The musical arrangements that came to stand for perfection in swing were called “head arrangements” because they arrived, unwritten, out of Count Basie’s head, on the bandstand.
As his trombonist Dickie Wells explained: Count Basie would start out at the piano, vamp a little, set a tempo and say ‘that’s it.’
First the saxophones would pick up the rhythm; the trombones would enter on another motif; then the trumpets on a pulse of their own, and the band was off and running, “sixteen men swinging,” as they said of the Basie band, with a muscular but supple propulsive irresistibly danceable energy that defined the Swing Era of the 1930s.
In the year 2000, this is the stuff of a huge Harvard lecture course, with the classical pianist and Mozart specialist Robert Levin.
On its variety of virtuosic voices, on rhapsodic invention in rhythm and melody under pressure, the Robert Levin short course on Swing music in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Robert Levin, pianist and professor at Harvard College, and John Hendricks, of The trio Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross.