Lockjaw Davis had given Basie his notice and the Count was looking for a new tenor, so Eckstine and the Wilkins brothers recommended Foster. „They said,“ Foster notes, still amused by it all, „`We don’t know where he is, but if you can find him, he’s a good tenor player.‘ At that time I was still in the Army in Korea, wishing I could be in Count Basie’s orchestra.“
Foster was discharged in May of 1953 and headed back to Detroit where the Basie band just happened to be playing. „I was walking down the street, still with my army suit on, in Detroit, and I ran into a friend who I hadn’t seen since I’d left Cincinnati. He said, `Hey, Count Basie’s looking for you.‘ And I said, `How can Count Basie be looking for me? I just got in town and nobody knows I’m here.‘
„`Count Basie’s looking for you, so you better go down there where he’s playing.'“ Wisely, Foster fell by the club that night, and asked for an audition. After two numbers Basie, a man of few words, told him, „I’ll be in touch.“The rest of May passed, then all of June, and as the end of July neared, Foster gave up hope. „I figured, `Well, I guess they found somebody else.‘ Then the next thing, I got a telegram from Mr. Basie with a one-way airline ticket to New York, and I said, `This dream is really gonna come true.‘ On Sunday, July 26, 1953 I flew to New York City. And on Monday, July 27, 1953, a good friend of mine, [singer] Sheila Jordan took me to Birdland, where Charlie Parker was appearing. Sheila was a good friend of Bird’s and she persuaded him to let me sit in. People don’t have dreams this fabulous!
„Now, at that time, as far as I was concerned, nobody could play like Charlie Parker, nobody. I mean, he was just God on the alto saxophone, as far as I was concerned. He did what a lot of seasoned professionals do when they encounter a youngster-they call difficult tunes at fast tempos. He did this, put me on trial, and I rose to the occasion and impressed him, and got a compliment from him. That was better than getting the Medal of Honor.
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Basie’s other tenor soloist was the smooth, confident Frank Wess, whose refined lyricism offered an distinct contrast to Foster’s more strident approach. „I never will forget,“ Foster remarks, shaking his head, „my first wife said, `The difference between your tones is that his is warmer.‘ To which I replied, `Thanks a lot!‘ But it was true. He had a sound that was suited for ballad playing and medium tempo playing, and Basie realized this early. And my tone was better suited to uptempo songs, like `Little Pony‘ and `Jumpin‘ at the Woodside.‘
„I remember once after I’d been in the band a year or two, maybe three, even, I asked Basie, `Why don’t you let me play more ballads?‘ And his answer was simply, `You do all right on the fast tunes. You don’t need to play no ballads.‘ And I didn’t argue with that. I knew what he meant, ‚cause when I came into the Count Basie orchestra in 1953, my sound was still not mature on tenor saxophone. I had the technique down. I had the facility to play uptempo `around the corner,‘ but my tone was still not mellowed out.“
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Already an experienced writer, Foster learned Basie’s three keys to a successful arrangement-„simplicity, swing, and leaving spaces for the rhythm section. One of the main things he always said to me was, `Kid, swing that music.‘ In other words, don’t write too many complicated arrangements with all kinds of stuff going on everywhere. In that way he was almost as great an arranger as anybody out there, because he was a master at what to take out, what to leave out.
„A case in point is one selection we play now called `Good Times Blues,‘ which features trombone and bass as soloists. There was a lot of writing in this-it was arranged by Ernie Wilkins-a lot of writing in the first part of it, and then there was this out chorus. Well, Basie took out the whole first segment, he took out everything but the closing, the out chorus, and he just had solos up until the out chorus, and it builds nicely. He really knew what to do.
„`Li’l Darlin‘,'“ Foster continues, „by Neal Hefti, was brought in as a medium-tempo, sort of bounce tune. Basie listened to that and he said, `Let’s slow that down and make a ballad out of it,‘ and it got to be one of the band’s most popular songs. Still is. That was the genius of Basie, to listen to something and decide what had to be done with it. And the arranger-composer could only have felt complemented if Basie decided to keep the arrangement, no matter what he did with it, no matter how much he chopped it up or took out of it.“
In his 11 years with the Count, Foster contributed a tall stack of marvelous charts to the Basie book („Blues Backstage,“ „Down for the Count,“ „Blues in Hoss‘ Flat,“ „Back to the Apple,“ „Discommotion,“ the entire Easin‘ It album), but none suited the Chief’s prerequisites better than „Shiny Stockings.“
„I wrote `Shiny Stockings‘ in 1955 and we had a rehearsal at a place called Pep’s Bar in Philadelphia. We had just arrived in town. Everybody was sleepy, tired, hungry, and evil. Nobody felt like rehearsing. We rehearsed `Shiny Stockings‘ and it sounded like a bunch of jumbled notes, just noise, and I said, `Wow, all the work I put into this, and it sounds so horrible. I know Basie will never play it.‘ And then something very strange happened. He continued to play and it came together. Finally, we recorded it and, well, it’s the very best known piece that I have contributed to the Basie book.
„Years later,“ Foster remembers with pride, „Basie gave me the supreme compliment. Every now and then, he’d say about a chart, `Oh, it’s very nice, kid,‘ and then leave it at that. Well, he grabbed me, he said, `Junior, you know that „Shiny Stockings“? You really put one down that time.‘ You couldn’t receive a better compliment from Count Basie.
„It embodies all the things that were important to him. It builds-it starts soft and ends with and explosion. It leaves space for the rhythm section to do whatever it’s going to do. It has that ensemble writing which the band can sink their teeth into and really make happen-and a wonderful trumpet solo by Thad Jones.“ One more thing: it swings.
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During this time Foster, ever the big band partisan, also began leading his own band, which he eventually decided to call, with no apologies to Spiro Agnew, The Loud Minority. „I was definitely making a statement,“ he insists. „I was all for civil rights and I got sick of hearing this expression, `the silent majority.‘ Now what I understood by `silent majority‘ was a group of white folks who didn’t go along with the civil rights movement and whose basic premise was, `What do those people want?‘ So I said, `I’m gonna call my group by a name that means the opposite of the silent majority.'“
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFHPmlAe_Co&NR=1
Frank Foster’s Loud Minority – 4, 5, 6 (mit Benny Powell – tb)
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba