Count Basie: The Red Bank Kid Who Left Kansas City Famous
Near Kansas City, Missouri
William Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in August of nineteen oh four, and came to Kansas City in the late nineteen twenties after a series of vaudeville and theater piano jobs that left him stranded there when a tour collapsed. He stayed. He worked as a pianist in the Kansas City clubs, having earlier studied organ with Fats Waller in Harlem, and absorbed the specific swing-based style the city was developing in its all-night sessions under the protection of the Pendergast machine.
He formed his own band in Kansas City in the early nineteen thirties and was working at the Reno Club on Twelfth Street when a young jazz producer and critic named John Hammond, listening to his car radio in Chicago, heard a late-night remote broadcast from the club and soon traveled to Kansas City to hear the band himself. Hammond was in his mid-twenties, the heir to a Vanderbilt fortune, and a jazz evangelist who would eventually discover or promote Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Aretha Franklin. When Hammond said you had to record, you recorded.
The Basie band left Kansas City in the fall of nineteen thirty-six, played Chicago, and reached New York soon after. Their first major New York engagement was at Roseland Ballroom, around the turn of the year. Within months they were the most talked-about big band in the country. The Kansas City sound, the riff-based, blues-drenched swing that had developed in the Pendergast clubs, had arrived on the national stage with a full orchestra behind it.
Basie led the band, in various configurations, for almost fifty years. He died in April of nineteen eighty-four. The recording career the Kansas City clubs made possible lasted longer than the machine that protected those clubs, longer than the clubs themselves, longer than most things the Pendergast era produced.
