Live At Birdland The Count Basie Orchestra

• 1 Intro (Live) 00:17
• 2 The Kid From Redbank (Live) 03:13
• 3 Who, Me (Live) 05:10
• 4 Way Out Basie (Live) 05:06
• 5 In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning (Live) 06:08
• 6 Doodle Oodle (Live) 02:53
• 7 Four Five Six (Live) 08:30
• 8 Basie Power (Live) 04:06
• 9 Honeysuckle Rose (Live) 03:22
• 10 Only The Young (Live) 04:58
• 11 I Can't Give You Anything But Love (Live) 03:06
• 12 Easin' It (Live) 07:23
• 13 What's New (Live) 05:09
• 14 Kansas City Shout (Live) 03:33
• 15 How Do You Keep The Music Playing (Live) 05:07
• 16 Basie (Live) 04:18
• 17 One 'O Clock Jump (Live) 03:50
• 18 Wind Machine (Live) 03:23
• 19 April In Paris (Live) 03:31
• 20 There Will Never Be Another You (Live) 02:48
• 21 I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face (Live) 04:13
• 22 I Needs To Be Bee'd With (Live) 05:23
• 23 Flute Juice (Live) 03:53
• 24 Moten Swing (Live) 05:33
• 25 Blues In Hoss' Flat (Live) 08:15
• 26 Once In A While (Live) 04:17
• 27 Five 'O Clock In The Morning (Live) 03:14
• 28 Shiny Stockings (Live) 05:36
• 29 What Kind Of Fool Am I (Live) 03:34
• 30 Deed I Do (Live) 02:42
• 31 From One To Another (Live) 10:56
• 32 Whirlybirds (Live) 05:33
• 33 One 'O Clock Jump (short) (Live) 01:19
• Total Runtime 02:30:19

Info for Live At Birdland

"In the summer of 1961, Count Basie and his Orchestra played in the iconic New York jazz club, Birdland, which Basie considered his musical home. The live recording from two of those nights, Basie at Birdland! has been called simply the best live recording of a big band ever.

Almost 60 years later, the Count Basie Orchestra, now under the direction of Scotty Barnhart and still performing all over the world returns to Birdland to once again record a live record. Those four nights in January 2020 would prove to be fateful as this country and the entire world would fall prey to a global pandemic shortly thereafter and virtually all live music performances would cease for the next year and a half. None of these coming challenges were on anyone""s mind as the crowds poured into Birdland that week. They knew that the Basie band remains a very special unit and that a four-night stint at Birdland promised special moments. The added element of a live recording made those nights that much more electric and the buzz in the room was palpable.

Live at Birdland captures the current band at its peak, and with its potent mix of seasoned veterans and emerging voices, simultaneously honors the tradition and looks forward. The Count Basie Orchestra retains the typical high level of musicianship we""ve come to expect over the last 85 years."

John White of Jazz Journal was considerably positive, writing that the album "offered a mixture of 'New Testament' Basie favourites with some surprising additions... [which] retain the flavour of the originals." He added: "The band can (and does) explode on some familiar (but adapted) charts. [...] Pearson, Doug Lawrence and Barnhart turn in memorable solos, while the band provides an initial shouting and then a shaded down backing." However, he concluded that the album "has considerable merits, but minus Basie himself is rather like 'The Marx Brothers' minus Groucho – not quite authentic." Matt Silver, writing for WRTI, stated: "There's not that much that's new here, not that much that could be branded as innovative— whatever that increasingly nebulous but ubiquitous merit badge even means. And maybe that’s why this album is, musically and conceptually, refreshing."

Scotty Barnhart, director, trumpet
David Glasser, lead alto saxophone, flute
Markus Howell, alto saxophone, flute
Doug Lawrence, tenor saxophone
Doug Miller, tenor saxophone
Joshua Lee, baritone saxophone
Frank Green, lead trumpet
Shawn Edmonds, trumpet
Endre Rice, trumpet
Brandon Lee, trumpet
David Keim, lead trombone
Clarence Hanks, trombone
Mark Williams, trombone
Alvin Walker, bass trombone
Glen Pearson, piano
Will Matthews, guitar
Trevor Ware, double bass
Robert "B.T." Boone Jr., drums
Special Guest:
Carmen Bradford, vocals
Jamie Davis, vocals
Butch Miles, drums (tracks 11, 12)

Recorded live January 15-18, 2020 at Birdland, New York City


Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 48kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Count Basie
Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1904, William "Count" Basie was not always the fabled "Count". He began his career as Bill Basie, an itinerant pianist who made his living pounding keys in theaters featuring silent movies and touring on the Theater Owners Booking Agency (TOBA) circuit, a hopscotch run of independent performance venues, in black communities stretching from East to West, North and South.

