#310: Count Basie - The Atomic Mr. Basie (1958)

Emily: I've spent a lot of time over the past couple months listening to jazz. While outlining and working on other stuff for exams, I needed some noise in the background that was pleasant but not distracting. Cue the Jazz Pandora station. That worked for a while, but then they started including songs with words and other things that were definitely not jazz. Around that time, I was out to dinner with a group of friends and one mentioned how she had been listening to a lot of John Coltrane recently. Aha! I thought. That's the solution to my Pandora problem. I definitely like Coltrane and other jazz musicians of his era, and those songs definitely don't have words. The next day I tuned in to John Coltrane Pandora and it was the perfect fit for end-of-semester studying. Count Basie probably came up on that station, but if not his music would have fit in seamlessly. Jazz from the '40s, '50s, and '60s is definitely my favorite - all horns and riffs and improvisation, without words to get in the way. Count Basie embodied that aesthetic, alternating between cool, slow songs and peppy up-tempo jams. It's the kind of album that when you want it to be in the background it'll stay there, but when you pay close attention there is so much to hold your focus. This will definitely go into my studying rotation, and maybe I'll even switch Pandora to a Count Basie station.

Favorite Tracks: Flight of the Foo Birds; Midnite Blue; Teddy the Toad

Zack: I am certainly a lot more into jazz than I was before we started this endeavor, although I still have no idea how to write about it. With every other genre, I at least have enough of a prototype in my head for what “good” sounds like that I can compare to, should there be nothing unique that jumps out about that particular recording. No such thing with jazz. I go entirely by instinct; did I like this or did it make me feel bad in my ears. Count Basie did not cause me ear-pain, which is certainly a net positive. And I can easily see it sliding into the Birth of the Cool-Love Supreme rotation of background jazz while I code do files. But I’m not sure what it is about it that I liked. It was smooth and balanced between up-tempo, swingy songs and slowed-down, somber songs. The trumpets sounded crisp. That’s about all I got, and all of those were about as vague as an undergrad’s essay about the strengths of American democracy. Since I have no clue how to explain why I liked Count Basie, you’ll have to take my recommendation on pure faith alone. Hopefully that will be sufficient.

Favorite Tracks: Fantail; Flight of the Foo Birds; Li’l Darlin’