![]() ![]() ![]() You have to have the right bass player, who knows how all the other bass players played. “What it really comes down to is that you’ve got to have the right musicians who understand the history of the music. “When people come in and don’t have that awareness, they end up leaving, or being asked to leave, because it’s too much of a problem. “Everybody in this orchestra has a responsibility to know the whole 79-year history of the Basie band,” Barnhart says. He knows how important Tulsa was to Count Basie, and so do the rest of the members. That includes the orchestra’s current leader, trumpeter Scotty Barnhart. But it’s in the hands of people who know and appreciate its creator’s history. “We are thrilled to have the Count Basie Orchestra back in Tulsa for the show, where it all started.”īasie’s music is the only thing that’s returning, as the Count himself died in 1984. “Count Basie’s sound wouldn’t be the same without the Oklahoma roots,” says Jason McIntosh, Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame CEO. Currently on a national tour, the Basie Orchestra stops off Sunday at the Jazz Depot, playing a show only a few blocks south of the street where Basie first heard the band that changed his life. And some 79 years after Basie started his own group, it’s still an active and vibrant part of American’s pop-music scene. “Everything about them really got to me,” he added, “and as things worked out, hearing them that day was probably the most important point in my musical career so far as my notion about what kind of music I really wanted to play was concerned.”īasie went on to join the Blue Devils, and, later, Bennie Moten’s outfit in Kansas City, which eventually metamorphosed into the Count Basie Orchestra – the big band that epitomized Kansas City jazz. There was such a team spirit among those guys, and it came out in the music, and as you stood there looking and listening you just couldn’t help wishing that you were a part of it. “I just stood there listening and looking, because I had never heard anything like that band in my life. In his autobiography, Good Morning Blues (written with Albert Murray), Basie described the unforgettable impression the Blue Devils first made on him. Basie was in town playing the Dreamland Theatre on Greenwood Avenue with a touring vaudeville act, and he hurriedly dressed and went out to see the group for himself. It turned out to be a big jazz band called the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, playing off the back of a flatbed truck in order to drum up business for a dance that night. WORLD-FAMOUS COUNT BASIE ORCHESTRA PLAYS JAZZ DEPOT SUNDAYĮighty-seven years ago this past summer, a piano player from New Jersey named William “Count” Basie stirred in his bed at Tulsa’s Red Wing Hotel, awakened by what he first thought was a phonograph record.
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