TOBA was also known as Tough On Black Artists, or less affectionately Tough On Black you-know-whats. In 1927, Basie, then touring with Gonzelle White and the Big Jazz Jamboree, found himself "high and dry" in Kansas City, Missouri. It was unlikely that Basie had followed Horace Greeley's actually John B.L. Soule's entreaty to "Go West young man" and his destiny was certainly not manifest.

As Basie recounted in his autobiography, Good Morning Blues, "I don't remember what my plans were at the time, but in the meantime I got sick and had to go to the hospital."

Nevertheless, for a musician of Basie's inclinations, Kansas City was not a bad place to be stranded. In the 1920's and 30's, Kansas City was headquarters for the territory bands that played the mid and southwest. KC was also a veritable cauldron for the heady mixture of blues principles, ineffably swinging rhythms and brilliant instrumentalists that coalesced into one of the signature sounds of American music, both popular in its appeal and substantial in its musical import.

Basie quickly fell in with the best of the territory bands, including Walter Page's Blue Devils and Benny Moten's Kansas City Orchestra. By 1935, Basie's destiny was becoming manifest. He had formulated and was leading the band that epitomized Kansas City Swing, the Count Basie Orchestra. Along with the bands of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, Basie's orchestra would define the big band era.

While the media of the time crowned Benny Goodman the "King of Swing", the real King of Swinging was undoubtedly The Count. Basie's achievements, however, would transcend the Swing Era as such. The Basie orchestra evolved into one of the most venerable and viable enterprises in American music, as meaningful in its legacy and continuing productivity as any musical organization of the 20th, and now, 21st century.

Interestingly, the critical consensus charaterizes the Basie lineage in Biblical terms, as the Old and New Testament bands. The Old Testament band's style has been summed as a combination of democratically developed, or head, riff-driven arrangements, dripping with blues essence and relaxed, but relentless, swing that showcased a who's who of very distinctive instrumentalists and vocalists: Lester Young, Hershel Evans, Harry Edison, Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, Jo Jones, Freddie Green and Jimmy Rushing among others.

In the early 1950's, The "New Testament" Count Basie Orchestra rose Phoenix-like from the ashes of the Big Band era. For the last fifty plus years, the Count Basie Orchestra has been an arranger's palette. Thad Jones, Ernie Wilkins, Neal Hefti, Sammy Nestico, and Frank Foster, to name a few of the more prominent Basie's penmen, have added volumes to the Basie Library. Through them, the Basie repertoire has continued to broaden harmonically and rhythmically, making it more than hospitable to the talents of successive generations of musicians. As Basie allowed for certain measure of change and for a variety of voices to emerge on the platform he created, his remained the ultimate sensibility.

Since Basie's passing in 1984, Thad Jones, Frank Foster, Grover Mitchell, Bill Hughes and now Dennis Mackrel have led the Count Basie Orchestra and maintained it as one of the elite performing organizations in Jazz.

Current members include musicians hired by Basie himself: John Williams (joined in 1970), Dennis Mackrel (joined in 1983), Carmen Bradford (joined in 1983), Clarence Banks (joined in 1984), as well as Mike Williams (1987, formerly w/Glenn Miller, NTSU 1 O'Clock), Doug Miller (1989, formerly w/Lionel Hampton), Scotty Barnhart (1992) and members who have joined in the last 15 years: David Keim (formerly w/Stan Kenton), Alvin Walker, Will Matthews, Marshall McDonald (formerly w/Lionel Hampton, Paquito D'Rivera's United Nations Jazz Orchestra), Doug Lawrence (formerly w/Benny Goodman, Buck Clayton), Cleave Guyton (formerly w/Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington Orchestra), Freddie Hendrix (Illinois Jacquet, Charles Tolliver) and our newest members: Mark Williams (Howard University), Bruce Harris, Bobby Floyd and Marcus McLaurine (formerly w/Clark Terry)

This album contains no booklet.