Home / Full timeline / William “Count” Basie, Black American band leader, dies of cancer in Hollywood, Florida, at the age of seventy-nine.

William “Count” Basie, Black American band leader, dies of cancer in Hollywood, Florida, at the age of seventy-nine.

1984 (Apr 26)

William "Count" Basie, Black American band leader, died of cancer in Hollywood, Florida, at the age of seventy-nine. Basie grew up in Red Bank, New Jersey, and began taking twenty-five-cent music lessons at age eight. Despite his protests, Basie's mother insisted that he was "going to learn how to play the piano if it kills you." Basie began playing professionally with Walter Page's Blue Devils group in Kansas City, Missouri, in the late 1920s and later joined Benny Moten's band in 1929. When Moten died six years later, Basie took over and began the Count Basie Band. The group was not really “discovered" until 1935 when John Hammond, a jazz impresario who had brought Billie Holiday to prominence, saw Basie's ten-piece band in Kansas City. He was so impressed that he urged Basie to increase the size of his ensemble and booked its first national tour. It was also in Kansas City that Basie acquired the famous nickname "Count.” A radio announcer discussing the “royal family" of jazz, which included “Duke of Ellington” and “King of Oliver,” struck upon the idea of a "Count of Basie,” yet Basie never really liked the title. He said in 1982, “I wanted to be called Buck or Hoot or even Arkansas Fats," all silent-film heroes. By 1936, Basie and his band had garnered a reputation far beyond Kansas City and it traveled widely throughout the country, with its residency at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City. It "delivered several seminal improvisers to the world of jazz." Most notable were Buck Clayton, Herschel Evans, and Lester Young, “whose logical flow of melody became the standard for horn players of subsequent generations." The Basie band began recording in 1937 and such tunes as “One O'Clock Jump” became "studies in call-and-response phrasing in which the saxophones often trade simple blues riffs with the brass.” The group's early albums included Basie's Back in Town, Blues by Basie, and Super Chief. The Basie band began to pare down in the 1950s, collaborating with blues singer “Big” Joe Williams in what “was widely considered a creative peak” for both Basie and Williams. The demeanor of Basie, who was influenced by the legendary “Fats” Waller, was perhaps best described by Whitney Balliett, a jazz critic, in his book Night Creature (1980). Balliett said the band leader “pilots his ship from the keyboard with an occasional raised finger, an almost imperceptible nod, a sudden widely opened eye, a left-hand chord, a lifted chin, a smile, and plays background and solo piano that is the quintessence of swinging and taste and good cheer, even when almost nothing happens around it.” Basie's last performance was on March 19, 1984, at the Hollywood Palladium in California. He was completing more than fifty years as a jazz artist. In commenting on Basie's death, blues singer Joe Williams said "we have just lost a national treasure but the happiness that his music gave us will live.”