Biography

It began as a nine-piece band at the Reno Club, broadcast late at night on local radio. One night, with time to fill, the band started improvising; Basie named the piece One O’Clock Jump, and it became the band’s signature. The producer John Hammond heard the broadcasts, and in 1936 the band went to Chicago, then to New York, where it made the Woodside Hotel in Harlem its base and rehearsed in its basement.

The band at the Woodside, 1938:

Piano: Count Basie
Guitar: Freddie Green
Bass: Walter Page
Drums: Jo Jones
Trumpets: Buck Clayton, Harry Edison
Trombones: Benny Morton, Dicky Wells
Saxophones: Lester Young, Herschel Evans, Earle Warren
Voice: Jimmy Rushing

Freddie Green, Walter Page and Jo Jones were the All-American Rhythm Section. Lester Young and Herschel Evans sat on either side of the altos, two tenors in duel, an arrangement other bands soon copied.

In 1952 Basie formed a new sixteen-piece orchestra, the New Testament band, with more written arrangements and fewer solo turns: Neal Hefti’s Li’l Darlin’, Wild Bill Davis’s April in Paris, the records for Verve and Roulette. It made its first tour of Europe in 1958 and kept touring, recording and playing festivals into the 1980s. Basie died in 1984; the orchestra still plays.

This is a demo site, a tribute built to show what a band’s page on TJP can hold. Its dates are the demo’s own.