Albert Murray - "Stomping The Blues" - 40th Anniversary Edition

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"Murray is possessed of the poet's language, the novelist's sensibility, the essayist's clarity, the jazzman's imagination, the gospel singer's depth of feeling."

—The New Yorker

"Beautifully illustrated with vivid period photos, LP covers, and broadsides of black jazz icons, Stomping the Blues represents the zenith of Murray's writing on the subject."

— Rolling Stone

"One fine lyrical history of the music. Murray demonstrates the central role of blues/jazz in American culture, telling us about the nature of our past, present and future: which of course is exactly what the blues is."

—San Francisco Review of Books

"A flamboyant, insightful examination and evocation of the sources, styles, and mythologies of blues music."

—Newsweek

Jonathan Haidt is a NYU professor of social psychology who specializes in morality and moral emotions.

On November 15th he delivered the 2017 Wriston Lecture to the Manhattan Institute under the title -  “The Age of Outrage: What It’s Doing to Our Universities and Our Country.”

Professor Haidt began his lecture by observing:

“Today’s identity politics . . . teaches the exact opposite of what we think a liberal arts education should be. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world.

By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a utilitarian or as a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or as a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.

But what do we do now? Many students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people.

This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion. It’s a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual impotence.”

In recent years, Jazz, too, has been afflicted by the Cult of the Single Lens which preaches that Jazz was created by Black musicians and appropriated by White musicians. Some go as far as saying that Jazz as a Black Art was stolen by White impersonators.

Those who hold this viewpoint have promulgated a distorted version of the facts that was shaped by ideas that were ideological before they were musical.

But to many scholars, it is beyond dispute that white musicians have been an integral force in jazz from its earliest days. Above all, they maintain that the idea of Jazz as an exclusively black cultural preserve does not stand up to close scrutiny.

Such matters have been loudly argued, even fought over, and doubtless will continue to be hot subjects for some time to come.

More relevant is the question of the music: Does any evidence support the idea of identifiable "black" and "white" styles? Did it ever?

As Richard Sudhalter points out in his seminal Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945:

“In the early years of Jazz’s evolution, particularly in the 1920s and '30s, there were differences. They came about chiefly because musicians of different races were separated in their day-to-day and professional lives. And it was separately that black and white musicians grappled with the same problems of rhythm, harmony, melodic construction, interaction.

Some of his more extreme views may make Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Leroi Jones) an unlikely source of valuable insight into such matters. Yet he seems right on target when he remarks, in Blues People: Negro Music in White America:

“Jazz as played by white musicians was not the same as that played by black musicians, nor was there any reason for it to be. The music of the white jazz musicians did not issue from the same cultural circumstances.”

In the context of the early years, the distinction is important. Differences in upbringing, environment, and musical training left white jazzmen (especially those who had little personal contact with black culture and its traditions) more likely to intellectualize, emphasizing matters of harmony and structure.

Performances by black ensembles, above all those of the South and Southwest, possessed, in general, a degree of rhythmic freedom, personal interaction, and often a blues feeling and melodic vocabulary rarely found in music by corresponding white bands. Again, Baraka gets it right:

“The white musicians understood the blues first as music, but seldom as an attitude, since the attitude, or world-view, the white musician was responsible to was necessarily quite a different one.”

But, along with other scholars who follow this line of reasoning, he fails to account for those many major black Jazzmen who feel, and display, little or no affinity for the blues and its "attitude." The exceptions they present, in their very numbers, are a counterargument, which cannot be explained, as Baraka tries to do, only as a matter of "Negroes trying to pretend that they had issued from [white] culture."

More likely, it seems, is an interpretation suggesting that mastery of what came to be called Jazz was not a matter of racial or genetic affinity (always a dangerous hypothesis) but of choice.”

As has been widely demonstrated in Richard Sudhalter’s Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945, Jazzmen of the pre-World War II decades, black and white, paid careful attention to each other's work, and that the degree to which such mutuality affected individuals varied immensely.

