When requested the best way to clarify the pianist and bandleader Depend Basie for the common listener, Butch Miles finds it tough to be dispassionate. As a youngster, he first noticed the Depend Basie Orchestra carry out songs at a jazz pageant in Virginia Seaside. “Marshal Royal was on lead alto. The two Franks were in the reed section. Sonny Payne was on drums,” the 76-year-old drummer recollects with a touch of awe. “It was something for a 16-year-old kid to sit right in front of the band and hear that. And that was all it took. I was gone, and I’ve been gone ever since that night.”
By the mid-’70s, Miles would be part of the band himself, a part of an ever-growing checklist of proficient musicians that performed bluesy, swinging, and warmer than scorching. The Depend Basie Orchestra, merely, has the ineffable potential to make your day higher. “His music makes you want to dance,” says Scotty Barnhart, who has led the Depend Basie Orchestra since 2013. “It makes you want to tap your foot and snap your fingers. When you leave a Basie concert, you’re supposed to feel better than you did when you first walked in there… That’s what Mr. Basie’s goal was.”
William James Basie was born in Purple Financial institution, New Jersey, in 1904. At first, he wished to be a drummer. He additionally badly wished to get out of Purple Financial institution, and he contemplated becoming a member of the circus to take action. “I always used to go down there and frustrate the hell out of myself dreaming about leaving with them,” Basie wrote in his 1986 autobiography Good Morning Blues. To get nearer to indicate enterprise, he dropped out of center college and carried out menial duties at a movie show. After watching Sonny Greer play, Basie gave up his desires of drumming. “Everybody knew he was the champ,” Basie wrote of the percussionist who would go on to play in Duke Ellington’s band. “I could see that playing drums was not going to be my gig.”
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Basie turned his consideration to the piano, absorbing the stride-piano model of Fat Waller, and finally hit the street with vaudeville acts. In 1928, he joined Walter Web page’s Blue Devils, and the next 12 months, he joined Bennie Moten’s band. Most of the members, like Lester “Prez” Younger, drifted into Basie’s orbit across the time of Moten’s loss of life in 1935. Progressively, member by member, the Depend Basie Orchestra was born, and nearly a century later, the group continues to be buzzing alongside as one in every of jazz’s most prestigious repertory orchestras.
For the uninitiated who’d wish to get into this towering determine of big-band, listed below are 20 important songs by the Depend Basie Orchestra – with and with out Depend.
The Outdated Testomony Band
Between 1935 and 1955, Depend Basie led two variations of the Orchestra, which critics nicknamed the Outdated Testomony and New Testomony bands. The Outdated Testomony band launched the careers of everybody from Prez to singer Jimmy Dashing to drummer Jo Jones.
Throughout one radio session, a tossed-off 12-bar blues grew to become their theme music. “One night, we were on the air, and we had about ten more minutes to go, and the announcer asked what we were going to do,” Basie wrote in Good Morning Blues. Basie started vamping; the announcer requested what the title was. The musicians’ working title of “Blue Balls” wouldn’t fly, and Basie wanted a brand new title, quick. So he seemed on the clock, and he discovered it: “One O’Clock Jump.”
“Avenue C,” which trumpeter Buck Clayton wrote and organized, is one other terrific entryway into the Outdated Testomony band. “Buck Clayton was the only guy in the band who could score – could write it all down,” says Doug Lawrence, who’s presently the Orchestra’s featured tenor soloist.
Due to Clayton’s potential, for the band’s first couple of years, “Buck told me everybody made a dollar a night and seven bucks a week, and everyone would take 25 cents out of their pay and give it to Buck,” he continues with fun. “He was the highest-paid guy in the band!”
Different go-to’s from this epoch embody guitarist Eddie Durham’s “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” and “Time Out,” Prez’s “Tickle Toe,” and Durham’s and Dashing’s “Good Morning Blues.” “Even though they have Basie’s name as the composer, those were riffs that Prez and Buck were making up,” Lawrence says of most of the Outdated Testomony tunes. “Lester never got credit for any of those tunes, and he didn’t care.”
“‘Good Morning Blues’ is significant [because] it has a certain kind of poetry and uniqueness,” explains tenor saxophonist, conductor, and jazz historian Loren Schoenberg. “The Old Testament band was so groundbreaking because it had this drive. I’ve heard people describe it as a locomotive going down the railroad tracks. It was that steady drive of that rhythm section – piano, bass, drums, and Freddie Green’s guitar. It had this steady pulse, and the swing was so hard it was better than anything else that was being produced at the time.”
The New Testomony Band
Depend Basie pulled the plug on the OId Testomony band in 1949 because the swing period declined and flirted with eight-piece, seven-piece, and six-piece teams – till the singer and big-band chief Billy Eckstine advised him to chop it out. “Get your goddamn big band back together,” Eckstine advised Basie, based on Good Morning Blues. “Man, you look funny up there… This is small garbage for you, Basie.”
Basie took his recommendation and shaped the New Testomony Band, which was heavier and richer than the Outdated whereas reflecting the harmonic improvements of the bebop motion. “In [1952], when you get to the New Testament band, that pulse is still there,” Lawrence explains. “It’s just that the arrangements, harmonically, are of that era – the bebop era. Then, you start getting arrangers who were arranging harmonically different than these earlier recordings.”
When alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie got here alongside, they cranked up danceable swing to whiplash tempos. In addition they braided it with harmonic magnificence influenced by classical music, a growth that left most swing bands within the mud. Depend Basie’s group was an exception, largely as a result of Basie welcomed musicians versed in bebop, like tenor saxophonist Frank Foster and trumpeter Thad Jones.
