Catherine Basie, wife of Count Basie, the jazz musician and band leader, died of a heart attack yesterday at the couple’s home in Freeport, Grand Bahama Island, according to Mr. Basie’s agent. She was 67 years old. The agent, Willard Alexander, said Mrs.
Is the Count Basie Orchestra still alive?
In 1935, Bennie Moten died and it was left to Basie to take some of the musicians from that orchestra and form his own, The Count Basie Orchestra, which is still alive and well today some 78 years later.
Who married Count Basie?
He quickly made a name for himself playing the piano at local venues and parties around town until he moved to New York City in search of greater opportunities. After a decade long courtship, Basie married dancer Catherine Morgan, his second wife, on his birthday in 1942. They had one daughter, Diane, in 1944.
How did Basie died?
Count Basie, the jazz pianist whose spare, economic keyboard style and supple rhythmic drive made his orchestra one of the most influential groups of the Big Band era, died of cancer yesterday morning at Doctors’ Hospital in Hollywood, Fla. He was 79 years old and lived in Freeport, the Bahamas.
What made Basie leave red?
In 1950, financial considerations forced Basie to disband the orchestra. But by 1952 he reorganized the band, and the “second” Count Basie Orchestra was considered as exciting, vibrant and even more important than the first.
Who gave Count Basie first piano lesson?
After automobiles replaced horses, his father became a groundskeeper and handyman for several families in the area. His mother, a piano player who gave Basie his first piano lessons, took in laundry and baked cakes for sale and paid 25 cents a lesson for piano instruction for him.
What disability did Count Basie’s daughter have?
The couple had an only daughter, Diane Basie, who’s now a 74-year-old disabled woman. When Basie died of pancreatic cancer in 1984 at the age of 79, he left his $1.5 million fortune in a trust to provide for Diane.
Did Count Basie read music?
Then when he develops his big band, he reunites with Eddie Durham. See, Basie couldn’t read music, so it was Eddie Durham who orchestrated his ideas for the Moten band and then later for the Basie band in New York for those Decca recordings.
Did Count Basie play the piano?
A pianist, Count Basie played vaudeville before eventually forming his own big band and helping to define the era of swing with hits like “One O’Clock Jump” and “Blue Skies.” In 1958, Basie became the first African American male recipient of a Grammy Award.
Who influenced Count Basie?
Basie studied music with his mother and was later influenced by the Harlem pianists James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, receiving informal tutelage on the organ from the latter. He began his professional career as an accompanist on the vaudeville circuit.
How did the bands of Count Basie and Duke Ellington differ?
How did the bands of Count Basie and Duke Ellington differ? The Basie band was looser and had a more relaxed swing feeling. … Ellington was a composer who played piano, but he really used the band as his expressive instrument.
Who is known as the father of big bands?
His name was Louis Armstrong. Bandleader, arranger and pianist Fletcher Henderson is one of the most influential — and yet least-known — jazz masters. During his orchestra’s peak years in the 1920s and ’30s, he helped define the sound of big-band jazz, pioneering musical ideas which today are taken for granted.
What was the greatest era of the Basie band?
The Count Basie Orchestra is a 16 to 18 piece big band, one of the most prominent jazz performing groups of the swing era, founded by Count Basie in 1935 and recording regularly from 1936.
Who led the Count Basie Orchestra?
The Count Basie Orchestra, today directed by Scotty Barnhart, has won every respected jazz poll in the world at least once, won 18 Grammy Awards, performed for Kings, Queens, and other world Royalty, appeared in several movies, television shows, at every major jazz festival and major concert hall in the world.
How did Charlie Parker influence jazz?
Charlie Parker forever changed the performance and writing of jazz music. He developed a new style of jazz called bebop. … Performers of bebop left the traditional musical melody and played a song freely, with the music and rhythm that was felt at the time.
Who taught Count Basie how do you play the piano?
But it was in Harlem, New York City, that he learned the basics of piano, mainly from his sometime organ teacher, the great Fats Waller (1904–1943). Basie made his professional debut playing piano with vaudeville acts (traveling variety entertainment). While on one tour he became stranded in Kansas City, Missouri.
What made Charlie Parker so good?
At thirty-four, he was dead from years of drug and alcohol use. Today, Charlie “Yardbird” Parker is considered one of the great musical innovators of the 20th century. A father of bebop, he influenced generations of musicians, and sparked the fire of one of the most important and successful American artistic movements.