As he states: “Beginning in the 1920’s, individual musicians and ensembles made choices based on what they liked, even admired, incorporating the results in their emergent solo styles. Choice, above all, quickly became the determinant of what and how a man played, how he constructed and developed a solo, addressed the beat. In this context, as noted earlier, certain traits — tendencies and attitudes — can be identified as "white" and "black" contributions to the mix.”

One such “choice” or to revert back to Professor Haidt’s use of the term “lens” is the use of The Blues as a basis for a musician’s approach to Jazz.

[“I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.”]

And since it was first published in 1977, there has been no better description of how Jazzmen who chose The Blues as a lens through which to solve the problems of rhythm, harmony, melodic construction, and interaction needed to play Jazz at the highest levels than Albert Murray’s Stomping The Blues.

If you missed its original publication, the University of Minnesota Press is currently offering a 40th anniversary paperback edition with a new introduction by Murray-scholar, Paul Devlin.

The following from a University of Minnesota media release is very accurate concerning the tone and tenor of Murray’s landmark study of the blues and its relationship to Jazz:

In this classic work of American music writing, renowned critic Albert Murray argues beautifully and authoritatively that "the blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance."

In Stomping the Blues Murray explores its history, influences, development, and meaning as only he can. More than two hundred vintage photographs capture the ambiance Murray evokes in lyrical prose. Only the sounds are missing from this lyrical, sensual tribute to the blues.”

To carry Professor Haidt’s lens analogy one step further, a reading of Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues will certainly provide the reader with some clearer views to understand these assertions from Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Leroi Jones) in Blues People: Negro Music in White America:

“Jazz as played by white musicians was not the same as that played by black musicians, nor was there any reason for it to be. The music of the white jazz musicians did not issue from the same cultural circumstances.”

“The white musicians understood the blues first as music, but seldom as an attitude, since the attitude, or world-view, the white musician was responsible to was necessarily quite a different one.”

It’s one thing to say The Blues, but it’s quite another to understand what is meant by it.

Since it publication 40 years ago, Stomping the Blues has been influential in a number of ways as is detailed in Paul Devlin’s new introduction to the 40th anniversary edition.

Perhaps one of the most helpful insights about what Mr. Murray means by The Blues is contained in the opening paragraph of Mr. Devlin’s Introduction:

"’For Paul, Some fundamentals.’ That is how Albert Murray inscribed my copy of Stomping the Blues. Here is one of his most fundamental points: "You don't stomp the blues like this [pounds fist on table] — you stomp the blues like this [snaps with panache on the afterbeat]." Murray used this example all the time in interviews and on panels in order to illustrate that the blues is "stomped" with elegance, not force; with technique, not power; with joie de vivre, not rage.”

Mr. Devlin’s Introduction also contains many other perceptive and penetrating observations about the book that will help the reader gain a fuller appreciation of its significance. For example, Mr. Murray tells us that:

“Blues music has always been good-time music; its function has been the exorcism of despair."

Mr. Devlin parallel’s this with the work of Andre Malraux when he explains:

“To an extent, this is an application of Andre’ Malraux's argument about the workings of the artistic process: that art, primarily, is a response to art, as explained in his book The Voices of Silence (1953), a monumental, profound, and idiosyncratic analysis of the visual arts that Murray studied for decades, and a work not unlike Stomping the Blues in several ways: poetic, written by a learned critic, yet not shackled by the conventions developed or expected by academic or journalistic critics of the form in question, slow and methodical to start, and difficult to put down once it starts swinging.

Another point Murray considered fundamental was his reorientation of how blues relates to jazz: as a matter of the level of orchestration. Indeed, he argues that the process by which pop tunes and show tunes are recomposed as jazz tunes is "precisely" the process by which the folk blues was extended, elaborated, and refined into jazz. Stomping the Blues is fundamental to his vision of existence and a lens through which to view other aspects of culture. …  It expounds a vision of and for life …  Stomping the Blues endures year after year, enthralling readers new and old while provoking debate.”

