The History of Jazz (34 page)

This new sense of time was accompanied by a shift in the nature of the rhythm section, a rejuvenescence that reached its fullest realization in the Count Basie band of the mid and late 1930s. Gliding over the powerful 4/4 bass lines of Walter Page, drummer Jo Jones was able to adopt a more open sound, relying less on the insistent pulsations of the bass drum, so prominent in the work of earlier jazz percussionists, instead employing his high hat as the primal heartbeat of the band. The result was a less staccato sound, a more continuous pulse, a shimmering layer of percussion. Time was now a cresting wave, fluid in its motion, rather than the steady, inevitable ticking of a clock. In this context, the role of the piano also changed,
needed
to change. Instead of evoking the ground rhythm with a steady four-to-a-bar stride, the keyboard now offered accents, fills, and asides, became one partner in a conversation, not a long-winded orator declaiming first principles. No one filled this new role— that of the “comping” pianist—better than Count Basie, who stands out as the best-remembered and most beloved of the Kansas City pioneers. In this symbiotic process, Basie, Page, and Jones collectively reengineered the nature of time and space in the context of jazz, not only putting Kansas City on the map as a major jazz center but marking a permanent shift in the rhythmic essence of African American music.

Even before Basie arrived in Kansas City, stranded there in 1927 as a member of a touring show, the incipient sounds of that community’s distinctive style of jazz were already in the air. Bennie Moten, a Kansas City native who had studied piano with two of Scott Joplin’s pupils, initiated a decade-long recording career in 1923; in fact, Moten fronted one of the first black jazz bands to record anywhere. From the start, the influence of the blues on Moten’s work was pronounced—all eight of the numbers recorded at the band’s first session in September 1923 were based on the blues form. Over the next decade, this ensemble would undergo a stunning transformation, shedding the last vestiges of the New Orleans tradition—replacing tuba with string bass, banjo with guitar, growing from a combo into a big band—and absorbing influences from other parts of the country, including the Northeast where the band visited on tours after signing with the Victor label in 1926. In time, Moten’s soloists proved capable of matching up with the best of the East Coast ensembles, and were especially well served by a strong body of charts, especially those by Eddie Durham, who joined the band in 1929. These captured the loose-and-easy Kansas City ambiance to perfection, mirroring the freewheeling linear movement of the local improvisational style. Moten used these various building blocks to expand the vocabulary of Kansas City jazz, meanwhile serving as mentor to a large group of musicians who would bring this style to greater national attention, most notably Count Basie. By the time of the Moten band’s landmark Victor session from 1932, it was playing at a peak level that few jazz ensembles anywhere could match. This December 13, 1932, visit to the studio produced a number of the most exciting big band tracks of the decade, including classic sides such as “Toby,” “Prince of Wails,” “The Blue Room,” and “Moten Swing.” Yet these would also be the Moten band’s final recordings.

Moten’s ensemble had strengthened as he had increasingly attracted talented sidemen from other groups, especially Walter Page’s Blue Devils. Originally formed in Kansas City in 1923 as Billy King’s Road Show, the group was on the verge of breaking up in Oklahoma City in 1925 when Page took over the band, renaming it and expanding from nine to thirteen players. Having studied music at the University of Kansas, Page brought a rare degree of polish to the rough-and-ready road bands that he graced. With his excellent sight-reading skills and versatility (he also played saxophone), Page had already taken on the role of musical director even before assuming leadership of the Blue Devils. But it was as a bassist that Page made his greatest impact. Cradling the instrument against his massive body frame—Page weighed in at over 250 pounds—he overpowered the bass, drawing out a stronger, more resonant tone than any of his predecessors. True, the shift away from using tuba or bass saxophone as the harmonic foundation for the jazz band was already well under way before the rise of the Blue Devils, but no one did more than Walter Page to legitimize this change, to assert the primacy of the string bass as the most flexible and expressive voice for the “walking line.”

The story of Basie’s initiation into the Blue Devils has often been recounted, never with more flair than in his autobiography,
Good Morning Blues
. After a late drinking session, Basie made his way back to his Tulsa hotel room, where he fell asleep only to be awakened in late morning by the sounds of a Louis Armstrong record—or so he thought. Groggy and hung over, yet fascinated by the music, Basie made his way downstairs, where the Blue Devils were set up on the back of a truck, performing to a gathered crowd.

I just stood there listening and looking, because I had never heard anything like that band in my life. … There was such a team spirit among those guys, and it came out in the music, and as you stood there looking and listening you couldn’t help wishing that you were a part of it. Everything about them really got to me, and as things worked out, hearing them that day was probably the most important turning point in my musical career.
⁵

The young pianist soon found himself a member of the Blue Devils, a band that was a magnet for great talent—but incapable of holding onto it. Count Basie, Lester Young, Eddie Durham, Jimmy Rushing, Hot Lips Page, Buster Smith: all of them eventually moved from the Blue Devils to the Bennie Moten band. Even leader Page ultimately made the jump to his more successful competitor. And though the Blue Devils lingered on for some time under Buster Smith’s leadership, the premier position in the region had already been usurped by Moten. Under different circumstances, Moten’s band would have become established in the history of jazz as the paragon representative of the Kansas City sound. Instead, Moten fell ill during a road trip to Denver, and the doctors advised immediate surgery. Moten did not survive the operation. He was forty years old at the time of his death. Most of his sidemen eventually found their way into a successor group led by Count Basie.

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, on August 21, 1904, William “Count” Basie grew up in a distinctly working-class setting. His father served as coachman and caretaker for a local judge, while his mother took in laundry to supplement the family income. The influence of Harlem stride would predominate in his early musical education, but the youngster’s environment exposed him to a wide range of other American vernacular music styles, garnered from player pianos, theater shows, traveling carnivals, and the like. “I just wanted to be on the road with a show so much that I would have gone along just to be a water boy for the elephants if I could.”
⁶
Some time later Basie began doing chores for the local motion picture theater proprietor in exchange for free admission to films and live shows. Before long the adolescent was running the projection booth and filling in for the house pianist. He had already initiated piano studies at home, under his mother’s insistence, but drums remained Basie’s primary musical outlet for some time—until the precocious skills of his friend Sonny Greer (later to achieve fame as drummer with the Ellington band) convinced him to focus on the keyboard.

Basie’s father encouraged his son to work with him, mowing lawns and looking after houses on the local estates. But as his piano skills improved, Basie came to realize that a musical career might offer a way out of the menial jobs his parents and peers pursued. Soon the vibrant nightlife of New York beckoned. Early on, he met James P. Johnson, Willie “The Lion” Smith, and Fats Waller. Waller was the predominant influence and mentor among this group, as Basie himself later acknowledged; the older stride master occasionally allowed the youngster to play the house organ during Waller’s stint at Harlem’s Lincoln Theater and later helped him get work with a vaudeville act. The impact of the stride style on Basie’s music remained a strong undercurrent throughout his career, despite his more minimalist aesthetic—well past his fiftieth birthday the Count recorded an album,
The Kid from Red Bank
, on which the two-handed attack of these early models came surprisingly to the fore. But the blues would prove an even more vital source of inspiration for Basie, although not immediately. “I hadn’t ever really paid attention to [the blues] and I hadn’t ever played the blues. I hadn’t got my first taste of real blues until the burlesque show I first left New York with played in Kansas City.”
⁷
But once transplanted to Kansas City, Basie not only fell increasingly under the sway of the strong local blues piano tradition, exemplified by Pete Johnson and Jay McShann, but in time came to match these masters in articulating an authentic and heartfelt blues style.

Yet there was much in Basie’s piano style that refuses to be reduced to a discussion of influences. One of the most singular keyboardists in the history of jazz, Basie refined a sparser, more open-sounding approach than any of his predecessors. It was almost as though jazz piano, under Basie’s tutelage, stopped shouting and learned to talk, learned to banter and whisper, at times even to hold its tongue in a silence that said more than the most high-flown eloquence. One of the many delights of his music comes from hearing how he could do so much with so little. Incisive, robust, energized—the ends achieved seem at odds with the meager means employed. Some have been tempted to dismiss Basie as a mere tinkler of the ivories, more noteworthy for his band than for his skills as a player; yet for Basie, a mere tinkle, a simple fill, or the hint of a vamp were rich with implication. These mannerisms became increasingly pronounced late in his career—and at times Basie veered dangerously close to self-parody. But the polish, ingenuity, and veneer of self-deprecating humor that accompanied this music always kept it sounding fresh, even as Basie approached his eightieth birthday. Most of all, the complex note-filled piano attack of the next generation reinforced, if only by contrast, the uniqueness of Count Basie.

