Decca recordings, this was the first small-group session with horns organized as such since the Jones-Smith date. In place of ensemble jams it offers harmonized melodies repeated without variation. Here the emphasis is on the solos, and they are uniformly first-rate. "Dickie's Dream," written by Young, was originally called "Conversation Piece." At the root of Lester's conception is an intriguing chord known as a minor sixth. This is the chord that Thelonious Monk turned Dizzy Gillespie on to and which inspired "A Night In Tunisia." Lester heard it differently, however. It was more static, whereas in Monk's world it was a chord that was always on the go. Through the use of a note associated with a major tonality, Young gave this minor chord a major inflection — as Cole Porter once put it, "how strange the change from major to minor" Wells may have sensed this and slides right into an E natural over the tune's C minor tonality — what would have been harmonic awkwardness in lesser hands becoming a stroke of genius in his. Lester folds this ambiguity into the center of his solo, with some descending arpeggios and a smooth elision into the bridge, the site of another of those amazing Basie/Young convergences. The approach to Basie's own bridge shows his absolute freedom with meter. "Lester Leaps In" became the saxophonist's own signature number for the remaining two decades of his life. It is based on "I Got Rhythm," a composition that he had already long used as a showcase. Here we get a glimmer of what John Hammond was referring to when he wrote: "[Young] would launch himself into improvisations with which each new chorus renewed themselves as if by magic; it was as though his energy and originality knew no bounds. Lester could improvise on the same theme for an hour at a stretch, without once giving the impression that he might be running out of ideas. And there was not the slightest touch of exhibitionism about it. His features evinced not the slightest emotion and his whole being was concentrated in the music." During his solo he plays pentatonic scales, presaging many devices that years later led George Russell, among others, to create advanced musical systems. Basie plays a boogie-woogie figure for just a moment early in Lester's solo. A second later the trigger-quick Young has turned it into a slightly amended blues figure. They were a perfect match, and never played again as well as they did together.

July 24, 1942

By the early 1940s, the "album" concept had taken root, and Columbia decided to issue a set of eight performances on four discs, calling it Blues by Basie. Recorded in Los Angeles on a single day, it is a classic item in the Basie discography, providing an extended listening session in superb fidelity with the All-American Rhythm Section, augmented on half the tunes by Clayton and by Young's replacement, the virtuosic Don Byas. They begin with the third Basie recording of "How Long Blues" in less than four years' time. It showcases Page throughout. He was not a linear soloist like Jimmy Blanton, but a grand architect who liked to generate large waves of rhythm from the bully pulpit of his bass. He pulls off some very adventurous things, with offbeat rhythms, interesting dissonances, and a penchant for counterpoint. Throughout the session, we hear the perfect marriage of the guitar, bass and drums, indivisible for all their individuality. The tunes were inspired; the multi-themed "Royal Garden Blues," "Bugle Blues" (a variant of "Bugle Call Rag"), and a surprisingly slow "St. Louis Blues" all feature superb solos from both Clayton and Byas, and enable the rhythm section to open up in a way they did not do when playing alone. "Sugar Blues" is a major event. It had been the theme for the wah-wah trumpeter Clyde McCoy, who parodied the plunger muted styles of such early jazz pioneers as King Oliver. Basie and band slow it way down and turn it into a blues ballad of tremendous depth. The other quartet titles are essentially dialogues between Basie and Page. "Café Society Blues" has a shining example of two-handed Basie piano.

May 16, 1950

The 1950 Octet recordings feature the small group Basie put together after every attempt to keep the big band solvent had failed. The results are uniformly professional and dotted with inspired moments from all, especially the leader. Neal Hefti, who had come out of Woody Herman's band and was headed for the big time in Hollywood, wrote most of the arrangements. They were slick, professional, and left plenty of room for blowing. But there is a generic quality to much of this music when compared with the 1936-42 sessions. The Kansas City spontaneity and the idiomatic particulars that had provided a springboard for the leader's brilliant piano were gone. Of course there is some wonderful playing on these sessions. It is only comparison with the earlier sides that leaves them wanting. All four horn players had come of age during the Basie band's ascendancy. Thoroughly contemporary stylists who had come to terms with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, they also had been through extensive experience with top orchestras: Clark Terry with Charlie Barnet and with Basie's full-sized group; Buddy DeFranco with Tommy Dorsey and Boyd Raeburn; Charlie Rouse with Gillespie and Ellington; and Serge Chaloff with Jimmy Dorsey and Woody Herman. With great ease, they construct pithy solos in relatively limited space and feed off each other's closing phrases to create a musical circle. The story goes that when Basie put his first small unit together, he didn't tell anyone in his old band. Freddie Green heard about it, found out where they were playing, sat down on the bandstand, and stayed in that rhythm section, big band or small, until his death thirty-six years later. The bassist Jimmy Lewis had a big sound and the kind of confidence Basie needed to fill Page's shoes, and the drummer Buddy Rich (on his best behavior — no showing off, just pure time) knew just what Basie liked, and gave it to him. "Neal's Deal" is an attractive medium-up swinger, replete with interludes, backgrounds, and some charging Basie piano. "Bluebeard's Blues" brings Basie to his favorite métier. There is a wonderful piano solo, with Rich supplying the sort of counterpoint that used to come from Page's bass, both behind Basie and during his own elegant hi-hat solo played over the walking rhythm section. "The Golden Bullet" is another blues that features all four horns, who spend much of their time trading Charlie Parker phrases. Rich plays his solo on the snare drum this time, and the whole package has a pristine feeling — every "i" is dotted and every "t" crossed. (Maybe that's part of the problem: no one is willing to make a mistake.) "You're My Baby, You" is an interesting tune along the lines of "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby." Rouse has the only horn solo, and the band sounds just a bit tentative. (They made another take with a vocal by Clark Terry, but neither were issued at the time.)

