Die Angaben, die Basie zu seinen frühen Jahren macht, sind allerdings sehr verlässlich, hört man anderswo (ich glaub nicht nur bei Hentoff sondern auch bei Larry Kart… dessen Text mag ich nicht auch noch bearbeiten und ganz reinstellen mag ich ihn auch nicht… sein Buch hab ich leider bisher noch nicht).
Anyway… die Autobiographie ist schon schön zu lesen! Was auch sehr klar wird ist, wie sehr Basie seine Frau Katy (Catherine) liebte.
Also nur die dazugehörige Passage von Larry Kart (1986):
A theme that recurs throughout the book is Basie’s love of his wife, Catherine. He first sees her when she is sixteen, one of the three „Snakehips Queens“ who danced with May Whitman’s vaudeville troupe. And when they finally wed (or, as Basie puts it, become „boy and girl“), his profound sense of satisfaction is almost palpable. Then, toward the end of „Good Morning Blues,“ Catherine Basie dies, and this is how the narrator presents it: „That album turned out to be the last one I made while Katy was alive, and she didn’t get to hear it because we lost her last April while I was up in Toronto. She was at home in Freeport, where she had been since late fall because her doctor had advised her to stay home and take it easy and watch her weight. So I knew she was not in the best of health, but all during the time while I was at home during the Christmas break, she didn’t seem to be having serious problems either. She was just her usual self, and that’s the way she was when I came back to work in January, and that’s how she sounded on the telephone every day. Then all of sudden she was gone. My Katy, my baby.“ That stark, four-word coda, with its double, falling cadence. Anyone, I suppose, can tell that only in this way could Basie express a weight of feeling that otherwise might have overwhelmed him – although in doing so he threatens to overwhelm us.
Full of accurate historical detail, „Good Morning Blues“ is most illuminating when it deals with Basie’s early career – in particular his encounter in Kansas City with the music of Walter Page’s Blue Devils, the band that virtually changed his life. „At the time,“ Basie explains (he was then on the road with a vaudeville revue), „I didn’t really think of myself as a jazz musician. I was a ragtime or a stride piano player, to be sure, but I really thought of that as being an entertainer, just another way of being in show business.“
Ein kleines Foto:
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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