Count Basie: Through His Own Eyes (2020)
Born Bill Basie in Red Bank, NJ, Count Basie found his sound—and his name—after moving to Kansas City. When he returned to the East Coast to play Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in 1937, he was a star, the leader of one of the greatest of the era’s big bands. He may have lacked the orchestral imagination of his fellow nobleman of jazz, Duke Ellington, but as much as any band leader, he infused his swing with the sadness and optimism of the blues.
The title of the new documentary Count Basie: Through His Own Eyes refers to its central storytelling device: a narrator reads Basie’s own words, often culled from letters he wrote while on the road to his wife of many years. Count and Catherine Basie shared a home in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Queens and a beloved daughter, Dianne, handicapped by cerebral palsy. But Basie was seldom home. The hardworking musician had to keep gigging to pay for it all. According to band members interviewed for the film, Basie’s orchestra often spent 46-47 weeks on the road, including 67 one-nighters in a row.
And they did it traveling together on a bus, and often passed through places that were not only legally segregated but actively hostile. Hotels that accepted Black guests were scarce in many parts of the country. One musician recalls spending the night in a Black-owned funeral parlor for lack of any better accommodation.
Despite all difficulties, Basie and his crew turned up each night with a shine on their shoes and nary a wrinkle in their suits, ready to jump and swing and fill the dance floor with the wild jitterbugging captured in some of the film’s archival footage. Basie didn’t doubt the existence of systemic racism, but he never let it get him down. “Not a drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me,” he once said. Anger? “It’s self-destructive,” Basie insisted, an impediment to the joy of his music.
Through His Own Eyes follows Basie as he got started playing piano in a traveling Black vaudeville show and the deep impression made by the virtuoso stride playing of Fats Waller. However, once he found his own sound, his playing was almost minimal, a guiding signal for rhythmically orchestrated jazz that allowed soloists to soar within the space his music created. Basie’s occasional Top-40 hits and exposure to GIs during World War II through Armed Forces Radio made him one of the country’s most widely known African Americans, yet he wore his fame lightly. According to Through His Own Eyes, his family always came first and he ran his band like the benign patriarch of a fully functioning family.
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