Carmen Bradford & the Count Basie Orchestra
Last week, I had the unadulterated pleasure of seeing (and hearing!) the Count Basie Orchestra at Birdland in Manhattan. I’ve been the Trustee of Count Basie’s estate since 2012, and I always go to hear them when they’re in town. It’s such a delight!
Big band music was heard all over the airwaves in the 1930s and 1940s – it defined the Swing Era. Its band leaders, including Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey, were all household names. In a world before television and streaming music, people would go out to dance with live music. The bands criss-crossed the country as their audiences would flock to dance halls to hear them. Although some bands lasted past World War II, their popularity ultimately gave way to smaller ensembles and different kinds of jazz, such as bebop, as well as various dance music genres, including rhythm and blues and rock and roll.
But the Basie Band has persisted for 90 years. Mr. Basie started it in 1935 and led it until he died in 1984, and it still tours – and they still sound fantastic.. Its 18 instrumentalists are all men – white and black, young and old, and they live all over the US. Carmen Bradford, a phenomenal vocalist, sings with them. As different as they are individually, I marveled at how well they play together, sounding as if they are one entity. Basie was known for treating the Band members like family, and that, I think, is the secret sauce for why it still exists. It could not continue its signature sound without one element – love.
Dee Askew, the woman behind the scenes, has been booking the band since the 1970s. She works with venues, books flights and hotels, makes sure everyone has their music, their instruments, their tickets, and their passports, and deals with endless changes as they travel. Scotty Barnhart, the band’s director, chooses the music and the musicians, assigns solos, and introduces the tunes with little stories that make the audience feel included.
And so, that love exudes to the audience. As I looked around the room at the audience, I asked my tablemates, “Who are these people? What brought them out here tonight? What are their stories?” Of course, I will never know. But I do know that although we might not have anything in common and may look at the world with very different lenses, we were all tapping our feet in time together for a few hours that night.
Basie lives!