November 2, 1950

There are three personnel changes for this session — Chaloff, Rouse and Rich were replaced by Basie band veterans, Rudy Rutherford on baritone (hardly any solos but good ensemble work), Wardell Gray and Gus Johnson. None of the material recorded at this session or the following one was issued at the time. "Song of the Islands" is miles removed from the 1939 big band version. The tempo is way up, and the horn solos show little relationship to the piece at hand. As well as DeFranco and Gray play, they seem to string together the same sorts of phrases regardless of the tempo, the tune, or the context. When these recordings are compared to the earlier Basie small group classics, they lack that Basie essence. In fact, you could have taken Basie out and put another first-rate pianist such as Hank Jones in, and the aesthetic would not have changed much. Only Ellington was able to pull off the miracle of maintaining his creativity across the span of his entire career. The first three tunes, all standards, sound like more Hefti arrangements. Rutherford gets a lot of feeling into his three-bar solo towards the end of "I'm Confessin'" and then sits out for Basie's first small-group version of "One O'Clock Jump." The Columbia engineers do an excellent job of capturing Gus Johnson's flowing cymbals (including a couple of choruses on the Chinese cymbal). The band works up a nice head of steam on this one, and the informal riffing brings back some of the early-Basie feeling.

November 3, 1950

"I Ain't Got Nobody" had first made an appearance on the Bad Boys session, and it is interesting to note that Basie uses some of the same piano figures, although they were recorded eleven years apart (and, as it happened, it took decades after recording for either version to see the light of day). "Little White Lies" is taken at a slower-than-usual pace, and Hefti weaves the horns in and out with panache. Basie follows Gray's solo with a lower-register one of his own which lands somewhere between Claude Thornhill and Eddie Duchin, but — and it's a big difference — it swings as only he could. "I'll Remember April" is also played at its original ballad tempo, far from where most jazzmen took it shortly thereafter. There are moments when both the rhythm section and the horn players sound uncomfortable with the chord changes, leading me to believe these arrangements were very possibly being played for the first time at the session. "Tootie" is a reworking of "Boogie-Woogie", and a welcome return to Basie doing his own thing. Freddie Green and the rest of the rhythm section follow right along with all of those swinging quarter notes. Basie's comping gives a sense of form to the horn solos - one little chord here, an off-beat accent there. This is an idiom he helped create, and the band sounds entirely different from the one on the three preceding tunes. It's not just the tempo, it's the language they are speaking.

Count Basie and His Orchestra

March 19, April 5, May 19, and August 4, 1939

It cannot be emphasized too often that most of the material reissued here benefits greatly from being newly transferred to digital tape, quite often from the originally-recorded acetate masters, a recording process that in the 1939 to mid-1940s period encompassing the Basie band's first Columbia work was indeed state-of-the-art. To long-time students of this music, almost every track contains some aural revelation.

The truly admirable restoration work that characterizes this four-CD unit has arrived not a moment to soon. The improvement on these recordings has of course been in evidence on other relatively recent reissues from this and other record companies, but for a long time the picture had not been nearly so bright

One recurring problem with more than a few early jazz reissue LPs was a whole laundry list of physical and technical limitations that faced engineers and producers — deteriorated or missing source material, limited ability to transfer sound accurately and without loss from pre-tape metal parts to analog magnetic tape, primitive noise-reduction and sound-enhancement techniques and equipment. The digital era brought some solutions and some new problems to join the continuing ones; differing individual taste entered the picture, as one man's pleasure at computerized noise reduction came up against another's rejection of the very same process as musically destructive. Transfers to tape were of widely varying quality, with some engineers displaying legendary and intuitive skills in this area and others lagging behind. (More than a few inadequate transfers have, in my opinion, somehow survived into the digital domain without much improvement.)

Of course, what can be extracted sonically from these early recordings can be no greater than what was put there in the first place. Excellent work has been done on this material, and one result is that we can now know that what was recorded in the first place was very possibly even better than we have believed. It is a joy to finally hear "Rock-A-Bye-Basie" so clearly, and with the original fade-out ending finally allowed to play out as recorded. And as you will hear within a session or two, the Vocalion engineers figured out how to get much more of the band's sound on disc.

"Rock-A-Bye Basie" is a head chart, with saxophone riffs contributed by Lester Young and the brass figures by Shad Collins. Dizzy Gillespie, with whom Collins had played in the Teddy Hill band, claimed that Collins had stolen the riff from his piece "The Dizzy Crawl." (Years later, Gillespie was granted partial royalties.) Earle Warren takes the first bridge, and reveals that he had his own style, owing little to either Johnny Hodges or Benny Carter, the reigning alto kings of the era. Buddy Tate makes his first recorded appearance with the band. He had played in an earlier incarnation in 1934, and had just been chosen to replace Herschel Evans. While he was clearly not the improviser Evans had been, Tate's soulful feeling and elemental blues foundation created a perfect contrast to Young's brilliance. Edison's 32 bars are perfectly constructed, coming as they do over the merging of the saxophone riffs and the plunging bass lines that Page and Basie provide.