In a brief synopsis, Mr. Devlin also details the storied, earlier publication history of Stomping the Blues:

“Stomping the Blues was published by McGraw-Hill in November 1976 and was celebrated with a midday "Kansas City Jam Session" in the publisher's landmark headquarters in midtown Manhattan, featuring jazz giants Mary Lou Williams, Budd Johnson, Buck Clayton, Eddie Durham, Oliver Jackson, Bill Pemberton, and Doc Cheatham. What an auspicious beginning: an artist saluted by artists he salutes. Stomping the Blues went on to win ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award for music criticism in 1977. A British edition was published in 1978, and subsequent American editions in 1982, 1989, and 2000. In 2016 it was included in the Library of America's edition of Murray's essays and memoirs ….”

Mr. Devlin offers a broader context as well in which to appreciate the influence and effect of Stomping the Blues as its relates to other of Mr. Murray’s writings, all of which have been published by the University of Minnesota Press, when he notes that:

This edition is a result of a collaboration that began in mid-2009 when I pitched what became Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones as told to Albert Murray, to the University of Minnesota Press [2011]. Since then, working with Murray's literary executor, Lewis P. Jones in, Minnesota has published Murray Talks Music; Albert Murray on Blues and Jazz (2016), a collection of Murray's previously uncollected or unpublished interviews and writings on music (edited by me), and a new edition of Good Morning Blues; The Autobiography of Count Basie as told to Albert Murray (2016), the fourth American edition. Murray Talks Music is a valuable companion to Stomping the Blues. These four books together tell an edifying story about American music and culture in the twentieth century: jazz and the blues as thought and lived; jazz and the blues in theory and practice. Stomping the Blues is the masterpiece that led to the other three….”

In the third and final section of his Introduction, Mr. Devlin offers these comments about the reception and influence of Stomping The Blues:

Stomping the Blues was reviewed extensively. Some of the smartest and most perceptive reviews include those by Gary Giddins in New York, John Edgar Wideman in The American Poetry Review, Robert Fleming in Freedomways, Bob Blumenthal in The Boston Phoenix, Stanley Dance in Jazz Journal, and Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone. ...

Many reviewers understood and appreciated what Murray was trying to do. A few years later Nelson George argued in the Village Voice in 1982 that it should be brought back into print and it soon was. George notes, perceptively, ‘the marvel of Stomping is that Murray manages to be both analytically detached and emotionally involved—criticism's most difficult parlay.’

By the early 1980s, and perhaps beginning with the review of the British edition in the Times Literary Supplement in 1978, a certain number of white jazz critics had started misinterpreting and exaggerating the caption on page 197, in which Murray refers to white jazz musicians as being part of the "third line." Third line does not mean third rate, as several critics have claimed or implied: it simply refers to a physical position in the old New Orleans parades, which Murray then used as a metaphor for closeness to idiomatic sources. ….

Stomping the Blues was probably the first work to articulate the connection between jazz, the blues, and locomotive onomatopoeia (or at least the first to do so cogently and comprehensively). Duke Ellington had been orchestrating stylized locomotives since the 1920s and Murray had been talking with Ellington about this since at least 1951 ….

Stomping the Blues had a marked influence on the development of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which Murray cofounded (see Murray Talks Music). The Preface to the Da Capo Press edition in 2000 frames the book in terms of that influence; it is the only previous dition to have an introductory essay. The Preface was written by Rob Gibson, a performing arts executive who was the first director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1991, and in 2000 was its executive producer and director….As of 2000, he writes that Stomping the Blues is a ‘preeminent source’ for people working in the jazz world and that Jazz at Lincoln Center has been able to embody ‘the many ideas that define this treatise.’

Aside from its place in the intellectual foundation of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Stomping the Blues has become a standard text in history of jazz courses, is a foundational text of the discipline of jazz studies, and has been quoted, cited, and discussed in dozens of books and academic articles….

But the reason to read Stomping the Blues today is not necessarily for its influence on Jazz at Lincoln Center, or on jazz studies as a discipline, or because the blues is central to the life of a random person on the street, or can elucidate a crucial response to modernity, but because following the movement of Murray's thought is a valuable experience in itself.  Yet the content of Stomping the Blues is accurate and can be the cornerstone of

an education in twentieth-century music. …”

Mr. Devlin sums up his Introduction with the following exhortation:

“So, if you're buying this book to replace a tattered copy from a history of jazz course, or if you are completing a Murray collection, or if you are discovering Murray for the first time, may it be your discovery of the year, and may rediscoveries be like new discoveries. Happy stomping.”