But Basie—like Ellington and Goodman—would not have reached such a pinnacle of artistry were he not equally a visionary, were it not for his skills of leadership and his ability to motivate others. Starting with a core group of Moten alumni that included Lester Young, Walter Page, Herschel Evans, Buster Smith, and Hot Lips Page, Basie soon enhanced the rhythm section with the addition of Jo Jones and Freddie Green. This was the most supple, the strongest jazz rhythm section of the era. More than this, it prefigured the advances of the next decade, when modern jazz would build lavish superstructures on the pared-down landscape cleared away by Basie, Page, Jones, and Green. The simplified left-hand voicings of Bud Powell and the pregnant pauses of a Thelonious Monk—these could only come after Basie had blazed the path; just as the pointillistic drumming of a Kenny Clarke or Max Roach would presuppose a Jo Jones. Much has been made of the influence of the Kansas City tradition on the modern jazz of native son Charlie Parker, but that is only one of the many links between these two schools of jazz. Glimpses of the future are everywhere apparent on the Basie recordings from the 1930s.

Even an average soloist would have sounded good with this support. But the Basie band was loaded with talent. Lester Young’s genius has been much discussed and analyzed by jazz historians, but he was far from the only star improviser in Basie’s horn sections. The contributions of tenor saxophonist Herschel Evans are often obscured by the renown of his celebrated associate, but his powerful sound and rough-hewn phrases—his “Texas moan”—communicated a visceral excitement few of his contemporaries could match. There can be little doubt that his contrasting style both spurred Lester and set off the latter’s more delicate improvisations in sharp relief. The complementary nature of their two approaches can be heard to good effect on performances such as “Blue and Sentimental,” “Doggin’ Around,” and “One O’Clock Jump.” Had Evans lived longer—he died from heart failure in 1939 shortly before his thirtieth birthday—he would likely have moved out of Young’s shadow and established himself as a major tenor voice. Vocalist Jimmy Rushing was primarily a ballad singer when Basie took over the band, but in time he developed a deeply personal approach to the blues. There was a wonderful paradox in Rushing’s singing. His resonant voice was a marvel of strength and authority, yet even at his highest energy levels, Rushing somehow retained the clean intonation and heartfelt sensitivity of a balladeer. This happy marriage of the down-home authenticity of the blues with the urbanity of a pop sensibility would set a model for many later Basie singers, such as Helen Humes and Joe Williams. Hot Lips Page’s exposure to the blues dated back long before his Moten days, when he had worked with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, but the influence of Armstrong also loomed large in his playing (and he eventually left Basie to work with Armstrong’s manager Joe Glaser in an illfated attempt to become a marquee star). Page was one of the hottest players in the band, and his tone and phrasing revealed a sure instinct for the dramatic. Buck Clayton, who replaced Page, offered a more lyrical style, with a burnished tone that was equally at home in the Basie big band or in small combos alongside Billie Holiday, where Clayton contributed some of his most memorable work. The addition of trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison and trombonist Dickie Wells a short time later further enhanced the band’s core of soloists, both players distinguished by their direct, conversational approaches to improvisation, set off by impeccable timing. Perhaps the Basie ensemble lacked the arranging and composing genius of an Ellington, or the instrumental virtuosity of a Goodman, but as a “blowing” band it was without peer.

Radio broadcasts and word of mouth soon brought the Basie band to the attention of power brokers in the music industry. A few hardy souls traveled to Kansas City to hear for themselves. In 1936, John Hammond made several visits, his interest excited by a chance hearing of a broadcast performance by the band. Dave Kapp of Decca Records soon followed, as did Joe Glaser, who left town with Hot Lips Page under contract. Finally, Joe Belford, manager of New York’s Roseland Ballroom, made the trek. The combined impact of these vistors from the East bearing homage was soon felt. Hammond set up Basie with booking agent Willard Alexander, Kapp signed Basie to the Decca label, and within a few months the band was headlining at Roseland.