One More Time: Music from the Pen of Quincy Jones by Count Basie 

(American Jazz Classics 99014) 

Dance Along with Basie by Count Basie 

(Poll Winners Records 27206)

“Everything was crackling so evenly. Those guys in the band, they really were something else. They just wanted to get up and play, and when the time came, they were ready, and they did it, and it was scorching.”

This is how Count Basie described the confreres of his orchestra and the spirit which drove them in 1959, when he led one of the strongest bands he had ever assembled. After some lean years too — in the early 1950s he had to break his full orchestra and rely on a much smaller group for a living — the Count had come back to huge popularity with his 1957 band and their rampaging album The Atomic Mr Basie.

Now, in 1959, they were riding a groove again, and some of their most engaging sounds of the era are available again on these two powerfully swinging reissues.

These musicians were second-generation Basie-ites — only Bill Basie himself and the eternal and essential chink of rhythm guitarist Freddie Green remained from the celebrated pre-war days.

But trumpeters like Thad Jones, Joe Newman and Snooky Young plus slidemen Al Grey and Henry Coker, a seething reed section of altoist Marshal Royal, tenorist Frank Foster, Billy Mitchell with Frank Wess trebling on alto, tenor and flute and rumbling baritonist Charlie Fowlkes, made an unsurpassed combination of ensemble and solo horns.

One More Time comprised ten charts and compositions from the Chicagoan trumpeter, composer and arranger Quincy Jones.

Jones had a way with melody and the opening song is dedicated to singer and campaigner Lena Horne and her husband. For Lena and Lennie is a tender, tuneful theme with some wistful trumpet from Newman, while its pacy successor, Rat Race, says something essential about the gut of American life — with Basie tapping piano and the tenors of Foster and Mitchell leading the way.

Basie invites us to Meet BB through an arresting flute/trumpet duet from Newman and Wess and stirring brass choruses from Coker and Thad Jones. 

An equally groovy Powell on trombone combines with Wess’s alto during the rumbustious Square at the Roundtable, while Al Grey’s aching slides on I Needs to Be Bee’d With find an emphatic partnership with Basie’s bluesy piano.

Quincy’s Swedish-written lament The Midnight Sun Never Sets is a feature for Royal’s juicy alto and Muttnik, a jazz cousin to the pioneer satellite circling the Earth, is a spinning ensemble where all horns unite.

The CD is filled out by the complete contents of the 1959 album String Along with Basie, where a string section is added to a novel Basie group featuring “tough tenor” Illinois Jacquet and the master balladeer of the tenor, ex-Ellingtonian Ben Webster. 

Webster delivers a beauteous version of the 1938 Basie masterpiece Blue and Sentimental, with tenorist Herschel Evans.

Dance Along with Basie helps us to remember that the original Basie band owed much of its massive popularity to how urgently it persuaded millions of black and white Americans onto the dance floor, and this selection of US songbook tunes brings that dynamic swinging back.

But it also signals how the Basie of the next decade hitched his popularity to commercialism and many of his ’60s albums were shallow attempts to cover Broadway shows, vapid filmscores or pop music successes — hence a series of superficial albums were cut, including Basie Meets Bond (1966), The Happiest Millionaire (1967), Half a Sixpence (1967) and Basie on the Beatles (1970).

He and the band though were to return to a succession of fine recordings throughout the ’70s for Norman Granz’s Pablo label.

As for the Dance Along with Basie album, some of its best moments are on a track which was omitted from the original release, before Basie takes it home with a typical minimalist chorus.

Grey is still growling adenoidingly on Makin’ Whoopee, Wess’s flute flutters through Misty with Fowlkes’s earthy baritone provoking a weighty contrast. 

Newman has some fluent muted moments in How Am I to Know? and an unusually drums-emphatic version of Easy Living offers a long, stretching chorus for Thad Jones.

As Basie himself concluded in his autobiography Good Morning Blues about his 1959 swinging outfit: “What can I say? That band was really a shaker.”