Helen Humes had the difficult job of replacing Billie Holiday as the band's female vocalist, but in many ways she made for a better fit than Lady Day. Content in her band role and inured to the vicissitudes of life on the road, Humes became "one of the guys," as her fellow band mates put it, in addition to being a surrogate mother when needed. On "One Hour," her sensitive phrasing manages to realize every inference of Henry Creamer's suggestive lyrics and James P. Johnson's melody. Basie loved the way Buck Clayton sounded with a cup-mute, and the sensitive, questioning quality of his playing on the melody of this recording became his trademark during the swing era (there was even a tune called "Cup-Mute Clayton"). We are ushered into the maelstrom of "Taxi War Dance" (based on "Willow Weep For Me") by Basie's rolling left hand piano figures, which set up a motif for all the soloists to react to. There has been no diminution in the Young/Basie alliance since the Jones-Smith session. The pianist's jabbing chords prod the saxophonist's lines, and in the eighth measure, when Basie reverts to the opening motif, Young responds with alacrity, obliterating the figure with a crushing dissonance. Solos like this explain why Young became the despair of anyone foolish enough to tangle with him in a jam session. While most instrumentalists struggle to come up with one individual sound and approach; Young had several that he frequently deployed within the course of one solo. He once described this solo as being among his favorites because of the "foghorn sound" he achieved. And then there's the rhythm: for a textbook example of how to achieve rhythmic variety while swinging, one might try singing along with Young's bridge! He then restores Basie's left-hand figure to its original form, thus inviting the next soloist, Dicky Wells, to alter it as he pleases. Basie went out of his way to find soloists who played with compositional authority. Wells' remarkable solo here has too often been ignored, probably because of its proximity to Young's, but he was a strikingly individual improviser for whom taking huge risks was the norm. Note how he deals with the piano motif in the same place Young did, at the start of his second eight bars, and how the last eight bars lead right back into the band figure. This is big band music of the highest level, because it has room for both the spontaneous and the predetermined. Buddy Tate trades four-bar phrases with the band (Basie takes the bridge) and he repeats the piano motif with a flourish at the end of his chorus. The band figures are underlined by Jones' swirling percussion and a series of cymbal surges that are all the more thrilling because you have to strain to hear them. His bass drum was muffled by the recording engineers but he lets all hell break loose nonetheless during the set-ups surrounding Young's return to trade fours with the band. In musicians' slang, this bass drum technique became known as "dropping bombs," and it is usually considered an element that the next generation of drummers, notably Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, added to the arsenal of jazz percussion. But these recordings (and to an even greater extent the radio broadcasts on Disc 4) show that Jo Jones was a bombardier from way back. While still in his teens, Young was strongly influenced by saxophonists Frankie Trumbauer and Jimmy Dorsey, who had developed a technique called false-fingering — playing the same note with two different fingerings, which creates two sounds. Young made this one of his trademarks, and he uses it here at the end of his trading chorus, sounding very much as if he is saying "what-to-do, what-to-do."

Euday Bowman had written "Twelfth Street Rag" back in 1914; it celebrated a famous Kansas City neighborhood. Its distinctive three against four rhythmic pattern had been raised to exponential heights of rhythmic complexity by Louis Armstrong in his classic 1927 Hot Seven recording. The Basie rhythm section first subjects it to a gentle sort of satire, with Jo Jones using his woodblocks for the accompaniment, then drops the funny stuff in the second chorus. The new transfer used for the present reissue brings out for the first time several details in the rhythm section — Basie's left hand, little strokes that Green adds here and there, many more of Page's actual notes than were ever discernable before. There are also previously under-appreciated horn articulations. Lester enters by paraphrasing one of Basie's famous right hand figures, and then takes off into a two-chorus solo. Earle Warren used to talk about Lester's ability to breathe deeply and to play long phrases when he was young, and you can hear his complete physical control of the horn to good advantage here. There is a telling moment in the eighth measure of his second chorus, when he pauses to breathe so that he can make one of his swooping upward glissandos. Earle also felt that no matter how much Lester's disciples tried to emulate his tone, his sound was sui generis, coming as it did not only from his mouthpiece and horn but also from his head, which formed a chamber when it resonated with the saxophone. What we are really hearing is the man, not just the saxophone.

"Miss Thing" (a Skip Martin original based on the harmonies of "Honeysuckle Rose") is virtually all ensemble, with the solos filling in the spaces. The tempo is brisk, and the soloists sail, with Young again leaving the most exciting shapes in his wake. Buddy Tate has recalled being taken in first by the sounds that came out of Young's horn, and this solo, s quickly as it goes by, is full of these wonderful sounds and rhythms. We can now hear the true dynamic range of the band, and the way they build gradually in volume and intensity. Also newly audible are the right hand figures Basie plays when the band is at full tilt - he was a master of the rare art of spinning counterpoint to ensembles. The band used "Miss Thing" to back a dancer as part of a stage show, and the extended ending, with Edison's trumpet dancing over the rhythm section and culminating in the band's dramatic framing of Jo Jones' whispering drums, must have been something to behold. "Nobody Knows" brings us back to Ellison and his memories of Rushing's voice late at night in Oklahoma City in the '20s.

And how it carried! In those days I lived near the Rock Island roundhouse, where, with a steady clanging of bells and a great groaning of wheels along the rails, switch engines made up trains of freight unceasingly. Yet often in the late-spring night I could hear Rushing as I lay four blocks away in bed, carrying to me as clear as a full-bored riff on "Hot Lips" Page's horn. Heard thus, across the dark blocks lined with locust trees, through the night throbbing with the natural aural imagery of the blues, with high-balling trains, departing bells, lonesome guitar chords simmering up from a shack in the alley, it was easy to imagine the voice as setting the pattern to which the instruments of the Blue Devils Orchestra and all the random sounds of the night arose, affirming, as it were, some ideal native to the time and to the land.

This rural imagery is enhanced by Basie's organ playing and by the plaintive riff Young taught to the sax section, which phrases in perfect unison, right down to the bent notes. Just six years earlier, Young had been barnstorming with King Oliver's band. He was particularly taken by the older man's playing of the blues, and it's not hard while listening to this recording to imagine how Lester might have sounded backing up this early mentor of Louis Armstrong in some roadhouse somewhere in what had recently been known as The Territories. "Pound Cake" (Lester's nickname for Eddie Durham) gives the band a chance to swing the blues. Written by Edison, it is fashioned out of phrases that could easily have all fit into one of his blues choruses. The composer and all four reedmen solo, with Warren and Young finding clever ways to slip in and out of the backgrounds. Jo Jones goes way beyond just keeping time — his subtle accents "comp" just like the piano. "Song of the Islands" finds the recording engineers getting used to the band and becoming more familiar with what belongs in the foreground and what in the background. Jo Jones' hi-hat is right up front in the mix, and they let Lester get that distant sound that was so evocative of his other-worldly style. Playing understated solos such as this in the midst of a big band is what inspired John Lewis's view of Lester as a poet. Thad Jones, star of a later Basie band, first heard them at a dance in Detroit at about this time and reacted quite strongly, as he later told Frank Buchman-Moller, author of a biography of Young (titled You Just Fight for Your Life).

It was like the horn only became a transmitter through which the soul of Lester Young was expressed…when he'd still be up to play I would look around, and people would slow down so they could listen, because everybody realized then, even the people who didn't really pay that close attention to details as far as the music was concerned, everybody seemed to sense that they were witnessing one of the greatest musicians of all time. It was like he was a minister and we were his congregation out there. He was speaking words of wisdom to us, and very prophetic, because, his style, what he was doing then, changed the whole concept of tenor playing…it was like listening to a saxophone with the sound of a flute with that clear just mellow, rich, round sound.

At the time the last two full-band 1939 sides included here were recorded, the band was in the midst of its second summer at the Famous Door. The ensemble cohesion had gone up several notches, and would only improve. "Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie" is what used to be called a "flag-waver." Skip Martin's arrangement is hand-tailored to the band's style and leaves a lot of room for Jo Jones to stretch out. He never covered the band up, no matter how much he played, and it was this sort of transparent playing that led drummer Don Lamond to say that Jo played like the wind. We can now hear all the articulations and the little side phrases that Young used to demonstrate his new concept of time relationships. He is never more composed and serene than at tempos such as this, where most soloists sound harried at best.

March 19 and 20, August 8, 1940

This was a watershed year for the Basie band, as it was for Ellington. The advent of an arranger with a new concept, Andy Gibson, and one of the most brilliant and influential lead trumpets of the period, Al Killian, launched the band in a direction that would eventually lead to the powerhouse Swing Machine of the 1950s. This new approach is abundantly clear throughout Gibson's arrangement of "Tickletoe." Written by Young, it is a variant of Durham's "Topsy," one of the band's 1937 Decca classics. There is a new precision, attributable to Killian's spot-on lead playing. His sound and rhythm seemed to single-handedly raise the technical level of the band several fold. In these new transfers, you can actually hear the snap of his attack against the studio walls. Gibson's arrangement is a no-frills affair, leaving ample room for solos by Tate, Edison, Young (one of his most famous), and the leader. Lester's love for the music of Trumbauer's musical partner Bix Beiderbecke is revealed through his use of eight bars of the cornetist's solo from the Paul Whiteman recording of "When" — the saxophones play it in unison just before the end. Gibson kicks off "Louisiana" with a metrically ambiguous introduction that leads to a Killian high note before the band sets out on this attractive J.C. Johnson tune. Gibson had a knack for combining the brass and saxophone sections in a creative way and passing the melody back and forth between them in unpredictable fashion. Edison, Young (now we truly hear his luminous tone) and Basie solo and are followed by a new voice — the witty and slyly virtuosic trombonist Vic Dickenson, who recorded a handful of classic solos during his year in the band. It is Killian who comes back to nail the high-note ending. The band was certainly on a roll in the spring of 1940, for the very next day they recorded "Easy Does It," Sy Oliver-Trummy Young original that is one of the definitive Basie classics. The rhythm section introduces the idea in the melody, leaving its exposition to the band. This is one of the few studio recordings featuring full-chorus solos from both Clayton and Edison, but the centerpiece is Young's, which begins with a four bar break. As Buddy Tate told Richard M. Sudhalter: "That modulation, he did it right off the top of his head, completely unrehearsed. He made it sound as if it had been written. He upset everybody in the band. We couldn't wait for the thing to be over, just to ask him, 'Hey, how did you think of that?' He was real cool, just said something like 'Aw, that's just one of those things that come to me sometime.' I guess that's part of what makes him great."

"Somebody Stole My Gal" hearkens back to a 1930 Moten recording that featured baritone saxophonist Jack Washington and a scat vocal by Basie himself. But what makes this version astounding is its sheer spontaneity. Done at the end of a session, it has all the hallmarks of an impromptu jam. Careful listening reveals that Washington makes a false entrance during the piano introduction; he then starts to play the melody, but quickly abandons it when he hears Edison come in with the lead. He keeps playing behind Rushing's vocal and then goes right into his solo. Washington was a consummate pro, so it's fair to guess that there must have been nothing planned beyond settling on a key and stomping it off. What other name bandleader would have dared to record something so spontaneous? It was Basie's confidence in his musicians' ability to improvise, and his decision to feature that ability as a key element of their style, that made the 1937-1940 band one of the great ensembles in the history of jazz. There is a wonderful moment during the second eight bars of the baritone solo when Basie intrudes with a figure. Washington stops, digests it, and carries on unperturbed. Eddie Durham and Ed Lewis, who was the lead trumpeter before Killian, liked to recall how, during the band's early days Basie would unleash Washington on Young and Herschel Evans if they got too carried away. Basie alters his accompaniment with high-register plinks when Edison enters. What began as a background morphs into a dialogue with the trumpet — you can almost hear Edison think as he makes way for Basie halfway though the out-chorus. "I Want A Little Girl" had been immortalized by Clayton, Young and Durham in their classic 1938 Kansas City Six session, and in this full band version Clayton plays an abridged eight bars before Rushing's vocal. Ellison's comment about the vocalist's ability to bring the blues to bear on everything he sang surely rings true here. Basie plays some fast runs during his brief solo, making the out-of-tune piano sound better than it had any right to.

November 19 and December 13, 1940

As the band became stronger, it was able to play arrangements that just a year earlier would have left them flummoxed. They tackle Don Redman's dazzling reworking of "Five O'Clock Whistle" with élan. This is a wonderful example of a great arranger pulling out all the stops to create a masterpiece with what in lesser hands would be overwriting. All three horn sections are given a chance to strut their stuff, but it is the passages when the whole band is playing (with Killian's sparkling lead) that are the most thrilling. Columbia's engineers were now making tremendous strides in capturing the true sound of the band. This session turned out to be Young's swan song. He is in absolutely top form, but the sad truth is that from this point everything was downhill for him. He left the band the following month expecting the same kind of solo career that his only peer on the tenor saxophone, Coleman Hawkins, was having, but he was far too sensitive a soul to weather the tough music world alone. Sweets Edison's brief solo on this number recalls the comment by Dicky Wells that the trumpeter could "make your insides dance" when he fanned his trumpet with a derby as he does here. Jo Jones had considered the arranger/composer Henri Woode one of his inspirations when they were both with Lloyd Hunter's band back in the early 1930s. No wonder he plays so wonderfully throughout Woode's "Broadway." Like Sonny Greer with Ellington, Jones created a spontaneous counterpoint to the band — what the Duke described as the pong to the band's ping. Edison and Lester are again the soloists, and if there is one Young solo with Basie that encapsulates all he brought to the band, this might very well be it. The relaxed stance, the sheer elegance of the melodies, the velvet tone and flowing rhythm all united in an ascending and descending arc reveals Young to be as much a master of the line as Matisse. With his departure, the band lost the individual voice of a true genius, and things would never again be the same. The old spontaneity and sense of discovery the Basie band had exhibited when they came from Kansas City would eventually vanish as their technical polish increased. But there were several years left and many, many highlights to come. They could still be galvanized by the advent of a great player, as Shadow Wilson and Illinois Jacquet would prove. "It's the Same Old South" is notable for a few things: a superior melody played in true Armstrong fashion by Clayton, a lovely arrangement, and lyrics that still stagger for their sheer audacity in confronting the more sinister aspects of the Southern experience. Amazingly, not only did Columbia issue the record with no internal problems, but no public outcry or even a mention of boycott ensued. Basie signifies by inserting a snatch of "Swanee River" between the two Rushing vocals.

January 28, April 10, and November 17, 1941

Basie's talents as a music editor were legendary, and one can have only sympathy for Dudley Brooks, whose chart on Ed Lewis's catchy "Jump the Blues Away" was cut to the bone. What resulted, however was a superb performance that served to introduces Young's replacement, the swashbuckling Don Byas, as the band's featured tenor soloist. Also heard are Edison, a brief melody solo by the composer, and at the end, Wells. There was another new saxophonist present, altoist Tab Smith, who had deputized for Warren briefly in 1940, and was courted back into the band when the decision was made to expand to a five-man reed section. His tricky articulation and occasionally glib style is featured on his original, "The Jitters," which is based on "I Found A New Baby." Edison, Washington and Byas split a chorus that leads into a break by Jones.

Earle Warren had written "9:20 Special" as a tribute to a favorite radio station, but the record company somehow inserted a colon into the title, leading to the incorrect assumption that it was named for a train. However, the big news on this number is the tenor solo, a guest appearance by none other than Coleman Hawkins, filling what only a few months earlier had been Lester Young's spot with melodic brilliance and chugging rhythms. Next up are three classic blues, beginning with "Goin' To Chicago." It's clear that this was a head arrangement, as we hear the saxophone section still fishing for their notes. This sort of on-the-spot composition was Page's great legacy to the band, but it didn't have the patina of perfection demanded of top bands at the time. It never happened again on a Basie band recording session. Clayton plays the classic opening chorus, setting the stage for Rushing, for whom this became almost a theme song. In contrast, "Harvard Blues" is perfectly sculpted. Don Byas plays one of his best recorded solos: two svelte blues choruses that are a tune in and of themselves. The lyrics by George Frazier, an early jazz critic and Harvard graduate, include references that without outside help would stop most of us in our tracks. Research reveals that "Rinehart" was one James B.G. Rinehart '00, who was frequently paged by a friend shouting his name from the courtyard outside his dormitory window. On one occasion, it is claimed, dozens of fellow students spontaneously chimed in, and out of all this evolved the myth of a lonely undergraduate who shouted his own name on campus so others would think he was sought-after. "Vinson" was an exclusive Boston club, whose female members were high up on the social ladder.

January 21 and July 27, 1942

This is Basie's second version his theme song, the "One O'Clock Jump". Having by this time been played literally thousands of times, it cannot be expected to have retained its original dewy freshness. But, well known as this idiom has become, it must be remembered that this is specifically the band that created it. The soloists are: Tate, trombonist Eli Robinson, Byas and Clayton. The Clayton arrangement of "It's Sand, Man" which follows is a perfect example of his lean and functional approach to orchestration. There are reflections of the new happenings in the jazz world — the trumpet riffs that lead to Edison's brief solo in the second chorus sound quite Gillespie-like, and there are a series of whole-tone harmonies in the interlude that sets up Tate's solo. Basie's own fills in the closing chorus retain a fresh feeling; they have not descended into cliché. "Ain't It the Truth" is a masterpiece from the pen of Buster Harding; every phrase has an interesting voicing or harmonic turn, and the soloists respond in kind. Wells was a master of this subtle art: his bridge, though it sounds quite off-hand, stems right out of the band figures. Harding's arrangements for this edition of the band clearly inspired many who were to write for it in the '50s. In many ways the early 1940s was a pivotal period in the evolution of the band, with this type of writing replacing the free-floating solos and home-made ensembles that had characterized the preceding era.

December 6, 1944

World War II was in full swing, and both Jo Jones and Lester Young (who had rejoined after a frustrating three year attempt at band leading) were drafted in September, 1944, during an extended West Coast sojourn by the band. Their places were taken by Shadow Wilson, who had already subbed for Jones earlier in the year, and Lucky Thompson, only 20 years old at the time but who (as they used to say) had an old soul. Wilson was a tremendously influential drummer, having played in the 1943 Earl Hines band that included Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan. Like Davey Tough, he was a small man who somehow managed to levitate a full-sized big band with ease. Wilson tuned his drums to a much deeper and darker tonality than Jones, had a wide beat (Elvin Jones was mentored by Wilson), and at times played in an explosive manner. "Taps Miller" has many moments when he makes his presence felt, employing a great variety of effects: stomping, on-the-beat bass drum accents, cymbal splashes, flowing ride cymbal work, snare drum rolls and hits and a nice kick into Edison's solo. We also hear from alto saxophonist Jimmy Powell, whose solos were eminently logical if not the most spontaneous, and both tenors. Wells again fits right into the tapestry - compare his solo with the others, which, good as they are, are not specifically related to the composition. Walter Page had been out of the band since the summer of 1943; the strong bass work here is by a New Orleans native, Rodney Richardson. This was recorded at the band's first studio session following the end of a recording ban (caused by a long, stubborn and bitter dispute between the musician's union - the American Federation of Musicians — and the record companies) that for Columbia Records had lasted almost two and a half years. On this occasion and for some time to come, the company's engineers again seem to be having trouble relating to the band, and the overall recording quality is notably inferior to the full sound that had been achieved in the period leading up to mid-1942, when the studios went dark.

