An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 15 | JAZZ IN THE SWING ERA 377

Shortly after Moten’s death and Good-

man’s success on the West Coast, Count

Basie formed a nine-piece group and

began playing at the Reno Club in Kansas

City. Before long, broadcasters on the

club’s radio hookup brought outside atten-

tion to the band. And by 1936 Basie’s Mid-

west group, now managed by a prominent

white booking fi rm, was coming into

its own as a swing band with a national

following.

Basie was born in 1904 in Red Bank,

New Jersey. Indifferent to school, he was

drawn to music from an early age. Although piano lessons taught him little about

reading music, he learned quickly by ear. Basie quit school before fi nishing

junior high to pursue a career in show business—not to get rich but because “I

liked playing music, and I liked the life.” He showed an instinct for getting ahead,

fi rst in New Jersey and then in Harlem, where he landed a job as pianist with a

traveling theater company. When that tour ended, he returned to Harlem and

worked in clubs, meeting such local pianists as Thomas “Fats” Waller and Willie

“The Lion” Smith, two key fi gures in the development of ragtime piano into its

jazzier descendant, stride.

In 1926 Basie starting touring with a vaudeville act. W hen engagements ran

out in Kansas City in 1927, he remained there, accompanying silent movies at

a theater, and in 1929 joining Moten’s band. He gained enough experience to

form his own band after Moten’s death, recruiting local players with a regular

engagement. Almost everybody in that band was a good soloist, he remembered,

and the group worked mostly off head arrangements: arrangements assembled

from the ideas (the heads) of band members and learned aurally rather than

being written down.

Basie’s big break came in 1936 when John Hammond, a producer for Columbia

Records working in Chicago, heard the band on the radio. Support from

Hammond and Willard Alexander of MCA, a booking agency, helped to transform

Basie’s local group into a polished, nationally known ensemble. Musicians were

added. Singer Billie Holiday was hired to join Jimmy Rushing, a Moten band

alumnus who had joined up with Basie the previous year. New arrangements

were commissioned. And the band refi ned its image to please audiences outside

the rough-and-ready confi nes of the Reno Club.

Yet the musical approach that Basie had worked out in Kansas City, and that

had caught John Hammond’s ear in the fi rst place, remained intact. Basie kept

the blues prominent in the band’s repertory. Soloists played a key role. Like

Ellington (see chapter 12), Basie knew how he wanted each section, and each

player, to sound. “I have my own little ideas about how to get certain guys into

certain numbers and how to get them out,” he said late in life. “I had my own way

of opening the door for them to let them come in and sit around awhile. Then

I would exit them. And that has really been the formula of the band all down

through the years.”

At the same time, collaboration was an essential part of the band, in the char-

acteristic sound of its rhythm section, especially after guitarist Freddie Green

K The Basie band in 1939.

Members pictured here

include Lester Young, tenor

sax (far right); Walter Page,

bass; Jo Jones, drums; and

Freddie Green, guitar.

Young’s unconventional

playing posture is evident

even at a distance.

head arrangements

John Hammond

the Basie sound

Basie’s rhythm section

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