I have recently been blasting The Great Count Basie Orchestra The Atomic Period at full volume. It’s a combination of circumstances, a desperate need for some happy music*, overexposure to Fallout 4 and it’s 40/50’s based soundtrack recently and hearing the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band ‘The Intro & The Outro’ yesterday:
Count Basie Orchestra on triangle. (Ting!) Thank you.
Simple as that.
The Atomic Period is a Danish LP of unspecified date and provenance documenting a (mostly) well-recorded selection from two gigs in Lausanne, Switzerland in February 1959; touring The Atomic Mr Basie LP, I suppose. The 15 strong orchestra and the Count himself really do give it some welly, as we say hereabouts.
Before we journey further along the spiral scratch together, I confess to you that I know very little about big band jazz. My parents who gave me a leg up into jazz were only really interested from be-bop onwards and so I am lacking in much of a context for it, as well as any critical vocabulary too. All I knew was that the era was just before stuff got wiggy and individualistic; I have no doubt that Basie and his contemporaries pushed things forwards, not least in terms of racial acceptance, but my impression is that we are skirting the dread realms of light entertainment.
The Atomic Period opens with the alluring smoothness of ‘Shiny Stockings’ and I do really like the way in which all 16 musicians lock into place like the well-honed machine they were. The Count introduces things in between certain songs and all is measured and informative, sadly no Freddie Mercury style ‘Daaa-oooow’s to test the Swiss crowds’ responses.
The Count is as dapper and neat a musician as he is pictured on the back cover**, there is a subtlety, clarity and lightness about his playing that I really like; every note counts, every note adds. Needless to say you don’t pass the try-outs for the Great Count Basie Orchestra unless you were a great player and the likes of Freddie Green (guitar), Sonny Payne (drums) and the trumpet quartet of Jones, Newman, Young and Culley^ all really standout here.
Track wise my highlights are the opener, ‘Basie Boogie’ and the comparatively wild ‘Bag a Bones’ that do it for me. The latter two have a bit more earthiness and tempo to them, something a little less tuxedo-d about them, I get a sense that the brass section relish the chance to blast it a little more. The last track, the promisingly named ‘Sixteen Men a Swingin” does anything but and in contrast to the rest of The Atomic Period, it also sounds like it was recorded on a cheap microphone hidden in a chubby bootlegger’s underpants.
Elsewhere there’s the odd bit of novelty, ‘The Midgets’ and bits of laughter during certain tracks that betoken a bit of clowning around and mugging around on stage and the odd smattering of polite applause. It may be these old cloth ears of mine but I really cannot discern anything of ‘Old Man River’ in, umm, ‘Old Man River’ – has it been mislabelled?
These are comparatively minor gripes though, there is a lovely, smooth, decidedly upbeat sumptuousness about The Atomic Period that has made me return to it again and again recently. That will do nicely thanks.
Ting!
993 Down.
PS: a good jazz buff friend of mine, who likes Count Basie et.al. tells me that I have to explore Duke Ellington, who is ‘the closest I have ever had to a spiritual leader‘. A duke of course outranks a count^^.
PPS: I’ve also watched this beauty twice now – do your soul a favour and just play the first track – a much more raucous rocking and (very definitely) rolling version of ‘Basie Boogie’. I can’t get enough of his gorgeous face, a smile a mile wide!
*unusually for me, I need this more than angry music at the moment. Odd.
**and that’s pretty fucking dapper!
^despite sounding like a firm of lawyers.
^^which is a non-English term for an earl.
