Count Basie

📍Red Bank, NJ 07701, USA

“I was born William James Basie in August 1904 in Red Bank, a small town on the Navesink River in New Jersey, and grew up on Mechanic Street. My father, Harvey, was a coachman and groundskeeper, and he played the mellophone, and my mother, Lillian, was a pianist who took in laundry and baked cakes to make ends meet. She gave me my first piano lessons, and paid a teacher twenty-five cents a lesson for more. I wasn't much for school. I dreamed of travelling, like the carnivals that came through town. I spent my time at the Palace Theater in Red Bank, doing odd jobs so I could get in free, and I learned to improvise music for the vaudeville acts and silent films, sometimes filling in when the regular pianist was late. I really wanted to play drums, but another Red Bank boy, Sonny Greer, was so good on drums that at fifteen I gave up and stuck to the piano. Sonny and I played together around town until he went off to join Duke Ellington. In the early 1920s I went to Harlem, where Fats Waller taught me the organ and the stride piano, and I toured on the vaudeville circuit. I got stranded in Kansas City in 1927, and stayed, joining Walter Page's Blue Devils and then Bennie Moten's band, and in 1935 I formed my own orchestra, the Count Basie Orchestra, the greatest swing band of all. Red Bank remembers me: its old Carlton Theatre is now the Count Basie Center for the Arts, and the town's football field carries my name.”

Sources: notoriousjazz.com Wikipedia: Count Basie