Jazz podcast: Count Basie and The Mills Brothers
January 13th, 2008 | by Tom |About Count Basie
b. William Basie was born on August 21 1904 in Red Bank, New Jersey USA and died on April 26 1984. As a bandleader and pianist, Count Basie grew up in Red Bank, just across the Hudson River from New York City. His mother gave him his first lessons at the piano, and he used every opportunity to hear the celebrated kings of New York keyboard - James P. Johnson, Willie “The Lion” Smith and especially Fats Waller. Ragtime was all the rage, and these keyword professors ransacked the European tradition to achieve ever more spectacular improvisations.
Young Basie listening to Fats Waller…
The young Basie listened to Fats Waller playing the organ in Harlem’s Lincoln Theater and received tuition from him. Owing to the “laisser-faire” administration of Democrat leader Tom Pendergast, musicians could easily find work, and jazz blossomed alongside gambling and prostitution.
Basie played to silent movies for a while, then in 1928 joined Walter Page’s Blue Devils, starting a 20-year-long association with the bassist. When the Blue Devils broke up, Basie joined Bennie Moten, then, in 1935 started his own band at the Reno Club and quickly lured Moten’s best musicians into its ranks. Basie’s feel for swing honed the band into quite simply the most classy and propulsive unit in the history of music. Duke Ellington’s band may have been more ambitious, but for sheer unstoppable swing Basie could not be beaten.
Big band with Count Basie!
Throughout the 40’s the Count Basie band provided dancers with conductive rhythms and jazz fans with astonishing solos. On vocals Basie used Jimmy Rushing for the blues material and Helen Humes for pop and novelty numbers. Economic necessity pared down the Basie band to seven members at the start of the 50’s, but otherwise Basie maintained a big band right through to his death in 1984.
A nice example of true Big Band is the record of Count Basie and The Mills Brothers.
Count Basie and the Mills Brothers tracklist:
FACE A
- Lazy river
- I may be wrong
- Release me
- I want to be happy
- Down down down
- The whiffenpoof song
FACE B
- I dig rock and roll music
- Tiny bubbles
- December
- Let me dream
- April in Paris
Tags: count basie, jazz albums, the mills brothers