Was meinst Du mit den Basie Jazz Profiles?
Prinzessin Margaret war in London zugegen, als Basies Orchester im April 1957 dort auftrat. Die Konzerte waren anscheinend eine Sensation, da die Gewerkschaften Auftritte von US-Bands üblicherweise verhinderten. Das, wie auch die folgende Passage, stammen aus einem Erinnerungstext, den Guy Kopelowicz 2004 für die erwähnte, nicht zustande gekommene Basie-Website verfasste:
By the time of the Basie concert I was ready to listen to the band and I did get a blast. The full sound of the band was breathtaking. From the opening tunes, I was mightily impressed with the volume of its ensemble sound and with the quality of its soloing. The band played the repertoire from their recent recordings for the Norman Granz label. Everybody had been waiting to hear a live interpretation of „Shiny Stockings“ whose arrangement by Frank Foster had been analysed at length by Andre Hodeir in an article that had just been published in Jazz Hot.
And „Shiny Stockings“ was provided by the Basie men. The band played it brilliantly to the Paris crowd shortly after the start of the concert.
The band was seated in three rows: trumpets in the back, trombones in the middle and the saxophone section in front with Basie, Eddie Jones, Freddie Green and Sonny Payne filling the left side. Practically every one in the band had solo space, except for Freddie Green who sat discreetly at a place just below Sonny Payne’s drums and performed his metronome chores. Charlie Fowlkes on the baritone also had a featured number on „Eventide,“ Sonny Payne had several short solo interventions but his featured number was „Mambo Inn“ (which I preferred to the flashy „Old Man River“ feature Payne had at later concerts), Henry Coker had „Yesterdays“ to himself. Joe Newman, Thad Jones and the two Franks – Foster and Wess – all had plenty of solo space.
The band also went into „April In Paris,“ their hit number which had been introduced shortly before the European tour. It was the first time they played this in Paris and Count Basie must have repeated his „One More Time“ encore at least half a dozen times before the band ended it in a final crescendo.
Nat Hentoff hat 1961 in seinem Buch „The Jazz Life“ über Basie u.a. folgendes geschrieben:
Personally, Basie is on the surface the most enigmatic of the major jazz figures. Even Duke Ellington, behind his multiple masks, is often openly mocking and elegantly sardonic. There is in Ellington, hatred of Jim Crow and the merciless economic facts of keeping a band together. There is also love of pleasure, fear of age and the intense endless satisfaction of making form and content fuse into an entity that only he could have created. These parts of his character are in his music and are evident in him. But who is behind the perennially bland face of Basie?
No member of the jazz pantheon smiles so much and says so little as Count Basie. „Except for Freddie Green, the guitarist, nobody really knows Bill,“ says a veteran member of the band. „He keeps in most of what he feels, and the face he presents to the public is usually the one we see too. Once in a great while, he will explode or do something that isn’t in keeping with the usual picture of him, but he quickly picks up his customary role. From time to time, we’ll see Freddie Green lecturing him off to one side – never the other way around. But I don’t know what those conversations are about.“
1960 was Basie’s 25th anniversary as a bandleader. Of the big band organizers, Basie along with Ellington, has had the most influential impact on jazz. His rhythm sections have made possible the later liberation of the jazz beat by such early modernists as Kenny Clarke and Max Roach. His soloists, particularly Lester Young, anticipated the long-lined, asymmetrical, bar crossing adventures of Charlie Parker. No jazz band has yet come close to achieving the floating unity of the best Basie performances between 1936 and 1942. Within the past decade, moreover, the renaissance of the Basie band shocked many young modernists into a reappraisal of their origins. I remember Stan Getz shaking his head in 1953, after hearing a Basie set. „I haven’t been swinging enough, I got too lost in the sound.“
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Nobody as bland as the public Basie could have been so responsible for so vigorous music. His sidemen have no difficulty appraising Basie in terms of his effect on their music. „The band,“ explains former sideman and arranger, Johnny Mandel, „doesn’t feel good until he’s up there. He makes everybody play differently. There’s no going against him; it’s almost like having a big father on the bandstand. Not just with his own band either. I was working with a poor band that Buddy Rich was leading in 1945. One night Basie sat in and everybody was playing differently.“
Yet the irresistible strength Basie projects as a pianist and leader clashes with another quality… caution. That has also been pervasive in his life on and off the stand. Although for one example, he plays a great deal more piano technically than he now indicates in public, he has not revealed his capacity since his 1932 recordings with Bennie Moten’s Orchestra, except at private sessions. He prefers to maintain an image of himself as a functional band pianist, not a soloist; and as a band pianist, he has no equal.
