JERUSALEM — It was, not surprisingly, while taking a walk —
when most realizations occur — that I finally understood something
about Count Basie that I’d been trying to understand for close to
thirty years: his playing was pure nuance. How, I’d long wondered,
was it possible to do more than almost anyone else by doing so
little? How could a little be a lot? How could repetition and
predictability be varied and unpredictable?
And now — taking my morning constitutional in the
north-Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Hamivtar, very far both in
space and time from Count Basie, Kansas City and all that, but
pursued by it in spirit — I had it: Count Basie dispensed with
everything else and resided only in nuance. Very, very fine
nuance.
It was a rare achievement especially in jazz, a vital,
propulsive music that encourages effusiveness. Among the giants of
jazz, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet playing came closest to the Count
in economy and precision. But the extroverted Satchmo was somewhat
more talkative on his instrument, more willing to expand and flow
freely. Count Basie was the most pared-down jazz master ever —
bare bones, aphorism. He was like a writer who writes only proverbs
— great ones at that.
William “Count” Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1904,
and by the 1920s he was a professional pianist in New York City,
learning from another mythic figure, Fats Waller. In 1927 he seems
to have wound up in Kansas City almost by accident, passing through
there with a traveling revue, joining up with “territory bands”
that toured the Midwest. It was in 1936 that the Kansas City-based
Count Basie Band emerged; and over the next almost half-century
until his death in 1984 it established itself, with the Duke
Ellington Band, as one of the two greatest big bands in jazz
history.
My own first encounter with the Count came, I believe, in 1970
when I was fifteen. I was heavily into rock then, not jazz, but I’d
heard snatches of jazz going back to childhood and was always
affected. It was probably The Tonight Show, and it was definitely a
summer night — otherwise I wouldn’t have been up watching so late
with my parents. The Count’s playing impressed me that night, but
even more so — his face. It was an extraordinary face with its
large eyes and wide jowls, its look of absolute refractory
stillness. It was the face of someone who played the piano
differently than any human being who ever lived.
LIKE ELLINGTON’S, BASIE’S BAND featured musicians of astonishing
originality and expressiveness, yet retained the stamp of its
leader at every moment. When Billie Holliday sang, Lester Young
played the tenor saxophone, or Buck Clayton played the trumpet in
the Basie Band, they remained Billie Holliday, Lester Young, and
Buck Clayton — yet at the same time, every note they produced was
Basie, part of the Basie phenomenon. If Ellington was a tempestuous
poet, searching restlessly for truth in esoteric terrain, Basie had
the truth, his sound cool, clean, and knowing, his Kansas City
rhythm section chugging along assured and steady as a train.
Some of Basie’s later big-band recordings are, to my ear, slick
and formulaic; but it doesn’t matter, there being a wealth of
recordings from which to pick what suits one. With due regard for
the greatness of the larger ensembles at their best, especially in
the early period when they laid down classics like “One O’Clock
Jump,” “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” and “Every Tub,” I’m most partial
to the small-group recordings the Count made sporadically over the
decades, their intimate settings most “friendly” to his own
superfine playing. Count Basie and His Small Groups: “The Fives” on
the Cedar Giants of Jazz series (UK) offers twenty-four numbers
dating from 1936-1942, about half of them twelve-bar blues, many of
them with only Basie and his rhythm section, that best epitomize
the enigma of the Count, who did so much by doing so little, whose
playing contains, perhaps, secrets about how to live, how to slough
off all that is even faintly false, excess, and contingent and keep
only what is true, valuable, and essential. Almost as wonderful in
this regard is the 1961 recording Count Basie and the Kansas City
Seven.
Count Basie belonged to a race of titans, a set of figures with
names like Count, Fats, Satchmo, and Lady Day, the color and
uniqueness of whose musicianship and personalities is the stuff of
myth and legend. Jazz is today an art music that is played for
small, ardent followings in places as diverse as America, Poland,
and Japan, and may it go on forever; but it can never recover the
era of its progenitors, who came into the world like a primal force
before jazz began to think about itself and define itself. Among
the titans, Count Basie was the most humble and reticent, the most
committed to his band and fellow musicians even at the expense of
his own prominence. But he could not escape his greatness. His
striking, impassive, inscrutable face will stare at us down the
ages — a gnomic counterpoint to his playing, jazz’s finest
distillation of knowledge and truth.