February 6 and October 9, 1945

Clayton's "Avenue C" provided riffs for several years' worth of big band charts subsequently recorded by the Woody Herman, Charlie Barnet and Elliot Lawrence bands. Arrangers like Johnny Mandel, Neal Hefti, and Al Cohn were unabashed in their love for this particular Basie style and used it prolifically. The featured soloists on this occasion are Basie, Tate, Edison, Thompson and Wilson — who boots the hell out of the band. Jimmy Mundy wrote the arrangements of Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" and his own "Queer Street." His writing had evolved significantly since his work for Hines and Goodman in the 1930s. There are few moments in these arrangements where the band is not playing loudly, and all of the points he makes seem to be followed by exclamation points. The harmonic language is quite contemporary, as is the sheer boldness of the concept. On "Blue Skies," it's interesting to hear Rushing in a context so far removed from the almost rural settings in which he had started. "Queer Street" is queer — both the form and the textures keep shifting. Basie gets to play a couple of blues choruses; Edison sounds a bit stymied by the harmonies during his 32 bar solo, and then Tate plays before the record's most famous moment - a stupendous double-time break by Wilson that immediately became part of the lingua franca of jazz drums. In his autobiography Good Vibes, Terry Gibbs remembers the break tormenting Buddy Rich night after night a few years later, as he unsuccessfully kept trying to top it. Contemporary drummers such as Kenny Washington still find inspiration in the freedom with which Wilson plays on these recordings, and in the confidence it took to establish a new identity in a band that had already had an innovative drummer.

February 4 and July 31, 1946

"Lazy Lady Blues" heralds a welcome return to a quintessentially laid-back Basie blues. It also marks the return of Jo Jones to the band. The featured trombonist is Big George Matthews, one of a whole generation of first-rate section men who could improvise well, and his solo along with the rest of his simple blues serves as a tonic after all the "ambitious" music that preceded it. The 22 year old trombonist J.J. Johnson was also on hand. Like Thad Jones a devotee of the Basie band and specifically of Lester Young, Johnson had honed his playing and writing skills while in Benny Carter's band, but "Rambo" is the only arrangement of his recorded by Basie. His solo is thoroughly contemporary for 1946 and typical of his work at this time — taken verbatim out of the Parker/Gillespie book, while the piece itself is conservative by any standard. The real highlight of this session is probably the introduction of tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, a Texan inspired by both Evans and Young who had arrived at a personal synthesis of their styles. Like Johnson, he also listened closely to Parker (in fact, he had started on alto sax) but always kept his feet planted firmly in the swing world. His recorded solos with Basie reveal his maturity, while in person and on many early Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts he squealed and honked at the drop of a hat, whipping the audience into a frenzy. Though there are hints of this exhibitionistic side on a few of his Basie recordings, I like to think that he thought of this setting as too sacred to turn into a circus. Jacquet is at his very best on "The King," which is a free adaptation of "Jumpin' at the Woodside." We also hear from Johnson and the pungent-toned trumpeter Emmett Berry, who was in the band for five years, and remains one of the most under-recognized of the great swing trumpeters. Jack Washington and Walter Page both came back to the band in the summer of 1946, and the bassist's presence is a major factor in the new lift we hear throughout "Hob Nail Boogie," a Buster Harding original. Page made the whole band bounce, and while he may not have been as technically adept as his replacements, from a conceptual standpoint he was way ahead of them all. It no longer feels merely like guitar/bass/drums playing at the same time, but as one organic unit. Listen to how Freddie Green places his notes within the bass line, and visa versa. The very fast "Mutton Leg" is a variant on "Every Tub," which features Jacquet with, for him at the time, a very tasteful squealing section. Others soloists here are Tate, clarinetist Rudy Rutherford, and Berry. The final spotlight on Jacquet (with a good bit of Ben Webster creeping into his playing) occurs on Tadd Dameron's "Stay on It." This number is actually more readily associated with Gillepsie's big band, which would record it a year later - but with this rhythm section and these soloists, t doesn't retain much of its "bop" profile. Edison is the trumpet soloist.

April 10, 1951

These were the first big band recordings Basie made after breaking down to a small band in January 1950. At the time of this session, he had just done a week with a full band at the Apollo Theater, and the success of that engagement and the quality of these recordings created the momentum to put the big band back to work. Both "Little Pony," a Neal Hefti original, and "Beaver Junction," composed by Edison and arranged in 1944 by Buster Harding, point the way towards for the Basie band of the 1950s. The soloists are Wardell Gray on the former, trumpeter Clark Terry and the leader on the latter. Both horn men had been in the 1948 Basie big band, and were a natural pair, as the 1950 Octet items display. But although their work is unvaryingly first-rate, the small-group essence of the original Basie band has now been lost, never to return.

In a sense, this was a good thing, because the new band was the Swing Machine, and that descriptive name is certainly a double-edged weapon. The at-times overly mechanistic power it provided is what led to Basie's tremendous resurgence in the mid-'50s via hits like "April in Paris." But the reverse side — the way the original spontaneity had been taken out of the band — was summed up brilliantly in a quote Billy Taylor gave to Nat Hentoff in the late 1950s, which appears in the best chapter currently in print on the subject of Count Basie. It's in Hentoff's book, The Jazz Life. "One night at Newport," Taylor said, "I saw Bill off to one side, listening intently to a modern small combo. He was listening wistfully, it seemed to me. The group was pretty adventurous. Somebody interrupted Bill, and suddenly he was Count Basie again - the smile, the detachment. I just don't think he's as happy musically as he mostly convinces himself he is. There was more he wanted to do, but a while back he decided to play it safe."