Basie’s caution is also the despair of several arrangers who have seen him accept new scores and not play them, or reject pieces they have specifically written for the band because the men can’t run them down smoothly on the first or second try. „I just gave up,“ says one writer who is very fond of Basie personally, „I’ve got a lot of stuff just lying there. It’s no wonder I no longer felt like knocking myself out for him.“ „He seems to be frightened of new tunes, „says one of his trumpet players. „There have been times he’s walked off the stand if someone calls a new piece early in the evening.“
Basie, however, is not complacent in his caution. He worries about freshening the book, and he worries about the band. When one of his oldest friends told him bluntly three years ago that the band was becoming sloppy. Basie admitted to the justice of the criticism and soon afterwards changes were made. „He loves the band,“ says guitarist Freddie Green, „he loves to hear it. It’s not because of the public that he’s on the job before we are most nights. It’s to hear the band for his own kicks. He’ll never stop playing. We still work overtime quite a lot because he gets so much enjoyment out of the job.“
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The caution, though, is not impregnable. Like all Negro musicians, Basie is bitter about conditions on the road. Filling station operators in New England as well as the Midwest who lock men’s rooms as the bus approaches; unpredictable restaurants; towns such as Las Vegas where for years only Negro headliners could stay in the hotels where they worked. „The first time I was in Las Vegas with the band,“ notes tenor saxophonist Billy Mitchell, „the swimming pool in the motel where were staying was ‚broken‘ all the time we were there. But hell, it happens in New York too. I had it happen at 53rd and seventh. You know that El Morocco and the Stork Club are Crow.“ „Geography isn’t dependable,“ says arranger Johnny Mandel. „Indianapolis is one of the worst cities in the country for that.“
Basie and his men rarely remonstrate when they run into prejudice. They go somewhere else. But one afternoon about three years ago, the band rolled into Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. They were due at a college dance that night. Some of the musicians went into a small restaurant, others went into a tavern. In the tavern, they were refused service. Basie walked up to the manager, looked at him coldly and said, „you want us to go out in the street and drink it? You want us to get arrested for breaking the law?“ The manager was shaken, but stubborn and so the musicians decided to leave a memory behind. The biggest men in the band, the ‚Killers‘ Eddie Jones, Billy Mitchell and Henry Coker, began to roam around the tavern like lions deciding just what part of their prey they’d savor first. Basie watched the scene, made no attempt to stop it, and in fact quite evidently enjoyed the morality play. The band wasn’t served, but at least it hadn’t slunk away.
Basie has gradually become more vocal about civil rights. In the spring of 1960, for instance, he publicly endorsed the sit-in movement of southern Negro students. Referring to the pressures on the students, he added, „They’re trying to knock us down, but we get right back up again.“ Basie is also an admirer of Martin Luther King: „Like the cats would put it, he’s saying something.“
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Basie is also cool until provoked beyond patience. Most of the time, however, even his rages are somewhat staged. „The cursing,“ notes a sideman, „seems controlled. Sometimes if we’ve been goofing off at a rehearsal, he’ll ask any women present, to leave the room, and then he’ll blow up. But always, after the steam is out, he’ll make some funny kind of crack so we’ll know he’s not mad.“
The Basie wrath can also be set off by men being continually late on the stand. When Basie begins to play the piano, that’s the signal for the men to return to work. Occasionally, a few sidemen are lackadaisical about leaving their avocational pursuits. If their carelessness continues, Basie is likely to hold a meeting of the band in the back of the club, after the set and lecture the band on the ultimate wages of the sin of their tardiness.
„There are other times,“ says a band member, „when Basie gets angry like a little boy. He’ll go into a corner and mumble to himself.“ „Once,“ recalls Johnny Mandel, „two guys in the band were scuffling, and Basie got as mad as he can get. He shook his head and said aloud, ‚It sure ain’t easy to run a band.‘ The way he said it, I really felt sorry for him.“
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Of all his contemporaries, Basie is most in awe of Duke Ellington. He has held Duke’s suave dignity as a model for himself, a model that he knows he does not have the temperament to emulate convincingly. The two leaders are alike in their reluctance to fire musicians. The discipline in the Ellington orchestra has always been remarkably lax. Basie actually runs a tighter crew, but he too, has to be driven to acute irritation before applying the guillotine.
