Count Basie

Because all those musicians were classically trained and all that sort of stuff.

Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Nina Simone.

of Thelonious Monk.

That was like classical music in my, right, right, right.

So here is a list pretty much by alphabetical order to remind us of some of the black performers that he either introduced to the U.S. or, of course, just gave them entree, more exposure.

the Supremes we talked about, but Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, Harry Belafonte, Brooke Benton, Diane Carroll, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, Bill Cosby, Count Basie, Sammy Davis Jr., Bo Diddley, Duke Ellington, The Fifth Dimension, Ella Fitzgerald, Four Tops, Jackson Five, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Moms Mabley, Johnny Mathis, The Platters, Richard Pryor, Lou Rawls, Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, Ike and Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, Flip Wilson, Stevie Wonder, and out of order, Fats Domino and Sam Cooke.

And so once we heard all these black performers, they became part of the mainstream, already were or became.

And so what did we do, Jim? We had all this music from Ed Sullivan to remind us, and we went right downtown or the Alma Plaza to buy our records.

Many of those ideas antithetical to Hammond's process of creating a cohesive album that would introduce Aretha to the world in an intentional, thoughtful way.

to focus on Aretha's voice, her soul, like he'd done with Billie Holiday and Count Basie.

But that process sounded too slow to the Franklins.

The result was an album biographer David Ritz described as uneven, a hodgepodge with weak arrangements.

He said, so that to me ruined listening.

Like he said, he heard Duke and Basie with no amps.

And he was still, he heard the band play the dynamics.

When another soloist entered, the band came down.

But the room wasn't filled with sound.

Certainly with a big band, they're playing all those dynamic things.

Count Basie.

I mean, speaking of where they use huge dynamics, where it's down to... like a brush on the hi-hat and a piano playing up in the upper register and then full band in roaring you know and it's it's exciting and intoxicating all that kind of stuff joe henderson comes out and i know one could argue that is it it's way more than intellectual but there's so much information And it's not with all of the dense sounds.

I'm Don Shor, coming to you from 95.7 FM, KDRT-LP, broadcasting from Davis, California.

That was Count Basie, O Lady Be Good, from the late 1930s.

Coming up tonight, Sonny Stitt, Sasha Distel, Stan Goetz, Phineas Newborn Jr. and the All-Stars, Duke Ellington with Peggy Lee on vocals, Woody Herman and his orchestra, Ella Fitzgerald, Chico Hamilton, Zoot Sims, Joe Pass, the Pat Longo Super Big Band, Winston Walls and Brother Jack McDuff, and Diane Schuur and Maynard Ferguson.

All tonight on Jazz After Dark.

The Sands, Sinatra at the Sands.

This is like one of the most famous, most popular albums with Count Basie, Quincy Jones.

Just great, right? And so I had Charles Pignon is my friend.

He's the president of Sinatra Enterprises.

And they're not sponsoring.

I'm just telling you.

So then Charlie says to me, You know, it was Count Basie, and he started this show at the Sands.

This was epic, by the way, for Frank Sinatra.

A little big band there, Bran.

I love Count Basie.

I feel like that should be not allowed.

Count Basie's too good for this.

It is, but it's on Bandcamp, so what are you going to do? If it wasn't Exhibition Week, I don't know.

Maybe we would have had to vote on it.

The two drummers had a long history by then.

They had first been introduced at a Count Basie show, in the sixties, by a stranger neither of them knew.

Decades later, they were still puzzling over who that stranger was.

Hart was brash and wiry.