Tag: Count Basie

Title: Count Basie – Count Basie And The Kansas City 7 (1960/2010)
Genre: Jazz
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Count Basie and the Kansas City 7 is an album by American jazz bandleader and pianist Count Basie featuring small group performances recorded in 1962 for the Impulse! label. The Allmusic review by Scott Yanow awarded the album 4 stars stating “One of Count Basie’s few small-group sessions of the ’60s was his best”.

One of Count Basie’s few small-group sessions of the ’60s was his best. With trumpeter Thad Jones and tenors Frank Foster and Eric Dixon filling in the septet, Basie is in superlative form on a variety of blues, standards and two originals apiece from Thad Jones and Frank Wess. Small-group swing at its best.

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Title: Count Basie – Live At The Sands (Before Frank) (1998) [MFSL 2013]
Genre: Jazz
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Frank Sinatra’s collaborations with Count Basie were among the singer’s better ventures back into jazz in the early 1960s, and led not only to a couple of great studio albums, and one superb live Sinatra album, but also to Basie’s being signed to the Sinatra-founded Reprise label in the mid-’60s. The 53 minutes of music captured on Live at the Sands was recorded during the opening sets from three different shows in late January and early February of 1966, by Basie and his band during the engagement with Sinatra at the Sands Hotel that yielded that live Sinatra album. Maybe that raises the expectations, because this release is a slight disappointment — the band sounds OK, but except for Basie himself and drummer Sonny Payne, it seems like they’re walking their way through some of this repertoire. There are a number of good moments here: “I Needs to Be Bee’d With,” “Flight of the Foo Birds,” “Satin Doll,” “Blues for Home,” and “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” (which is worth hearing for the ensemble work and Eric Dixon and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis’ solos); the band finally takes flight, but compared with some of the recordings of complete shows by Basie that are nothing less than great, a lot of this is secondary. Given the fact that it was Sinatra’s set that was going to be taped for release for certain, the band may, indeed, have been holding back during its own set, for good reason. Even the audience response says it, positive and polite but not excessive — they were there for Sinatra, and nothing Basie and company did were likely to bowl them over, so why make the effort? It’s not a bad set, and some of it — “Makin’ Whoopee” (especially the call and response on the piano), “Corner Pocket,” and “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” — has great appeal. But this is overall a legendary band doing a somewhat less-than-legendary set, during some gigs that, in fairness, yielded up a great live album elsewhere. The quality is solid live sound, in crisp stereo from a nicely controlled mid-’60s venue, using state-of-the-art equipment.

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Title: Count Basie – Supreme Jazz (2006)
Genre: Jazz
Format: MCH SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

William James “Count” Basie was an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer. In 1935, Basie formed his own jazz orchestra, the Count Basie Orchestra, and in 1936 took them to Chicago for a long engagement and their first recording. He led the group for almost 50 years, creating innovations like the use of two “split” tenor saxophones, emphasizing the rhythm section, riffing with a big band, using arrangers to broaden their sound, and others. Many musicians came to prominence under his direction, including the tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Herschel Evans, the guitarist Freddie Green, trumpeters Buck Clayton and Harry “Sweets” Edison and singers Jimmy Rushing, Helen Humes, Thelma Carpenter, and Joe Williams. Count Basie introduced several generations of listeners to the Big Band sound and left an influential catalog.

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