Count Basie and His Orchestra

THE BROADCASTS — 1939-41

July 15, 1939 (Broadcast)

These broadcasts perfectly complement the famous studio recordings. Here is the band as it sounded on the job. As you delve into the first broadcast, it should not be too hard to imagine that you are in New York City, in the tiny room on West Fifty Second Street called the Famous Door. In the summer of 1938, Basie's management had helped the club acquire air-conditioning in exchange for the booking. The engagement was a smash, and the buzz it generated (there were frequent broadcasts) established the band as a comer. Their return the following summer was equally impressive, and we can now hear them in a BBC series called America Dances. The first thing that becomes clear is that Lester Young literally plays like a one-man band, in that he frequently makes no attempt to blend into either the saxophone section or the band. He creates a spontaneous counterpoint at will, sometimes by virtue of the notes he plays, or by adding phrases to what is already being played, or merely by his sound — playing the same part as everyone else but making it stand out nonetheless. For a musician at his level of professional skill, this is an extreme act. Some players simply don't have the ability to blend with a band; Young could when he wanted to, as we hear on the studio recordings. The second relates to the comment Basie made late in life to Artie Shaw, that of all the musicians he had hired over the years, only two "lost" the band when they played: Lester Young and Thad Jones. Each man's solos created its own context, and the feeling was tangible to Basie when it happened. On this broadcast, Young's playing is charged with an intensity that at times does indeed overwhelm the specific setting. There are also many heretofore unknown phrases, articulations, sounds and devices to be heard, reinforcing the impression that a large part of Young's musical language was never documented. There are recordings in later years that provide him with a chance to play at length, but unfortunately none during this, his greatest period. Thus every solo here contains reflections of what was lost to the ages. With a lesser artist, this sort of obsessive tracing of what remained unexpressed might seem ill-advised, but certainly not for this musician or this band, for this was their zenith.

Here are some informal riffs on Basie's riffs:

"One O'Clock Jump" — A brief statement of the theme to open the broadcast, with Lester already going his own way as soon as the announcer says "BBC." The fact that the rest of the saxophones do not follow him means that he was not setting a new riff for them but commenting on the proceedings from his own bully pulpit.

"Swingin' the Blues" was written by Eddie Durham for the Basie-Webb battle of the bands that took place at the Savoy Ballroom on January 16, 1938, which was also the night of Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert. The Decca recording made shortly thereafter was greatly abridged, so it is a revelation to hear the band tear into it as they did night after night . Frankly, there is some sloppiness in the brass section (as previously noted, this would disappear when Killian joined the band), but maybe this was the price Basie had to pay to keep things this loose. Young's solo was relatively "set" (he plays the same shapes on other broadcast versions) and is at least as well composed as the backgrounds Durham provided. Of special interest is the high wailing note in the second chorus — this was a device King Oliver had used on "Dippermouth Blues," his most famous recorded solo. Young is preceded by a short volley from Bennie Morton, and followed by Clayton, Tate, Edison, and finally Jones (in two-bar exchanges with the band's quotes from Armstrong's famous "St. Louis Blues" solo).

"Rock-A-Bye Basie" — Very close to the Vocalion recording; the rhythm section as a unit functions on an equal plane with the horns. Solos: Warren, Tate, Edison.

"Don't Worry 'Bout Me" — Helen Humes does a good job with this challenging piece which she had recorded earlier in the year, backed by some equally vocal counterpoint from Young. He also plays a brief solo, starting with a phrase that is as notable for its notes as for its sound.

"Time Out" — initially recorded for Decca in 1937. Durham took an introduction from his earlier arrangement of "Pigeon Walk" for Jimmie Lunceford, and used it for this composition, a variant of Edgar Sampson's "Blue Lou." What follows is unusual in that there is no initial theme, just an improvised Young solo containing some of his most idiosyncratic phrases, which continue to boggle the mind. Most improvisers favor phrases that "fall under the fingers" - Young's fingers were clearly informed by a brain that did not limit itself to what others had done. What we are hearing is the reinvention of an instrument. Durham uses the intro as an idée fixe throughout the piece, with Young commenting over it the first and last times. The trumpet solo is by Clayton.

"Boogie Woogie Blues" — Adapted from the Jones-Smith date, this lets us hear what Rushing sounded like singing in a nightclub. His projection is almost operatic, as is his diction. Basie's piano solo is notable for its quiet intensity and the unusual tom-tom backing from Jo Jones. They seem to be channeling Kansas City right into the center of Manhattan on this one.

"Roseland Shuffle" — Another Jones-Smith adaptation, this starts with "Shoe Shine Boy" taken at a very fast tempo. It features an opening chorus by Basie with Young taking the bridge, and then two choruses where they trade fours. Basie plays with great metric freedom, and each of Young's ripostes starts with a wonderful sound and shape, many of which vanished from his playing within the next few years.

"White Sails" — A nondescript pop tune rescued by a buoyant Humes vocal, some faint obbligati from Young and the band's inexorable rhythmic drive.

"Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie" — Another chance to hear a complete arrangement that had been edited for 78 issue. Here it was a chorus by Tate that had been omitted. Young displays his sense of humor in his second chorus by double-fingering the bridge and then babbling in true Dadaist fashion towards the end.

"One O'Clock Jump" is closer in style to the original Decca made two years earlier than to the 1942 remake included in this set. The band was still not the least bit self-conscious about letting the seams of an improvised performance show, and that's where the magic comes from. Lester plays some pretty riff variations followed towards the end by a brief Dicky Wells solo (engaging along the way in a conversation with Jo Jones) that adds greatly to our appreciation of what the band sounded like.

