Basie Plays Hefti

 

Cute

Basie Plays Hefti

Produced by Teddy Reig

Cover Photo: Chuck Stewart

Roulette Bridled Series R-52011

1958

From the back cover: Some arrangers seem made to order for certain bands. Don Rodman and Benny Carter and Horace Henderson fitted a variety of organization in the twenties and thirties in this way. Billy Strayhorn was obviously born to write for the Duke Ellington band as Sy Oliver was to write for Jimmie Lunceford and Fletcher Henderson for Benny Goodman. And now it seems that Neal Hefti has found his band in Count Basie and Count is composer and arranger in Neal.

Like Fletcher's writing for Benny's musicians, Neal's suits the tastes and temperaments of the Basie men in every sort of entail. It provides settings for soloists which bring them out bar by bar, texture by texture, idea by idea as they rarely have been before. It is a style of scoring at least as much intuitive as it is instructed tin the sinking and playing procedures of these jazzmen. Somehow, either because of a similar set of likes and dislikes or because of his keen ear of considerably playing and writing experience, Neal knows the right figures to make Frank Wess blow his most forceful flute, Joe Newman his most swinging trumpet, Snookie Young his most soulful horn and Thad Jones his most elegant. One way or another, he has provided Marshall Royal with an adequate background for his large alto sound and given the Basie tenor men, Billy Mitchell and Frank Foster, a spacious alley in which to chase each other and found room for Al Grey's big, guttural trombone pushes and pulls. 

It's not a very complicated course of action, providing the Basie musicians with proper material. It does not involve tricky contrivances or writing in a notably obscure manner. It is, rather, a suiting of figure and temp, soloist and section, mood and mode so that it comes out Royal and Newman, Young and jones, Foster and Mitchell and Wess – in a word, Basie.

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