Paul Devlin

Long Island, New York

April 2017

I would also urge you to read Stomping the Blues because it will afford you with, from the perspective of Professor Haidt, another “ … tool for understanding the world,” -the Jazz World, that is.

Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Regardless of any preferences as to style or performer, if you are a Jazz fan, then you are a fan of Count Basie’s music. It really is as simple as that. In the over 60 years of my association with this music, I’ve never met anyone who claimed otherwise regarding this equation.”  

- The Editorial Staff at JazzProfiles

The full title of this work is Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie As Told To Albert Murray - and therein lies the conundrum because if you know anything at all about the personality of Bill [never William] Basie and Albert [never Al] Murray, you, like me, are scratching your head in wonder at the pairing.

You can take solace from the fact that we are not alone in musing about these two working in concert to produce this volume as Dan Morgenstern, the distinguished Jazz critic and Director Emeritus of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, also emphasized this “odd couple” in his Introduction to the book.

However, he also goes on to reconcile this enigma by explaining how the two built on their strengths and offset their weaknesses to produce an autobiography of a Jazz Master that was long in coming and almost didn’t arrive.

INTRODUCTION

DAN MORGENSTERN

When Albeit Murray told me that he was going to be, as he put it, Count Basie's co-writer on the great man's autobiography, I was both baffled and elated. Elated because Basie, a notoriously difficult interview subject at best, had for years been stalling journalists and scholars with the excuse that he was saving anything worth talking about for a (hypothetical) book; baffled not so much because I knew that Murray had other literary irons in the fire, but because these two, on the face of it, made such an odd couple.

Basie was laid back, laconic, taciturn, the incarnation of the man-of-few-words, while Murray was intense, animated, a brilliant and enthusiastic talker, a veritable verbalist. What I should have known is what this wonderful book made obvious: that Albert Murray is also a brilliant listener, and that these two remarkable men shared a gift for editing — Basie of music, Murray of speech. By the time he sat down with his co-writer, Basie was a master of the art of artistic economy, of knowing what to leave out — both when it came to playing the piano and to editing and enhancing arrangements — and exactly what to leave in. That was something Murray understood and accepted from the start, and that understanding created the climate of trust that made the relationship, almost from the start, like one between old friends.

Which, in a way, they were, these two masters of the blues idiom. Murray was far from a stranger to Basie's realm of swinging and stomping the blues, and I cannot, in all honesty, think of another writer who could have made Basie come to life so fully on the printed page, in what throughout sounds like Count's own true voice. Such a minor miracle could only have been wrought by a writer able to combine the very different requirements of reporter and poet — the former to sort out and render the many facts of a rich and long professional life; the latter to capture every nuance and rhythm of the speech and thought of a man who, while often disarmingly straightforward and self-deprecating, was as complex and mysterious as any artist worthy of the name.

What Basie clearly didn't want his book to be was any kind of expose, as he makes crystal clear near the end of Good Morning Blues: "I know you can get away with putting almost anything in a book these days. But I don't want any more outhouses in mine than I have already put in here."

That's putting it plain enough, and Basie-Murray do adhere to it. Not that the Count makes himself out to be some kind of saint; the narrative is full of good times recalled without regret. Basie makes clear that he liked to take a drink, loved the company of pretty women, and was far from averse to playing the horses. He is frank about scheming to further his career, as in how he managed to become a member of Bennie Moten's band though Moten was a fellow piano player: "I have always been a conniver and began saying to myself, I got to see how I can connive my way into that band." But that, of course, is nothing dishonest, and Basie does not shy away from telling it like it was when it comes to unfair dealings he encountered. But he does not tattle or smirk.

