Count Basie

Count Basie learned to play piano in New York from Fats Waller, but it was in Kansas City — stranded there when his touring company broke up — that he found his real musical identity. Kansas City in the late 1920s and 1930s had developed its own jazz style: blues-drenched, riff-based, built for dancers, with a relaxed rhythmic feel that was distinct from New York’s busier approach. Basie absorbed all of it.

When Basie formed his own orchestra in 1935 and it was heard nationally through a radio broadcast from the Reno Club, it was immediately recognized as something new. The band’s defining characteristic was its rhythm section: Jo Jones (drums), Walter Page (bass), Freddie Green (guitar) and Basie himself on piano. Jones’s hi-hat playing — moving the beat from the bass drum to the cymbal, creating a lighter and more flowing rhythmic foundation — was one of the most influential innovations in jazz history. It changed how swing felt.

Basie’s piano style was its own kind of revolution: spare, minimalist, rooted in silence as much as notes. Where Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson played with a full-hand stride approach, Basie used single notes and two-note voicings, punctuating rather than accompanying. It made him the most economical and distinctive pianist in swing. The orchestra’s decades of touring — into the 1980s — spread the Kansas City approach across the world.