(b Red Bank, NJ, 21 Aug 1904; d Hollywood, CA, 26 April 1984). American jazz bandleader and pianist. He was a leading figure of the swing era in jazz and, alongside Duke Ellington, an outstanding representative of big-band style.
After studying the piano with his mother, as a young man he went to New York, where he met James P. Johnson, Fats Waller (with whom he studied informally) and other black pianists of the Harlem stride school. Before he was 20 he toured extensively on the Keith and Theatre Owners' Booking Association vaudeville circuits as a solo pianist, accompanist and musical director for blues singers, dancers and comedians, an early training which was to prove significant in his later career. From 1923 to 1926 he performed with various bands in New York. Stranded in Kansas City in 1927 while accompanying a touring group, he remained there, playing in silent-film theatres. In July 1928 he joined Walter Page's Blue Devils which, in addition to Page, included Jimmy Rushing; both later figured prominently in Basie's own band. Basie left the Blue Devils early in 1929; later that year he joined Benny Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, as did the other key members of the Blue Devils shortly afterwards. He led members of Moten's band, independent of Moten, from 1933 to 1935, then rejoined Moten. When Moten died suddenly in 1935, the band continued under Buster Moten, but Basie left soon thereafter. The same year, with Buster Smith and several other former members of Moten's orchestra, Basie organized a new, smaller group of nine musicians, which included Jo Jones and later Lester Young; as the Barons of Rhythm it began a long engagement at the Reno Club in Kansas City. The group's radio broadcasts led in 1936 to contracts with a national booking agency and the Decca Record Company; it expanded and within a year the Count Basie Orchestra, as it had become known, was one of the leading big bands of the swing era. By the end of the 1930s the band had acquired international fame with such pieces as One o'Clock Jump (1937, Decca), Jumpin' at the Woodside (1938, Decca) and Taxi War Dance (1939, Voc.), but gradual recourse to written arrangements began to lead it towards stylization and conformity, and to subdue its personality to the personalities of its arrangers.
In 1950 financial considerations forced Basie to disband, and for the next two years he led a six- to nine-piece group. After reorganizing a big band in 1952, he undertook a long series of tours and recording sessions that eventually led to his becoming an elder statesman of jazz, while his band was established as a permanent jazz institution and training ground for young musicians. He made the first of many tours of Europe in 1954, visited Japan in 1963, and issued a large number of recordings both under his own name and under the leadership of various singers, most notably Frank Sinatra. In the mid-1970s a serious illness hampered his career, and in the 1980s he sometimes had to perform from a wheelchair; he devoted time increasingly to his autobiography. After Basie's death, the band continued under the direction of Thad Jones (1985–6) and Frank Foster (from 1986).
Like all bands in the Kansas City tradition, the Count Basie Orchestra was organized about its rhythm section, which supported the interplay of brass and reeds and served as a backdrop for the unfolding of solos. Using an elliptical style of melodic leads and cues, Basie was able to control his band firmly from the keyboard while blending perfectly with his rhythm section. This celebrated group, consisting of Basie, Page, Jones and, from 1937, Freddie Green, altered the ideal of jazz accompaniment, making it more supple and responsive to the wind instruments and helping to establish four-beat jazz (with four almost identically stressed beats to a bar) as the norm for jazz performance. Of particularly far-reaching significance was Jones's technique of placing the constant pulse on the hi-hat cymbal instead of the bass drum, thereby immeasurably lightening the timbre of jazz drumming. Another important factor was the accuracy and solidity of Page's walking bass technique, which obviated the need for left-hand patterns in the piano and imparted a buoyant swing to the ensemble. Basie's rhythm section was supreme in its day, and its innovations served as models for the even more spare and flexible rhythm sections of the bop school.
