Basie Quotes

#1. I joined Count Basie's band to make a little money and to see the world. For two years I didn't see anything but the inside of a Blue Goose bus, and I never got to send home a quarter.

Billie Holiday

#2. More than anybody else I'd like to thank Count Basie for teaching me how to perform.

Tony Bennett

#3. I decided that I would be one of the biggest new names; and I actually had some little fancy business cards printed up to announce it, 'Count Basie. Beware, the Count is Here.'

Count Basie

#4. Count Basie was college, but Duke Ellington was graduate school.

Clark Terry

#5. And, well of course, Count Basie, and I think all of the black bands of the late thirties and early forties, bands with real players. They had an influence on everybody, not just drummers.

Buddy Rich

#6. Whenever I'm in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here - like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things - but I couldn't do what they did. They were too good.

B.B. King

#7. 'American Music' is an inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings.

Kate Christensen

#8. Make no mistake, this music is for everyone. Jazz is not an exclusive, elite club. Go ahead, listen to your Snoop Doggy Dog, Pearl Jam, Garth Brooks, but add a little Ellington, Basie and Coltrane to your life as well.

Christian McBride

#9. Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.

Ice Cube

#10. I got to trumpet, finally. That's why I love to write for brass, and [Count] Basie and [Frank] Sinatra and all that stuff, 'cause that's just like part of my DNA.

Quincy Jones

#11. We were all influenced by Lester [Young]. Listen to the records that he made with [Count] Basie. Nobody's got what he's got. He's still the daddy.

Zoot Sims

#12. When I was 16 or 17 I heard the Count Basie band with Jo Jones and Lester Young and Herschel Evans and I couldn't believe it. They were the greatest swing band. I really fell in love with that sound. Everybody danced!

Illinois Jacquet

#13. The hardest thing for a musician to learn is how to play WITH people. That's what made the Basie rhythm section.

Jo Jones

#14. When I was 3 or 4, I seemed to be bursting with music. They played Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra in the house, so I learned my vocabulary from song lyrics - I was literally singing before I was talking.

Dan Hill

#15. Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, Lionel Hampton, the Mills Brothers, Woody Herman, and Nat King Cole. "Mona Lisa, men have named you,

George Hodgman

#16. Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.

Quincy Jones

#17. Count Basie isn't just a man, or even just a band. He's a way of life.

Lena Horne

#18. I'm saying: to be continued, until we meet again. Meanwhile, keep on listening and tapping your feet.

Count Basie

#19. I'll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I'd never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I'd never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn't much like it at first.

Count Basie

#20. If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.

Count Basie

#21. I don't dig that two-beat jive the New Orleans cats play. My boys and I have to have four heavy beats to the bar and no cheating.

Count Basie

#22. Well, if you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

Count Basie

#23. Oscar Peterson plays the best ivory box I've ever heard.

Count Basie

#24. Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

Count Basie

#25. I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.

Count Basie

#26. It's the way you play that makes it ... Play like you play. Play like you think, and then you got it, if you're going to get it. And whatever you get, that's you, so that's your story.

Count Basie

#27. I was always willing to say, "Let's see what happens," when something came up that looked like it might help me get a little closer to where I wanted to be ...

Count Basie

#28. If you play a tune and a person don't tap their feet, don't play the tune.

Count Basie

#29. I just think swing is a matter of some good things put together that you can really pat your foot by. I can't define it beyond that.

Count Basie

#30. Freddie Green has been my right arm for thirty years. And if he leaves the band one day, I'll probably leave with him.

Count Basie

#31. I think the band can really swing when it swings easy, when it can just play along like you are cutting butter,

Count Basie

#32. All I wanted was to be big, to be in show business and to travel ... and that's what I've been doing all my life.

Count Basie

#33. Learn to deal with the valleys and the hills will take care of themselves.

Count Basie

#34. Keep on listening & tapping your feet.

Count Basie