Nor does he dwell on the many injustices, big and small, that he inevitably encountered in his many years on the road during (and after) the official reign of Jim Crow. He doesn't gloss over the negatives, but, as he explains, "If I haven't spent a lot of time complaining about all of these things, it's not because I want anybody to get the impression that all that was not also a part of it. It was [but] you don't let that stop you if [you know] what you really want to be."

One of the finest moments in this book is when Basie discovers that what he really wants to be is a jazz musician. Prior to his discovery (one morning in Oklahoma) of the great Blue Devils band (which is to say, the blues as transformed to instrumental jazz, and with that unique 4/4 beat that he did so much to bring out into full hearing of the world), he merely wanted to be a part of show business, but now he is about to find his calling. It was a storyteller's masterstroke to depart from chronology and begin the narrative with this epiphanic moment and its emblematic slogan, Once a Blue Devil, always a Blue Devil.

There is much to learn from this plainspoken, non tendentious book, which, alas, Count Basie did not live to see published — though he read and approved a first draft that essentially was what we find here — and which is the fruit of a seven-year-plus labor of love. It involved, for the co-author, frequent visits to the Basie home in Freeport, Bahamas, many trips to spots where the Basie band was in residence for more than a night or two, and countless hours of researching transcribing, and editing, resulting in one of the best and most authentic of all jazz autobiographies and biographies.

What was Basie's secret as a leader of two of the greatest bands in jazz history — the old and new testament ones? As it emerges from his own story, there is the key element of the band as an extension of family life—of a very special kind of togetherness. Thad Jones, speaking with Royal W. Stokes, put it so very well: "There was a roundness and a togetherness about everything we did that was very exceptional . . . coming from that strong and binding family circle. It was incredible that a man could organize people to form this strong bond of friendship and generate such a warm, human feeling toward one another, concern for each other's welfare, and consistently maintain it, as Mr. Basie did. That's true genius."

And then there was Basie's time. As another great Basie trumpeter, Harry Sweets Edison, that one from the old testament band, told Stanley Dance (for The World of Count Basie, which makes a fitting counterpoint to this book): "[Basie] was and is the greatest for stomping off the tempo. He noodles around on the piano until he gets it just right."

That incomparable noodling set the tempo just right for more than five decades of the swingingest music this side of heaven. There were times when the band would get to swing so hard that Basie, having set that tempo (and kept it there) just right, would lift his hands from the keyboard, and just sit there with the most blissful expression on his benign countenance. That, an onlooker felt, was a man fulfilled—one of the lucky ones. As long as there's recorded music, Count Basie will keep us tapping our feet, and with Al Murray as an added starter to that incomparable All-American Rhythm Section, he tells us how.”

One of the most revealing aspects of Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie As Told To Albert Murray is how much thought or, if you will, forethought that Count Basie put into everything he did over the course of a career that spanned a half century.

Because he was a man of few words and preferred a blues-based, straight-ahead approach to Jazz, one gets the impressions that there’s not very much to it and that Basie fifty year evolution as a bandleader just happened.

But after reading the 16 chapters that make up Basie’s autobiography, I came to the realization that it was well-thought out and planned every step of the way.

Basie’s career developed as it did because The Count wanted it to happen that way.

Of course, he fell under the sway of other musicians he respected. As a case in point, the following excerpt indicated how important Billy Eckstine was in convincing Basie to re-establish a big band in the early 1950’s at a time when many considered them to be a thing of the past.

Part Two

THE COMEBACK, 1950-1954

“The main one who was really responsible for me deciding to get a full band back together again when I did was Billy Eckstine. I have to give him a whole lot of credit for that. And no matter how much I give him, it will never really be enough. Because he was the one who just kept on after me and kept on after me and wouldn't let me alone until finally I just said, hell, Fd go along with it.

My co-writer has reminded me that a lot of people who were around during that time still like to think of the band that I began to work with that next year as the Birdland Band, and they have a point. Because Bird-land, near the corner of the east side of Broadway at Fifty-second Street, was known as the jazz corner of the world in those days, and that was where things finally began happening for the new band, just as the Famous Door was where the first band really broke into the big time about fourteen years earlier.

