Home » Search Center » Results: Count Basie
Results for "Count Basie"
George Gee: Swing Makes You Happy!
by Jack Bowers
The George Gee Swing Orchestra swings in the manner of Gee's friend and mentor, Count Basie, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale (Gee's group numbers only eleven, and that includes vocalists Hilary Gardner and John Dokes). Even so, the Basie spirit is ever-present, and if Swing Makes You Happy, Gee's eighth album as leader (and first ...
Coleridge Goode: 100 Not Out!
by Duncan Heining
To celebrate the 100th birthday of Jamaican-born bassist Coleridge Goode, All About Jazz publishes Duncan Heining's 2012 interview with Goode. A remarkable man and musician, the bassist connects aspects of British jazz from the 1930s through the war years and on through the fifties, sixties and seventies. He played with Caribbean-born and black British jazz pioneers ...
Benny Bailey / Nashville Big Band: A Bird in the Hand
by Jack Bowers
To accentuate the positive: A Bird in the Hand is Georgia-based drummer Ben Bailey's debut album as a big-band leader, and a splendid one it is, thanks to Bailey's ample talents and those of the Nashville Big Band. The recording arose from a chance meeting in 2011 when another well-known timekeeper, Duffy Jackson, traveled to from ...
Tampere Jazz Happening 2014
by Henning Bolte
Tampere Jazz Happening Tampere, Finland October 30--November 2, 2014 On the way from the airport to the city of Tampere you pass by Nokia, situated fifteen kilometres west of Tampere, the Scandinavian city famous for its gumboots and cables, and famous for its mobile phones. For a while 'Nokia' was synonymous ...
Cecil McBee: Masterful, And Always Equipped
by R.J. DeLuke
Cecil McBee is one of the finest bass players on the scene, a status he's held among musicians for many years, even if the public is slower to pick up on the achievements of this 79-year-old musician extraordinaire. A natural, he was quick to connect with musicians in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. But ...
The Magnificent Thad Jones – Blue Note 1527
by Marc Davis
Man does not live by hard bop alone, even on Blue Note. Sometimes, you just got to have a ballad. When you're in the mood, this is the record for you. Thad Jones provides the horn, and he has never been better. Jones is best known as co-leader of the big band that bore ...
How Ken Burns Murdered Jazz
Ken Burn’s interminable documentary Jazz starts with a wrong premise and degenerates from there. Burns heralds jazz as the great American contribution to world music and sets it up as a kind of roadmap to racial relations across the 20th century. But surely that distinction belongs to the blues, the music born on the plantations of ...
Count Basie Quartet: 1968
Count Basie's piano is deceiving. We're so used to hearing the pow of his band after one of his abbreviated blues introductions that we forgot just how glorious a player he was. In the following video, we have a chance to hear and see Basie's minimalist swing style develop in the raw, without brass or reeds ...
Ricordiamo Gerald Wilson
by Angelo Leonardi
Era rimasto l'unico grande bandleader della Swing Era, Gerald Wilson, e la sua recente scomparsa (l'8 settembre scorso, a 96 anni) è stata ricordata dai principali media statunitensi con ampi necrologi. Purtroppo in Italia è rimasta quasi inosservata. Superato il picco di popolarità dei primi anni sessanta, con un orchestra che vinse prestigiosi referendum, Wilson ebbe ...
Danish Radio Big Band: A Good Time Was Had By All
by Chris Mosey
To paraphrase Shakespeare, there is something rockin' in the state of Denmark. It's the Danish Radio Big Band, best of its kind in Europe, indeed--depending on who is conducting and the mood of the players--on occasion best in the world. Against all the odds in these cash-strapped times, the DRBB, as it is universally known, is ...