In recent years the three most notable firings were Gus Johnson (drummer), Bill Graham (reeds), and Reunald Jones (trumpet). No one in or out of the band knows why Basie fired Johnson, the best drummer the band has had since Jo Jones. The consensus is that the band needed some ‚flash‘ and accordingly he fired Johnson to replace him with Sonny Payne, who is inclined to send up rockets when the music calls for indirect lighting. The sidemen have long been disturbed at Sonny’s playing, though he is liked personally, and Basie realizes he has made a mistake, however is unlikely to dismiss Payne, unless he becomes a disciplinary problem. Basie did look on approvingly when Freddie Green, aggravated by Payne’s tendency to rush the beat, kept a long stick on the stand, which he used to poke the drummer when the beat began to run away.
Billy Graham, an extrovert and a prankster, „played himself out of the band,“ as one of his fellow roisters points out. „Billy was not only too playful, but he got a little too ‚familiar‘ with the ‚Chief‘ himself. He’d even heckle Basie on the bandstand. As usual when a guy goes, Graham got the news during a layoff. When we came back, he wasn’t there.“
The patrician, Renauld Jones, was quite a different case. For several years, Jones, who had the bearing of a British military officer in pre-Gandhi India, was the most conspicuous member of the band. Seated at the extreme left of the trumpet section, Jones was always one level higher than his colleagues. He played with one hand, as if in derision of the simplicity of the music. When the section would rise in unison, Jones invariably remained seated. His expression, no matter how much joking was going on, was constantly sour. Jones‘ childish campaign of passive contempt was in protest that Basie never assigned him any solos. Jones was finally fired because, as a section mate gleefully said, „he drank too much water.“ Jones was a clubhouse lawyer and occasionally complained to the musicians union about overtime matters. He went to the union one time too often.
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John Hammond has written about Basie’s first Decca contract in 1936, which called for twenty-four sides at a payment of $750.00 without a cent of royalties. Hammond later complained to the union and Basie at least, was raised to scale, but he’s never received any royalties from any of his early big hits, One O’Clock Jump, Swingin‘ the Blues, etc.
It took Basie many years to examine his own books. Relatively unconcerned by financial details, Basie was a ‚professional baller‘ during the 1930’s and 1940’s, hanging out with his men after hours and generally exploring the pleasures and challenges of hedonism. „When he woke up,“ said a friend, „he had no band, no wardrobe, no money. The managers had swimming pools.“
Basie disbanded and toured with a small group in 1950 and 1951, mainly to pay off his debts. He became so careful of fiscal details in his next big band that for a time, he, himself, was the paymaster.
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Basie has picked his men carefully. He is as concerned with a man’s temperament as his musical ability, and will not knowingly hire a congenital complainer or anyone who is addicted to drugs. The Basie band is the cleanest of all big bands.
Just as he has a greater capacity as a pianist than he indicates, Basie’s organizing capacity is more impressive than is generally realized. „Think of what he was able to do in 1953, „says Jo Jones, „He’d lost all of his band, yet he was able to remember guys he’d heard that he had liked, take some other suggestions, fuse them into a unit, and take over the whole big band business.“
Basie as an organizer is also in evidence at rehearsals. Sitting on the sidelines he’ll stop the band and make changes, usually cuts, and shapes a score into the Basie vein. He does not read music easily and prefers to absorb a new arrangement by ear, but once he has it down, it becomes inescapably his and the band’s.
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It is true that while the Basie Band is inclined to become somewhat fretful when based in New York for too long, he is a model of stoicism when traveling. „It’s strange to watch him in a crisis, „says trombonist Benny Powell, „he lets everybody else panic. We’ll be doing a one nighter and everything will go wrong. The bus breaks down; there’s no time for dinner; we get to work late; the promoter is angry. Basie couldn’t be calmer, and funnier.“
Once in a great while, Basie’s public mask slips momentarily. „One night at Newport,“ recalls pianist Billy Taylor, „I saw Bill off to one side listening intently to a small modern combo. He was listening wistfully, it seemed to me. The group was pretty adventurous. Somebody interrupted Bill, and suddenly he was Count Basie again, the smile, the detachment. I just don’t think he’s as happy musically as he mostly convinces himself that he is. There was more he wanted to do, but a while back he decided to play it safe.“
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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