So I'm not forgetting Birdland, and I'm not forgetting Norman Granz either. Because without all of those fantastic gigs in Birdland, it would not have been the same story for us, at least I don't think so; and I also have to say that all those records that Norman began bringing out on Mercury and then Clef and then Verve labels were also very, very important. That was the main way the new band got nationwide exposure.

Those first records were not big hits or anything like that, but there were disc jockeys playing them, and they were on the jukeboxes; and when we were out on those early tours, everywhere we went there were almost always some people waiting for us, mainly because they were already familiar with how the new band sounded on tunes like "Bleep Bleep Blues," "Sure Thing," "Why Not?," "Fancy Meeting You," "Cash Box," and "Tom Whaley" from those Mercury and Clef LP's that Norman was distributing all over the country, along with his Jazz at the Philharmonic releases that were so popular at that time. Because I really didn't give a damn about going back into the big-band thing at that time. I'm not saying that I didn't miss it.

Some people insist that all during that time with the combo I was always talking about how much I missed that bigger sound of the full band. Even my wife claims that I used to mope around the house grumbling and complaining about not being able to hear my music the way I was used to.

But the combo was doing all right [Basie led a septet for a few years in the late 1940’s following the demise of his big band]. There was no problem about getting bookings for it, and those guys were burning it up every set, every night. It worked me a little bit hard, but I was getting used to it, and I was having a ball. I really was. But Billy came by to see us one night. I forget exactly when it was, but it was while we were working in the Capitol Lounge in, Chicago. Whenever it was, he started in on me and that was just the beginning.

"Man," he said, "what you doing messing around out here with this stuff for?" Of course, all of Billy's close friends know damn well that he didn't really use nice little words like "crap," "stuff," "fooling around," "messing around," but we'll just pretend he did, because he really wasn't talking dirty to be nasty. That was just his way of showing how much he liked you. Instead of coming somewhere and telling how much he loved you, he would come in and cuss you out, just like some people show you how glad they are to see you by slapping you and pushing and carrying on like that.

"Man, goddamn, we don't need you out here with this old crap. We need you out here with a big band again."

And every time I saw him from then on, it was the same thing.

"Man, what you keep fooling around with little old one- and two-piece stuff for? Get your goddamn big band back together. Man, hell, you look funny up there messing around with that little old two- and three-piece crap. Stop kidding yourself. This is small garbage for you, Base. This ain't your goddamn thing. Hell, your goddamn thing is a goddamn big band, man." Now, he might have said, "your thing," but

what he actually said was a word that begins with the letter s.

The thing about Billy was that he was really sitting on top of the world of show business at that time. He had a whole gang of hit records out, and he was getting top billing at some of the biggest theaters from coast

to coast, beginning with the Paramount in Times Square. And that's the way it had been for a couple of years or so. Of course, he had already become one of the top band singers back when he was with Earl Hines's great band. And for a few years at the end and right after the war, he had also led his own wonderful band that had all of those great stars like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Sarah Vaughan, Budd Johnson, Gene Ammons, Art Blakey, and I don't know how many others in it. But at the time I'm talking about now, he was working as a single and he was the top male vocalist in the country, and everybody was talking about the great Mr. B. and everywhere you went you could hear that big, wonderful voice on the radio and the jukeboxes.”

Serendipity [or “fate”] also played a role in the direction that the Basie band took, witness the following excerpt about how drummer Sonny Payne became a member of what became referred to at the “New Testament” Band:

“By this time, that current band was really getting there. But before the year was out, we found ourselves with a hell of an emergency on our hands, Shortly after we opened in Birdland for the Christmas holidays, Gus Johnson had an attack of appendicitis and had to go into the hospital for an operation. That was just two days before Christmas. But that just shows how fate works sometimes.

Because the guy we brought in to pinch-hit for Gus was Sonny Payne, and he came in and hit a home run with the bases loaded. That was not any reflection on Gus at all. Absolutely not, because Gus, even up to this very minute, is still one of the great drummers. He's got a great sense of timing, and he can hold things together. Everybody speaks of him as being a great man for backing a band. He can set things behind a big band or any kind of band or any kind of group. It doesn't make any difference. He's a great drummer even if he's just playing by himself. He can do it from one and two on up. He's just an all-around great guy to have in your organization.

