“Basie Rocks!” — Time Trippin’ for the Boomers

If any of these songs get some airplay and serve as gateway drugs to the glories of the Count Basie band, I’m all for it.

Basie Rocks! – Deborah Silver with the Count Basie Orchestra (Green Hill)

Big fish swallow little fish, animals find diverse compatible mates, and aberrations in the gene code turn out to create advantages for survival. As it is in nature, so it is in jazz.

The Count Basie Orchestra (now a ghost band under the capable direction of Scotty Barnhart) has always had mixed success with its moves far outside its traditional swinging big band style. This isn’t a complaint! Jazz, more so than most other genres, depends upon rapid and constant evolution. When the big bands of the 1930s-50s (the dinosaurs of jazz) faced extinction due to the takeover of popular music by R&B and rock ‘n’ roll (the crashing meteor of Elvis), they adapted to the new environment.

The Basie band occasionally led the way, sometimes with more courage and commercialism than good taste. Basie Meets Bond (1966) covered the theme songs from the hip James Bond movies, and it’s for completists only. Basie’s Beatles Bag (1966) and Basie on the Beatles (1969) fare better. The source material is seemingly indestructible, and the band was a powerhouse back then. Weakest of all is Manufacturers of Soul (1968) with Jackie Wilson, who is clearly sloshed (the liner notes describe the big party held in the studio before the recording). Wilson was trying to swing and couldn’t quite get there, and the Basie band was trying to sound like an R&B horn section and couldn’t quite get there. But hey, they were trying, and it even produced a top-100 hit with “Chain Gang.”

But now the day has come when Peter Frampton guests with the Count Basie Orchestra, there’s a cover of “Bennie and the Jets,” and it’s all on an album produced by the drummer of the Rolling Stones. This one is either going to be hilarious, great, or an embarrassment.

It varies from track to track, but overall, it’s pretty great. Basie Rocks! is a follow-up to 2023’s Basie Swings the Blues!, which paired the band with contemporary blues masters like Buddy Guy, Robert Cray Shemekia Copeland, Charlie Musselwhite, and Bobby Rush (among others). Basie Rocks!  avoids the miscellaneous quality of Basie Swings the Blues! because it draws on a single singer, the flexible and effortlessly glitzy Deborah Silver (who technically gets top billing). Silver is like a surfer riding the undulating waves of the orchestra, staying on top of it, singing just ever so slightly behind the beat to boost the swing.

I’m not sure Silver is the next great singer to record with the Basie band, but the competition is hardly fair for anyone. When your predecessors include Billie Holiday, Helen Humes, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Carmen Bradford — and those are just the females — you can’t let yourself get psyched out. Silver does her own thing, and she does it with drama and confidence.

Silver chose all the songs on the album, with some input from Barnhart and producer  Steve Jordan. There are certainly some tightropes to walk here, and you have to give her some credit for taking risks when she could have played it safe (think Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett, for example, sticking with chestnuts like “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” when they could have done a finger-poppin’ version of, say, “Poker Face”). The first risk here is turning some of the great rock songs into glib novelty tunes. That does happen here, but the duds are few. The second risk is that even when the song fits easily into the Basie formula, the material is just too thin to deserve that honor. That happens here, too, but not often. The third risk is that it’s just a gimmick to sell some records — how many big band lovers will be able to resist hearing what the Basie Orchestra can do with “Fly Like an Eagle”? To this, all the songs are guilty, and that’s cool. If any of these songs get some airplay and serve as gateway drugs to the glories of the Count Basie band, I’m all for it.

The album opens with “Paint It Black” as a reminder that the producer is the drummer with the Rolling Stones, Steve Jordan (who doesn’t play on this track, but does on “Tainted Love”). It’s done with a Latin beat, and Arturo Sandoval contributes a trumpet solo. It’s also the first track to have what becomes a recurring problem on the album — a musical feel that is at odds with the content of the lyrics. The cheerful groove and bright singing don’t convince me that Silver wants to paint anything black.

Another example is “Bennie and the Jets,” which describes a glam rock band, so it makes no sense at all as a big band jazz number. Musically, it works well with sultry swing, and Barnhart’s arrangement expands creatively on Elton John’s original piano syncopations. It just works better if you pretend the lyrics are about Benny Goodman.

I suppose my advice could be “just ignore the lyrics and enjoy the music.” That’s usually possible, but with songs this familiar, the lyrics are already buried deep in your inescapable subconscious. Kris Johnson’s arrangement has some fun with the various rhythm and tempo changes on “Band on the Run,” but the lyrics fall flat in this context. You can either sell a line like “stuck inside these four walls, sent inside forever,” or swing. Silver wisely chooses swing.

By the time you get to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock & Roll,” you just have to give up and embrace the irony that jazz is exactly the kind of music the lyrics are rejecting. The band leans into it, starting off with some lo-fi traditional New Orleans music. The rest is done as a slow blues stomp, with guest Wycliffe Gordon tearing it up on vocals and trombone. It’s grooving, but it’s nevertheless a hammy novelty tune.

Vocalist Deborah Silver delivers drama and confidence on this album. Photo: Facebook

Another trombone guest, Trombone Shorty, lends vocals and his slide to “Joy to the World.” It’s an additional bluesy stomp, slower than the Three Dog Night original, and the arrangement concludes with a classic Basie shout chorus. Still, there’s not much anyone can do to transform the thin, repetitive material. This Jeremiah ain’t nothing but a bullfrog.

A better example of how the new genre can accentuate the lyrics, rather than making them seem absurd, is “Baby, I Love Your Way.” It’s done here as a slow ballad, which brings out some of the lonely poignancy of the lyrics. Frampton overdubs a solo with a dialed-down fuzzy electric sound (you won’t mistake him for Freddie Green), essentially playing rock guitar phrases at a slower tempo. If you’re waiting to hear Frampton uncork it for some real jazz, keep waiting. Silver is the one who’s unrestrained here and delivers some convincing blues.

Two of the oddest choices are Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle” and Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good.” The former features guest Bill Frisell on guitar, because at this point, why not? Frisell has played brilliantly in just about every other genre of popular music, so it’s good to see him adding the Basie band to his roster. Frisell plays it straight and swings it hard, with no special effects. “Life’s Been Good” is one of those perfect performances that really doesn’t need to be covered by anyone, but it emerges as one of the best tracks on the disc as a classic up-tempo Basie band groover. There’s finally a round-robin of short solos from many of the outstanding musicians in the band.

Finally, the one arrangement I would love to see catch on is “Tainted Love.” Most of us know it from Soft Cell’s hit in 1981, but it dates back to a Gloria Jones version in 1964. Guest vocalist Kurt Elling is a natural fit because he’s been doing swinging performances of unexpected pop tunes for much of his career (just this year we have Superblue: Guilty Pleasures, Vol. 2 covering tunes such as “Turn To Stone,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Gangster of Love”). “Tainted Love” is done here as a finger-snapper, along the lines of Peggy Lee’s “Fever,” which is a great way to show off guest John Clayton’s authoritative walking bass.  Jordan turns out to be a fine big band drummer, as was his predecessor Charlie Watts, at turns easily swinging and tight with the ensemble. The arrangement by Andy Farber underlines the blues in the melody and its catchy built-in rhythms rather than struggling against them.

Basie Rocks! is a minor entry in the long and spectacular history of Basie and Basie ghost band albums, but it’s fun. It’s definitely aimed at the Baby Boomers. The oldest song on here, “A Hard Day’s Night,” dates from 1964, and the most recent one is “Every Breath You Take” from 1981. That was 44 years ago. (Perhaps in 2069 we’ll get Basie Does Billie Eilish.) If you’re looking for snappy jazz covers of today’s pop tunes, you’re better off with the retro geniuses of Postmodern Jukebox. But jazz has always taken what it likes from even the most hackneyed Broadway ditties and pop novelty numbers and utterly transformed them, not to satisfy audience nostalgia, but because they somehow spoke to what the artist wanted to achieve with them. Just think of the reincarnation of “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music when played by John Coltrane.

I’m not sure “Bennie and the Jets” or “Baby, I Love Your Way” are going to become jazz standards any time soon, but I’m sure someone once said that about “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” or, more recently, Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” After all, time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future.

from https://artsfuse.org