During the band's heyday in the late 1930s Basie preferred light, readily expandable arrangements which were particularly notable for their use of riffs, a legacy of the Moten band and of Southwest ensemble jazz generally. Ex.1 shows a typical riff pattern, which might easily have been developed in rehearsal and played from memory. This simple approach to ensemble accompaniment, which contrasts with the more elaborate group writing of Duke Ellington, Don Redman and Sy Oliver, gave full freedom to Basie's outstanding soloists. These included the trumpeters Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison and Buck Clayton, the trombonists Dicky Wells and Benny Morton, the singer Jimmy Rushing, and two excellent tenor saxophonists, Herschel Evans and Lester Young, whose widely differing styles and artistic personalities gave added breadth and tension to the group's performances. All of these soloists are prominently featured on the band's recordings between 1937 and 1941. Basie also recorded masterpieces with his band's rhythm section and soloists (notably Young), for example, Lady Be Good(1936, Voc.) and Lester Leaps in (1939, Voc.).
In his bands of the 1950s and 60s Basie retained his swing-style rhythm section but chose soloists with more modern learnings, particularly the trumpeter Thad Jones and the saxophonists Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, Frank Foster and Frank Wess. Although the band's sound tended to change with its current arrangers (most notably Neal Hefti, Benny Carter, Quincy Jones and Thad Jones), it was unequalled for its relaxed precision and control of dynamics, as may be heard on the album April in Paris (1955–6, Verve). Basie's later bands, though musically less satisfying, never lost their large popular following. In the end, the Count Basie Orchestra proved the most long-lived and enduring in jazz.
Basie's eminence as a bandleader tended to overshadow his considerable achievements as a jazz pianist. Early recordings with Moten, such as the introduction to Moten Swing (1932, Vic.), reveal his mastery of the ragtime and stride idioms. By the mid-1930s, however, Basie had adopted a highly personal, laconic, blues-orientated style, compounded of short melodic phrases – often nothing more than jazz clichés – expertly placed and accented with wit and ingenuity. These seemingly fragmentary and disjunct solos, of which ex.2 is typical, were nevertheless capable of generating great forward momentum and cumulative energy, and of leading in the next soloist, a gift for which Basie was justly famed. Although sometimes wrongly attributed to laziness, Basie's ‘minimal’ style, with its avoidance of the ornate mannerisms to which other pianists of the time were prone, was in fact deliberately abstracted from the more elaborate jazz piano styles of his day to meet the demands of large-ensemble improvisation. It was of seminal importance to John Lewis and the cool pianists of the West Coast school in the early 1950s. Jazz pianists as diverse as Oscar Peterson and Mary Lou Williams have freely acknowledged their debt to Basie.
B. Harding: Count Basie's Boogie Woogie Styles (New York, 1944)
J. Hammond: ‘Count Basie Marks 20th Anniversary’, Down Beat, xxii/22 (1955), 11–12; repr. in Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz, ed. E. Condon and R. Gehman (New York, 1956/R), 266–73
R. Horricks: Count Basie and his Orchestra: its Music and its Musicians (London, 1957)
N. Shapiro: ‘William “Count” Basie’, The Jazz Makers, ed. N. Shapiro and N. Hentoff (New York, 1957/R), 232–43
E. Towler: ‘Vintage Basie’, Jazz Monthly, iii/6 (1957), 2
N. Hentoff: ‘Count Basie’, The Jazz Life (New York, 1961/R), 143–56
B. Schiozzi: Count Basie (Milan, 1961)
R. Russell: Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest (Berkeley, 1971/R, 2/1973)
A. McCarthy: Big Band Jazz (London, 1974)
S. Dance: The World of Count Basie (New York, 1980) [collection of previously pubd interviews]
A. Morgan: Count Basie (Tunbridge Wells, 1984)
C. Basie and A.Murray: Good Morning Blues: the Autobiography of Count Basie (New York, 1985)
B. Clayton and N.M. Elliott: Buck Clayton's Jazz World (London, 1986)
C. Sheridan: Count Basie: a Bio-discography (Westport, CT, 1986)
G. Schuller: ‘The Quintessence of Swing: Count Basie’, The Swing Era: the Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York, 1989), 222–62
Oral history material in US-KCm and US-NEij
J. BRADFORD ROBINSON