Tracks: The Kid from Red Bank//Duet//After Supper//Flight of the Foo Birds//Double-O//Teddy the Toad//Whirly-Bird//Midnite Blue//Splanky//Fantail//Li'l Darlin'
A violet-hot hydrogen bomb going thermal into the White Sands of your skull! Rattling the bones right out of your mouth to tap round the room with your erstwhile ego! If you will suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions! Hang on, wait a minute – this isn’t be-bop. There are no hip neo-decadent Beats here. Why, it’s positively old-fashioned. Good lord, it’s SWING! Well, they don’t call it the Kansas City Stomp for nothing. Ever since I first read about Count Basie I always envisioned him as coming roaring out of the Mid-West like a steam train, thundering down into Harlem on the back of his band while the whole city started swinging to his piano. Animated cats were involved, and the Count had a red velvet cape and hair like Blacula. Of course, that’s not really an accurate description.
From what I gather, Basie toured hard and worked hard to get to the top, fighting his way up through Harlem clubs and gaining rep from a number of key gigs – such as his famous battle against Chick Webb the drumming dwarf that lasted all night and really lit his candle as a name to watch-out for. I don’t know much about the Count, as to be honest I’ve always preferred stuff post-bop. I do like Ellington, but as much because of his own compositions as because of the obvious debt owed to him by Charles Mingus, who is my absolute favourite band leader and the only one I know anything much about. But, from what I see here, I enjoy Basie quite a bit, and I might even dig into his catalogue.
Anyway, beside the point. Basie, like many others, suffered a massive career set-back after the war as the popularity of Big Band declined. Singers, now, were taking the stage. Guys like Frank Sinatra were putting the spot-light on the voice, whereas before the singer had just been another engaging element of any solid jazz ensemble. Basie wasn’t a composer, relying more on outside arrangers and freely-improvised “Head” compositions – tracks wherein the leader states a theme, and then the band grooves through it an elaborates basically on impulse. He played dance music, basically, and with the gradual death of live audiences for Swing there wasn’t much way for a live dance band, even a top-notch one, to survive. Ellington had composed pop and jazz standards and was able to survive off of them while in hibernation, but Basie didn’t have such a massive store of heavily licensed material to draw from given the freer approach he took to composition – although he made-up for this on an artistic level with a willingness to foster younger artists and with his dazzling instrumental technique.
So, as I understand it (as Wikipedia has given me to understand) his career took the up-and-up when he started to play to the times by attaching himself to big name singers. It makes sense – he’d had Billie Holiday as part of his live group back in the 40s, and a whole bunch of vocalists since. Then he got Neal Hefti in to do some arrangements (including this album), and things started going great-guns. He ended-up sliding out of life over the next few decades on the strength of his “Elder Statesman of Jazz” cache, as well as the generous tithes he received from his titled lands in Europe. After formally knighting Dizzie Gillespie at a sitting of Parliament in Birdland in late 1956, he declared himself accepting of bop and incorporated it into his music as a new and powerful weapon against the rise of rock-based voodoo cults. Unfortunately, he accidentally split the atom in the process – an event which led to the development of the first 100 megaton hydrogen warhead, thus escalating Cold War tensions to such a point that Eisenhower was forced to send Stalin every single poppy in Georgia as a way of apologising. Thankfully, this little-known but important historical incident can now be heard in hi-fidelity monophonic sound roughly 40 seconds into “Double-O” (Basie’s code name with the FBI). It is perhaps the first recorded instance of jazz fusion.
Or at least, so I’ve read.
So, what can you say about this album? Basie and his band swing hard. There’s a massive rhythm here – the bass is as high in the mix as it was ever likely to get in 1957. The drumming is phenomenal, although everything is strictly 4/4. Basie’s piano-playing is still rooted in pre-bop swing, and even quotes ragtime in the opening number, but he incorporates elements of bop everywhere – perhaps most obviously in the charming “Fantail”, but also in the dazzling displays of extremely rhythmic, hypnotic arpeggios that he brings out in “The Kid From Redbank”, for example. The band is huge and brassy and the riffs from the bank of horns are marvellous and enormous. And Basie’s roots in simple head compositions and free improvisation made him ideally suited for squaring himself with the bop crowd while still keeping to a swing format.
It’s not all big massive dance-floor anthems, however. The album is cannily structured like an actual concert, opening with perhaps the hardest, most foot-stomping number in “The Kid from Redbank”, and then dropping down into a few mellower, slow-dance and slove-jive numbers before mounting up into dizzying, but still (compared to the first track) relatively restrained “Flight of the Foo Birds”. And then “Double-O” hits, at first innocuous, but about a minute in it really does reach out and knock you right off your arse and on to the dance floor. This ebb and flow is maintained across the whole album, never less than danceable, closing out on the beautiful “Lil’ Darlin’”, which is utterly delicate and really rather lovely, with a gorgeous solo by someone whose name I can’t find. The album is full of great solos, actually, although none of them ever really grandstand and overwhelm the principle aim of the music, which is dancing. Dancing! Dancing! Dancing!
Put this album on anywhere and people will shake their arses off. It’s not a revolution in sound, but it does show both the roots of jazz, and the ways in which such jazz was moving forward and compromising at the time in a struggle to stay relevant in a world of radical formal innovation at a break-neck pace. So, at bottom it’s fun, it’s pretty, and it has a really apt cover. Hell, it manages to outswing Sinatra! And that guy loved swinging! He even named an album after it.
The downside of all this is, I suppose, that the tracks tend to all blend together. But then, isn’t that how you want it to be at a party? This is the same problem that faces Sinatra’s albums, I suppose – cohesive mood over the immediacy of individual tracks. It’s a problem common to a lot of Jazz, actually – not being pop music, it can often invest more interest in the playing than the composition. It’s a classic reason why a lot of people have a problem with bop, and would lead to massive divides in jazz listening public. But damn it, it works! The individual tracks are all nicely done in their own right. It’s just that individual segments within tracks hit harder than the songs themselves, thus lending I suppose to the feel of this as very much a “concert” performance. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing I should be sitting down and listening carefully to, although it’s well-played and composed enough to warrant the attention given.
Speaking of details, I’ll just close-out on the production. This is one of the best-sounding records so far. The rhythm section is warm and thick but you can pick-out every detail. The horns come crashing over like waves. Ted Reig’s done a great job of capturing a joyous and beautiful recording.
I was really quite pleasantly surprised by this. I’ve never been a huge fan of Swing, or even, if we’re honest, of the other Basie stuff I’d heard. Here, however, he’s won me over. You may not remember much of it when you turn it off, but while your listening? It’s fun!
8/10
Download: Count Basie Orchestra - The Kid from Red Bank.mp3
Download: Count Basie Orchestra - Li'l Darlin'.mp3
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