Basie Bash in Edmonds to showcase jazz from swing heyday
Published 1:30 am Friday, January 27, 2017
The Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra returns Saturday evening to the Edmonds Center for the Arts with a concert featuring the early music of Count Basie.
The concert, titled “Basie Bash: New York, 1937,” showcases Count Basie’s work from New York in the heyday of swing dancing.
The performance will include numerous hits from the Basie band’s first years in the national spotlight, recorded for the Decca label.
Titles include “Oh Lady Be Good,” “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” “One O’clock Jump,” “Shorty George,” “Doggin’ Around,” “Jive at Five” and “Roseland Shuffle.”
In addition, the concert features more recently composed masterpieces, recorded by the great Miles Davis on his 1957 album, Miles Ahead, and performed by the SRJO in its sold-out November concerts, “Miles Ahead: Miles Davis and Gil Evans.”
The Miles Davis pieces were created in collaboration with celebrated composer/arranger Evans, and are considered among the finest work produced by either musician.
SRJO directors Michael Brockman and Clarence Acox are eager to share the show with the Edmonds audience.
“This concert contains some of the most compelling and highly entertaining jazz music ever written,” said Brockman in a press release from the SRJO. “The pairing of Basie’s earliest works alongside the more modern pieces from Miles Ahead is an astounding reminder that the art of jazz is evolving and thriving right before our eyes.”
The concert provides special challenges to the musicians of the SRJO, who must shift gears repeatedly during the show between the early jazz styles of the 1930s, and the modern styles required for the technically advanced and harmonically sophisticated arrangements of Evans.
“The Basie library has long been a major part of our repertoire, and some of SRJO’s very first concerts were built around the sound of Basie,” Acox said. “Everyone in the band loves Basie’s swinging sound, and the Miles Ahead album has long been an inspiration for jazz musicians around the globe.”
Now celebrating its 22nd concert season, the 17-piece SRJO is co-directed by saxophonist and arranger Michael Brockman, long-time faculty member of the University of Washington’s School of Music and an authority on the music of Duke Ellington, and drummer Clarence Acox, award-winning conductor of the Garfield High School bands.
SRJO includes many of the region’s top jazz soloists and band leaders: trumpeters Jay Thomas and Thomas Marriott; bassist Phil Sparks; saxophonists Mark Taylor, Bill Ramsay, Travis Ranney and Alex Dugdale; trombonists Dan Marcus, Scott Brown and Bill Anthony; guitarist Milo Petersen and pianist Randy Halberstadt.
If you go
Tickets are available through SRJO online at srjo.org or by calling 206-523-6159, and also through Edmonds Center for the Arts at www.edmondscenterforthearts.org or 425-275-9595. Single tickets are $35. Jazz fans 25 and younger are admitted for $10.
