count basie--4/11/25

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Today's selection -- from The Jazzmen by Larry Tye. Jazz legend Bill “Count” Basie grew up in Red Bank, New Jersey, the son of Lillian and Harvey Lee Basie. A pianist, he went on to form and lead a revered jazz big band for fifty years, releasing highly popular albums such as One O’Clock Jump and Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings: 

“Bill's relationship with Harvey was close but never warm. The son had three lasting memories of their time together: being caught drinking gin, dashing his dad's hopes of a father-son business mowing lawns and cleaning houses, and siding with his mother when his parents separated later in life. (Bill was blind to that growing estrangement, as he was to many things in his youth.) Harvey's response then, as Bill recollected: ‘If that's the way you're going about it, that's the way it'll have to be. Because, after all, she's your mother, and I know you love her, but she was my sweetheart and my wife.’ Harvey came closest to revealing his flatlined feelings about the Count in a toast he delivered years later: ‘He is my son, with whom I am well pleased.' Bill was equivalently muted when an interviewer asked how his father had reacted when Bill left behind sleepy Red Bank for the lights of Broadway: ‘I guess he seen that there was no use, you know, [making] me turn another way ... [He] didn't discourage me.'

“The bonds between Lillie and Billy ran far deeper. ‘My mother, God rest her lovely soul, used to take in washing,' Bill wrote. ‘Her having to do that rubbing and scrubbing over those hot suds and all of the squeezing and starching and shaking out and hanging out and taking in and ironing and pressing to help my father make ends meet ... Sometimes just the thought of all those baskets of laundry was almost more than I could bear, and I would just go over to her and hug her and say, “One of these days. You just wait and see. I promise. You just wait till I grow up.”’

“Lillie's burdens went well beyond the body-bending work she did for those white households, as Billy must have recognized. There were the irreparable losses—of Leroy, the son she openly mourned, and of Samuel, about whom she furtively anguished—and the oversized hopes she unmistakably vested in her surviving child. It was something she could only have talked about with Harvey, and neither left written records of their states of mind. But the adult Count Basie would never forget how Lillie responded to his boyhood promises to make good and do right by her: ‘[I] remember myself hearing what she always used to say back to me. I never will forget that. “I’m already proud of you, Billy.” she used to say, sometimes stroking me on the cheek, and patting me on the head, and sometimes holding me by both shoulders. “You're a very big help to me already. You're a good boy, Billy. You're such a good boy, and you will go far in the world, and my prayers will go with you and be with you.”’ 

“His best memories from Red Bank, as with most youngsters, were holiday sounds, tastes, and smells. ‘My mother loved to make cakes and pies,’ Bill said, ‘so there was all that nutmeg and vanilla and cinnamon and chocolate in the air. My mouth still waters when I remember those cakes and with all that coconut icing and those jelly layer cakes and those potato pies and custard pies. And all mixed in with all of that, you could also smell the celery and the sage and black pepper in the chicken or turkey stuffing.’

“His worst days were in the classroom. ‘School, I'm sorry to say, was not my thing.' he wrote. ‘I didn't go any higher than junior high school ... I used to stay in one grade so long it was shameful. Kids would come into kindergarten and grow on up and catch up with me and then leave me sitting there in the same class ... I didn't pass in my homework or anything. I didn't take any tests. I didn't even have any report card anymore. It was ridiculous. I guess my parents must have said to hell with it.’

“It wasn't that Billy—or Willie, as he sometimes preferred then—lacked passions. His first was show biz, specifically the carnival. He liked the dazzle of the big-tops and their clowns, acrobats, parade bands, and once-wild animals. He liked merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels. Most of all, he dreamed about leaving town with the carnies, no matter where they were headed. It was the characteristic wanderlust of youth, along with the bane of being an only child in an often frosty household. Regardless of the reason, as he wrote afterward, ‘I just wanted to be on the road with a show so much so that I would have gone along just to be a water boy for the elephants.’

“The love of spotlights and footlights also took him as often as he could to Red Bank's Palace moving-picture theater, which featured not just silent picture idols like Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton, and Mary Pickford, but live comedy, songs, and dance. He swept the auditorium and lobby, polished the rails and fixtures, put up extra seats and scrubbed the below-stage dressing rooms used by vaudeville acts, and greeted entertainers at the train station, showing them to their hotel. Eventually he graduated to projection room helper. One day, the house piano player who accompanied that era's silents didn't show, and Willie volunteered to sit in. 

“This was his big moment. He didn't have the regular player's experience, but he had been taking lessons forced on him by his mother, who scraped together the twenty-five-cent fees. While his interest waxed and waned, his ears heard not just the beat written on the sheet but ones in his head and toes. His hands tinkled the keyboards with ease and poise. He was a natural. 

Basie at the piano

“Exercises demanded of him were straightforward, but he delivered more. ‘All I had to do was have somebody else playing something and I could start right in and repeat it,’ he remembered. ‘That wasn't anything for me. And of course, in those days you also picked up things from piano-player rolls.’

“It was more opportunism than epiphany, the way things generally are for the young. Willie Basie was no more drawn to the piano, or to the joys of ragtime and jazz, than Little Louis Armstrong was seduced by horns. Those attractions came later, no matter what romantics and screenwriters claim. Willie was as desperate to experience the world beyond Red Bank as Louis was to escape the Waif's Home and the bad-boy track that landed him there. For Willie, a band was an even better way out than the carnival, and he was showman enough to pull it off. 

“And much as Armstrong would experiment with a series of instruments before finding the trumpet for which he is famous, so Basie's first love was trap drums. His dad bought him a set with a small snare and bass, along with a hanging foot pedal. It was William Alexander ‘Sonny’ Greer, a native of nearby Long Branch and later Duke Ellington's percussionist, who unknowingly moved Basie off the drums. ‘I had sense enough,' Willie said, ‘to know that I'd never be able to do what he did up there.’

“Shy as he was, Willie also was ambitious, and he managed to talk his way into gigs in town with groups like the Colored Young Men's Association, where he soloed on the piano in his childlike knee britches. Red Bank, which took its name from the red soil of the Navesink River, was known then for its textiles and tanning, not for the quaintness that today makes it the Garden State's answer to Greenwich Village. The 1910 Census showed it had 7,398 people, and 844 Negroes, which to Bill Basie wasn't enough of either. While his first move was only ten miles down the road, to the modest seaside community of Asbury Park, it seemed to him like a metropolis with its population of 10, 150-1,934 of whom were Black. 

“Like any artist trying to prove his worth, he was game to do whatever it took. That meant parking cars at a roadhouse called the Hongkong Inn when a more seasoned player unseated him at the piano. Customers sometimes were drunk enough that they passed out in their vehicles, and Willie would get them comfortable, then help himself to whatever tip he felt he deserved. He also pilfered armfuls of just-baked rolls from the wicker baskets delivered in the early morning to restaurants, and he slept on a bench at Joe Brown's Pool Room, a magnet for musicians on Asbury Park's Black West Side. As his longtime guitarist Freddie Green would later say of the two of them: ‘We could have been a jazz musician or a criminal.’”