Foster’s “Shiny Stockings” and the Orchestra’s tackle Vernon Duke’s normal “April in Paris” present how they grew extra sonorous and resonant with out sacrificing that essential pulse. Barnhart calls the previous “another basic staple” of the group; the latter, which is essentially the most well-known model of the tune, was inducted into the Grammy Corridor of Fame in 1985.
“If I had to name one Count Basie Orchestra album for a beginner to get into, it’d be Chairman of the Board,” Barnhart says. That 1959 album represents a candy spot in Basie’s discography. The manufacturing’s wonderful, the band swings laborious, and you may enterprise ahead or backward from there as per your style. From that album, take a look at the exuberant “Blues in Hoss’ Flat” and “Kansas City Shout.”
After that, discover the album with the hilarious and brazen mushroom-cloud cowl – some name it The Atomic Mr. Basie, others name it E=MC2 – and crank up “The Kid From Red Bank,” “Whirly Bird,” and “Li’l Darlin’.” “That’s probably the pivotal album [in defining] the sound of the New Testament band,” claims Marshall McDonald, who held down the lead alto chair within the Depend Basie Orchestra and linked the creator of this text with most of the interviewees. In Good Morning Blues, Basie known as the luxurious ballad “Li’l Darlin’” “one of our standards.”
Collaborations With Vocalists
Depend Basie’s discography is filled with songs with premier vocalists like Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett, all who match seamlessly into the Orchestra. To grasp the vocal aspect in Depend’s work, nonetheless, “Everyday I Have the Blues,” that includes Joe Williams, is Exhibit A. Whereas a music like “Fly Me to the Moon” with Frank Sinatra could be extra recognizable, Williams was within the Depend Basie band. “The hits he had with the band redounded to Basie’s fame and bottom line,” Schoenberg explains. “The other things were, you know, a tour with Sarah Vaughn, a tour with Frank Sinatra.”
That mentioned, if the fabric with vocalists compels you to dig deeper, don’t hesitate to take a look at albums like 1959’s Strike Up the Band (with Tony Bennett), 1961’s Depend Basie/Sarah Vaughan, and 1963’s Ella and Basie!.
The 60s, 70s, and 80s
Whereas the Outdated and New Testomony bands embody the lion’s share of Depend Basie’s basic songs, the following twenty years include must-hear cuts, too.
Chief amongst them: the title observe to 1963’s Li’l Ol’ Groovemaker… Basie!, an album which Quincy Jones composed and organized. Basie’s and Jones’s inventive relationship was artistically and commercially fertile; Basie received a Grammy that 12 months for his association of “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” “Blues for Stephanie” from 1980’s On the Highway stays a mainstay for the orchestra attributable to its melodic vibrancy and ample house for soloing.
When you’re at it, cue up the title observe to 1981’s Heat Breeze. “That’s Sammy Nestico. That’s a beautiful tune,” Lawrence says. “It’s classic Nestico, and he had a lot to do with what we were doing in the 80s.” A veteran composer and arranger identified for movie and TV, Nestico shepherded the Depend Basie Orchestra by means of albums like 1982’s Farmer’s Market Barbecue and 1983’s 88 Basie Road.
The Orchestra Submit-Basie
Since Depend Basie’s passing in 1984, a succession of bandleaders has taken his place. “Thad [Jones] took over the band for a while before he became so sick,” Miles says. “Then, Frank [Foster] took over, bless his heart. Then, Grover [Mitchell] took over. Then, Bill Hughes took over, then Scotty [Barnhart] took over.”
If you wish to take a look at the Orchestra post-Basie, there are a few nice beginning factors. Hunt down “A Foggy Day” from 1986’s Lengthy Dwell the Chief, which options vocalist Carmen Bradford, and “Katherine the Great,” which Frank Foster wrote for 1989’s The Legend, The Legacy. Additionally, take heed to Thad Jones’s “From One to Another” from 2018’s All About That Basie, additionally that includes Bradford. (The remainder of the album options luminaries like Stevie Marvel, Kurt Elling, and Joey DeFrancesco.)
Make no mistake, although: Regardless of which period of the Depend Basie Orchestra you dip into – and even whether or not it options Basie – you’re going to listen to musicians of the very best caliber. “I think every musician that ever played in the Basie band was recommended by another musician,” explains James Leary, who performed within the Orchestra throughout Basie’s remaining years. “You didn’t audition for the Basie band. To get on the Basie bandstand, you were recommended by another musician.”
Certainly, to listen to previous and current members of the Orchestra inform it, what separates Basie’s band from the remaining – Glenn Miller’s, Benny Goodman’s, even Duke Ellington’s – is their uniquely familial bond. “There are so many great musicians where they’re amazing technicians, and their organizations run like watches,” says Dennis Mackrel, who led the band from 2010 to 2013. “But they’re miserable to be around, or they’re so stressed out they can’t wait to be out of it. They’re happy they were part of a great organization, but they never want to go back. With Basie, he recognized that it was important to have fun. I don’t know any musicians who have bad things to say about him.”
Miles remembers how the Orchestra’s closeness buoyed them on each good nights and tough ones: “There were nights when the band had been on the road all day,” he says. “Maybe we didn’t even have a chance to get to our hotel yet. We hadn’t shaved. We were changing clothes on the bus. We didn’t get anything to eat. We showed up to do the concert about 40 minutes before we were supposed to and got off the bus grumbling, tired and beat up.” However then, “We went on and played our asses off.”
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