Think about the Glenn Miller song In the Mood. Those fat brassy chords, the smoother-than-silk sax lines that waft effortlessly between punctuating solos. And that walking bass line, the indescribable lilting suspension of time and rhythm that made you tap your foot the moment you heard it in your head. That's swing.
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That's the sound that Count Basie and his Orchestra introduced to the world in the 1930s. For 80 years since then they've been the guardians that swing, they've been its greatest practitioners. When the orchestra plays in Canberra on May 17 there will be a direct connection to that sound, untouched by the intervening years of history.
Trombonist Clarence Banks is one of the last three musicians hired by Basie before he died in 1985. Banks says the orchestra is devoted to maintaining the sound that Basie pioneered and perfected. "We're trying to keep that, for lack of a better word, groove that Basie had."
That "groove" he is referring to is best described as the Count Basie approach to swing; other people call this the "Basie Way". Every jazz ensemble since 1940 has incorporated swing in some form or another but no one does it like the Count Basie Orchestra.
It all started when William "Count" Basie, a talented piano player was stranded in Kansas City in 1927 after a tour went bust. Lax liquor laws and non-stop nightlife made the city a cradle for jazz in the '20s and '30s. Basie found work as a musician and began to learn the local style built around extended solos and the 12-bar blues. He also learned a rhythmic technique which was just emerging in the jazz world at that time - swing.
Basie met a bassist called Walter Page and the two of them joined the best band in town - Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra. Page invented the walking bass lines, Basie brought syncopated piano fills - a combination that would transform the orchestra and would soon define big band swing. The breakthrough moment came in 1932. The doors were famously left open to a concert in Philadelphia so a curious public could hear this new sound from Kansas City. The crowd demanded seven encores and the big band swing era was born.
Basie took over the Kansas City Orchestra when Moten died suddenly in 1935. He rapidly reformed and renamed it the Count Basie Orchestra and dominated the big band era alongside Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. Apart from a brief hiatus in the early 1950s, the orchestra has continued under his name ever since.
Banks was called up to the orchestra in 1984. He was already an established trombonist who'd been playing big band jazz and Basie arrangements for years. But this was different. In the Count Basie Orchestra the music was "phrased differently, played differently [and at] different tempos" – even though they were the exact same notes he'd been playing just days before. It took him three weeks to just understand the music and how they played it. Six months before he was "on top of it".
Banks knows many great musicians over the years who simply couldn't adapt to the Basie way. He feels fortunate that he got to learn directly from the Count, even though he was "shaking in his knees".
"[Basie] listened, was understandable, reasonable, easy to talk to – although I was afraid to talk to him," he laughs. "He had that persona, he didn't say much."
The band will play some new material but they understand that a lot of their audience come to hear "the old stuff" – that purity of sound back to the big band era, to Frank Sinatra who recorded seminal albums with Basie and his orchestra. Banks wouldn't have it any other way. It's "the real deal, they're going to hear the real deal".
The Count Basie Orchestra – 80th Anniversary Tour is performing at the Canberra Theatre on Sunday, May 17 at 7.30pm.
