Whether the pairing works is a matter of taste, but it’s certainly different from the Basie band’s usual sound. The tight trumpets and silky sax section are a strong contrast to Rush’s sandpaper voice and loose-limbed phrasing. Bobby Rush invites the band to “Boogie in the Dark,” and they hit a driving shuffle groove. Of course, there are other tracks where the band meets the guest artists more than halfway. Jamie Davis, a regular performer with the Count Basie Orchestra, has Joe Williams’s baritone and some of his vocal mannerisms on “Look What You’ve Done.” Bettye Lavette swings “Stormy Monday” hard the way Dennis Rowland would, adding her wise and weathered voice. Sipp” Coleman shouts/sings his way through “Let’s Have a Good Time” behind the riffing horns, much like Jimmy Rushing. So, even within the band’s history, you can find more than one style of the blues.Įach of those Basie blues styles is represented here. In 1977, Basie hired Dennis Rowland, another baritone who brought a jazzier swing back to the band’s blues. From 1954 and occasionally up through the 1980s, baritone singer Joe Williams brought a freer and more gut-bucket blues style to the band (“Every Day”). The early Basie band historically represents a swinging kind of Kansas City jump blues often featuring the great blues shouter Jimmy Rushing (“Sent for You Yesterday”). The experiment here is to reconcile multiple styles of the blues. And the nucleotides holding together that band’s DNA aren’t C, G, A, and T, they are B, L, U, E, and S.īasie Swings the Blues is a collection of one-off sessions with many of today’s great blues artists, with “blues” defined as you’d see it catalogued in your local record store: Buddy Guy, Charlie Musselwhite, Shemekia Copeland, Bobby Rush, and others. (Incidentally, how perfect is this for a wedding moment? Isn’t a head arrangement a perfect metaphor for starting a new life together?) The members of the band didn’t need to be told how to do it - the seasoned pros, no doubt hired for their ability to play with precision and swing through exacting charts, just drew on it naturally from the Basie band DNA. What happened at that wedding some 85 years later sounds like it was another head arrangement. According to Basie, “We hit it with the rhythm section and went into the riffs, and the riffs just stuck.” Basie called it the “One O’clock Jump,” and it became his biggest hit and signature tune. They started improvising what became known as a “head arrangement” - the section leader comes up with a riff, the rest of the section harmonizes it and memorizes it, and the other sections fill it in and complement it with other riffs. In 1935, Basie’s band was doing a radio broadcast from Kansas City’s Reno Club, and they found themselves with some time to fill. Young, ambitious, and talented, Count Basie had the musical instincts of a Kansas City bluesman. The authenticity of any ghost band is often questioned, but there’s something deeply true to the essence of the Count Basie Orchestra in this troupe, a resonance that goes all the way back to their roots as an offshoot of the Bennie Moten big band in 1933. It was electrifying! I just had no idea it would all culminate three years later in Basie Swings The Blues. With the saxes, trombones, and trumpets improvising riffs behind him, that was the moment when I finally heard what our recording should sound like. The groom played the living heck out of the blues on his guitar and sounded like all of the great blues guitarists rolled into one. I called the key of G to the guys and counted off a medium tempo blues and what happened over the next few minutes was one of the most incredible things I had ever heard in my life. I told the groom he could sit in with us and after retrieving his guitar and joining us on stage, I asked what he might like to play and he said, “How about some blues?” I said sure, “What key?” He said, “It doesn’t matter to me.” Right then I knew something major was about to happen. Normally, that means one of two things - the person can really play, or they can’t and just want to show off in front of their friends…. After we had played Quincy Jones’ arrangement of “Fly Me to the Moon” for the lovely bride and groom on their first dance, the groom approached the stage to ask me if he could sit in with us. In March of 2020, we were playing a private wedding reception on the very day that COVID-19 shut down nearly the entire western world insofar as travel was concerned…. It must be nice to have the Count Basie Band play for your private wedding.Īccording to Scotty Barnhart, the leader of the Count Basie Orchestra (Basie himself died in 1984), But it’s even better to hear them exult the blues with their own time-honored style leading the way.īasie Swings the Blues – The Count Basie Orchestra (Candid) It’s good to hear the Basie band stretch.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |