(This
book review appeared in the Sunday Show section of
The Chicago Sun-Times on Dec. 29, 1985.)
Good
Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie
As told to Albert Murray. Random House.
During
the last decade of his life, Count Basie managed to tape his
recollections while swingin’ with his band, maintaining—as
always—a hectic schedule of international touring.
A
heart attack in the late 1970s didn’t stop him, nor did arthritis
in the early 1980s. When he died of cancer at age 79 in 1984,
William "Count" Basie had been leading his big band
for almost 50 years.
For
many fans, it was the definitive big band of jazz. Swing and
Basie were one and the same. He appeared to be a quiet man
who said all he wanted to say through his music. He signaled
his musicians with a smile, a glance, and a note or two. They
always knew what he meant.
Good
Morning Blues takes the reader on Basie’s fantastic solo
through the 20th century, from his boyhood in Red Bank, N.J.,
to Kansas City in the 1920s and 1930s, to the grand days of’
the Swing Era, when more than 2,000 people would go to a record
store just to get his autograph, and right up to the Basie
band of the 1980s.
His
parents paid for lessons on the piano, from which Basie’s
genius—not in reading music but being able to play anything
he heard—emerged. Jazz was still evolving when Basie left
Red Bank as a teenager for New York City to seek a career
as a musician.
During
the 1920s, he performed on the vaudeville circuit with several
companies, one of which folded in Kansas City, leaving Basie
stranded. Kansas City was much like Chicago during Prohibition,
a Mecca for jazz and blues and booze. It became Basie’s base.
In
1928, Walter Page invited Basie to play piano for his Blue
Devils. Not long after, Kansas City bandleader Bennie Moten
soon began pirating Blue Devils. Moten recruited the extraordinary
Basie as well. Moten, a pianist himself, would play a few
numbers at the beginning and end of each evening, allowing
Basie to play most of the night.
When
Moten died in 1935, Basie decided to go out on his own, at
first leading a trio, then a nine-piece group, Count Basie
and his Barons of Rhythm. The following year, thanks to radio
broadcasts from Kansas City’s Reno Club, record producer John
Hammond heard Basie while listening to the band on his car
radio outside the Congress Hotel in Chicago, where Hammond's
friend Benny Goodman was performing. Hammond arranged for
Basie and his band to go to New York. In 1937, the Basie band
emerged that would soon rank as one of the best of the Swing
Era.
It
became a precision band, as if every sideman thought as one.
But it also was a band of superb soloists, including Lester
Young, Herschel Evans, Buck Clayton, Benny Morton, Earle Warren,
Eddie Durham—and singers Jimmy Rushing and Billie Holiday.
Many
early Basie songs were based on "head" or unwritten
arrangements that the band simply worked out. Gradually, Basie
added arrangers to score the charts. In 1938 the Basie band
was heard throughout the nation via CBS radio broadcasts.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Basie
stayed with his big band throughout the 1940s, reluctantly
giving it up for awhile during the early 1950s in favor of
a small group. Billy Eckstine finally persuaded him to put
together another big band.
Basie’s
mid-1950s big band was like a prism, reflecting the influences
of the earlier band and focusing them onto the Basie band
of the future. It featured Chicagoan Joe Williams as its vocalist.
In 1955, they recorded "Every Day I Have the Blues,"
which soared to the top of the charts, the first big band
number to do so in almost a decade. Almost immediately, Basie’s
instrumental version of "April in Paris" enjoyed
the same success.
For
the next three decades until his death, Basie and his men
kept on swingin’. His sidemen were loyal, always loyal, but
most went on to other things after a few years with Basie.
Guitarist Freddie Green, who joined Basie in 1938, stayed
with Basie until the very end.
His
wife of almost five decades, Catherine, died in 1983. Throughout
Good Morning Blues, their devotion to one another is
matched only by Basie’s devotion to his music. He met Catherine
when she was a 16-year-old dancer in a vaudeville show, but
it took him more than a decade to win her over.
Good
Morning Blues, in its own way, ranks among a handful of
books in this century that poignantly illustrate the "American
dream." What is so remarkable about this book is that
it conveys in Basie’s own subtle fashion how he succeeded
in the first place—and then how he stayed at the top.