June 30, 1937 (Broadcast)

Although Billie Holiday sang with the band for a year, they never recorded together, due to her contract with a rival recording company. Luckily, John Hammond preserved a couple of airchecks that give us the only examples of this magical union. She would record all three of these tunes as part of her classic small group series, but hearing Holiday sing them in this more formal setting is instructive. It's one thing to hear her in hand-picked company on a featured record date, and another to see how she fit into the well-defined "band singer" mode of the day. Her individuality becomes even more tangible. If you can find the contemporary recordings of "They Can't Take That Away From Me" (originally sung by Fred Astaire to Ginger Rogers) and "I Can't Get Started" (introduced by Bob Hope and Eve Arden), you will be able to properly appreciate just how far out Holiday's concept was at the time. Although based on Armstrong's innovations, Holiday's stark disdain for any commercial sheen was challenging. There is a Clayton solo as well as a brief obbligato by Herschel Evans on the first number, while the second features the soon-to-be legendary sound of Lester Young creating pure counterpoint as he croons the melody behind Holiday.

As a song, "Swing, Brother, Swing" is strictly a period piece, but Holiday's phrasing and time, with the band surging beneath her, turn it into a masterpiece.

June 5, 1939 (Broadcast)

This originated at the Panther Room of the Hotel Sherman in Chicago. "Moten Swing" had been written by Basie and Durham, though composer credit was usurped by Bennie Moten and his nephew, Bus. It had earlier been a feature for Young, but here showcases the 23 year-old Edison in the process of defining himself as one of the most immediately identifiable soloists in jazz. His dozen quarter-notes in a row are at once a tribute to his roots in Armstrong's style and his own declaration of stylistic independence. Had he played this solo on an issued recording, it would have been one of his career highlights. I believe it is Young (who had given Edison his nickname), who shouts "Sweets" eight measures into the second chorus.

February 20, 1940 (Broadcast)

This is the band at the Southland in Boston shortly after Killian and Dickinson joined, and the ensemble work is notably improved. In addition, the source material and original balance is far superior to the preceding broadcasts. Only the Rushing blues was ever recorded commercially by the band. "Ebony Rhapsody" was introduced by Ellington's band in the 1934 film Murder at the Vanities, and is based on Lizst's "Hungarian Rhapsody". This Don Redman arrangement is more ornate than their usual bill of fare, but the band, with its newfound ensemble skills, sounds as though they enjoyed the challenge. Solos: Wells, Young, Edison (who anticipates the bridge of Ray Nance's famous "Take the 'A' Train" solo, recorded almost exactly one year later), Young.

"Darn That Dream" was a superior pop tune, presented here in a less than distinguished arrangement, although Humes handles the advanced melody with aplomb. It is a shame that she didn't get to record more songs of this quality with this band, but the music of Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers didn't fit the niche the band's producers chose to emphasize. Sonny Rollins has wondered out loud on more than one occasion as to which planet Lester Young came from, and the way he drops in behind this Humes vocal is truly other-worldly. The melody trumpet solo is probably by Ed Lewis, and Young returns to bat clean-up.

"Take It, Pres" is a head arrangement based on "I Never Knew" and "Rosetta," and features Basie, Young and Edison. The solos are all superlative, the forward motion of the rhythm section (recorded extraordinarily well for a broadcast) is unstoppable, and the band pulls off an exquisitely paced crescendo over the last choruses. This broadcast catches Jo Jones at his very best as he paces everything, while keeping his drum sound transparent — you can always hear the band through whatever he does.

"Baby, Don't Tell On Me" is another head chart that brings Rushing back to the helm, backed by Buddy Tate and Dicky Wells. The outchoruses have some humorous touches as Lester, Tate and Basie kick a riff around.

"I Got Rhythm" has some special moments, beginning as it does with Lester taking a handful of breaks before the band comes in with the famous melody. Young actually sounds vaguely out-of-sorts on this broadcast, but certainly any Young from this period is worth cherishing. Edison and Dickinson (in rare form) follow before Lester literally leaps in with an upward gambol. The two bridges are each noteworthy. The first is shared with the leader, while the second finds Young reacting to Killian's brilliant high D with a phase that is an anomaly and the only one I have ever heard come out of Young's horn that could be called awkward. But the climbing scale steps that he dances over after that are the essence of grace, and then our attention is drawn to the spectacle of the band briefly in confusion as the broadcast ends. The announcer begins to close up shop while Lester is still soloing and the band doesn't really know how it should come back in, although if you listen carefully, someone takes a stab at it before reverting to silence. Lester is still noodling beautifully as the band goes off the air.

September and October, 1941 (Broadcasts)

An extended engagement at Barney Josephson's racially integrated Café Society Uptown gave the band extensive radio coverage in the fall of 1941, and in turn, the radio engineers had plenty of opportunities to fine tune the band's balance. "9:20 Special" is very similar to the recorded version, except of course that Byas is now the tenor soloist. (There is also a 1944 transcription on which Young plays a classic solo on the same chart.) The other solos are by Basie and Edison.

"Elmer's Tune" was a big vocal hit for Glenn Miller's band, and it is a hoot to hear Basie cover it. The arrangement is spare but well constructed (note the sound of the two baritone saxophones — the second is an infrequent double by Earle Warren) as the band somehow manages to make this sound like a pure piece of Basie-ana.

"Jumpin' at the Woodside" follows the original version through the Basie, Warren and Clayton solos, until Don Byas breaks out into an inspired adventure that moves away from the Basie oeuvre into the kind of music the tenor saxophonist was playing during his early-morning sessions in Harlem with Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Kenny Clarke. You can almost hear the sound of the gears clashing as he weaves more and more chromaticism into the solo. It's not that the playing isn't creative and original; it's just that it takes the performance out of its original Lester Young context, and so perhaps can serve as a closing reminder as to just how vital that context was to the creation of this music.

— LOREN SCHOENBERG

[Early in his career Loren Schoenberg played saxophone with Eddie Durham, Jo Jones, Buddy Tate, Buck Clayton, Sweets Edison and Earle Warren. He is now the Executive Director of The Jazz Museum in Harlem]