Kansas City Suite - Plak

ENGLISH

A session from 1960 with Basie and his Orchestra on absolute top form. It's hardly surprising when you see the line up of star players and also the fact that every single selection was written by Benny Carter.

The Kansas City that Count Basie found himself in had become the hard core of vital new jazz. It was a place where the musicians who expressed this new jazz could, from night through morning, and on again the next night, sit in on numerous jam sessions.It was a place where musicians like Walter Page, Benny Moten, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Andy Kirk, Coleman Hawkins and many more, could be found working, experimenting and living their music. This was Count Basie's Kansas City, and this is the Kansas City that Benny Carter has dedicated this music to. He has written an original modern jazz suite that is flavored with the elements of Kansas City stomp jazz, and tailored for the big brash sound of the Basie band of today. To Benny Carter, the different streets and places in Kansas City, where so many of these jazz greats lived and worked, and where so much of jazz history was written, evokes a mood, a rememberance of things past. He has, for this reason, titled the selections of this suite after these very same streets and places. The Kansas City of the '20s and 30s is now a legend, and the music that saw it's beginnings there has since developed and moved into the mainstream of today's jazz. It has reached its full maturity and greatness in the music of Benny Carter, and through the dynamic force of the great Basie band!

Recording: September 1960 at United Recorders, Los Angeles, by Wally Heider

Production: Teddy Reig