But fate is a funny thing. Sonny Payne came in there, and right away he touched off a new spark in that band, and we had to keep him as much as we all loved Gus. Naturally people noticed that Sonny was more of a showman than Gus was, but I wouldn't say that showmanship was what made the difference. It was not that easy. You can't see any stick twirling and trickerlating on those next records, but you can hear and feel a difference in the band.”

But one thing remains clear throughout a reading of Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie As Told To Albert Murray and that is Bill Basie’s unswerving devotion to how he wanted to play Jazz. Of course, as he puts it, he was very accommodating of fate along the way and was always “game” - willing to take a chance.

So to wrap things up for the time being, I'll just say whatever happens from here on in I can't complain. I've had my breaks, and I really can't squawk. Whatever else happens, I'm still going to have to say I've been blessed. I've been very lucky. Fate has been very good to me. It really has, and I'm thankful. That's why I never sit down to a meal without first pausing to give thanks. Every time I think about how many years I've been able to do what I enjoy doing and make a pretty good living and also make a name for myself and a reputation that stands for something, I realize how much I have to be thankful for.

And of course, I was also game. I was always game. I have to put that in here, too. If something came up, I was willing to try it. That doesn't mean that I was always changing what I was doing because I was out there trying to latch onto the latest thing to come along. Some people are like that. Not me. Naturally there are things that come up over the course of the years, and you have to adjust to them because that is the way life is. But I've seen people get away from who they are and what they can do—something they are just wonderful at—just because they think they have to try to be something else. You don't have to do that. You don't have to leave from where you are. I've never forgotten that. You can still be yourself and grow and keep up with the times. If you are going to grow.

When I say I was always game, I mean being willing to take a big chance on yourself because you want to do what you want to do, because when I say that I'm thinking about how I jumped at the offer to go out on the Columbia Wheel with Katie Krippen, and the things I did out on the TOBA* with Gonzelle White's Jamboree, and how I got my job playing organ at the Eblon Theatre in Kansas City, and how I left the Eblon the first time to join the Blue Devils and the second time just to see if there was any way to get with Bennie Moten. And so on to how I did what I did to take over that job at the Reno and start that Three, Three, and Three outfit that got me the attention that brought me back to New York and into the big time. [*TOBA = Theater Owners Booking Association, a circuit of theater owners who booked talent into a string of 80 theaters extending from the East Coast across the South and back across the Midwest with Kansas City being the farthest stop west.]

I was always willing to say, "Let's see what happens," when something came up that looked like it might help me get a little closer to where I wanted to be, and since that's the way I still am, that really is old Count Basie right on up to date, motor scooter and all. As my co-writer says, autobiographies don't have endings. It's like when I segue into the out-chorus of "One O'Clock Jump" to wrap up a dance set or a concert or a stage or nightclub show. I'm not saying this is the end. I'm just saying that's all for now. I'm saying: to be continued, until we meet again. Meanwhile, keep on listening and tapping your feet.”

Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie As Told To Albert Murray is a joy to read not only because it is choc-a-block with details about all aspects of Count Basie’s career, but also because the narrative flows so easily.

I suspect that the latter has a lot to do with Albert Murray’s skills as a writer. Although it’s Basie telling his story, it’s Murray writing and editing it in such as way as to make the process of reading it similar to the excitement one feels while reading an enthralling novel or an exciting mystery.

It’s also an interesting documentary on the development of Jazz in Kansas City which complements the many studies of the evolution of the music in New Orleans, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. This book goes a long way toward rectifying the fact that Kansas City Jazz is often overlooked as a major wellspring for the music.

Lastly, it is a delightful read about a world-gone-by, never to come again. But you can visit it vicariously through a reading of this marvelous autobiography which was a longtime in coming, but well worth the wait.

The following video montage features the New Testament Basie Band performing Neal Hefti’s composition and arrangement of The Flight of the Foo Birds.