July 7, 1937: The Count Basie Orchestra Records "One O'Clock Jump"

July 7, 1937: The Count Basie Orchestra records "One O'Clock Jump" in New York City. It becomes one of the signature songs of "Big Band" jazz.

William James Basie was born on August 21, 1904 in Red Bank, Monmouth County, New Jersey. Both of his parents were musicians, and his mother taught him to play the piano. He loved going to the Palace Theatre in Red Bank, and dreamed of becoming a traveling musician like the ones he saw there.

Long before Bruce Springsteen was born, the teenaged Basie got piano gigs in nightclubs on the Jersey Shore. Then he moved to Harlem, and got a regular job in a band in Kansas City in 1929, playing what became known as the "Kansas City stomp" style. By that time, he was already nicknamed "Count." In 1936, he formed a new band, Count Basie and his His Barons of Rhythm, and moved it to Chicago. At a time when most "big bands" had one tenor saxophone, he had two, giving the Barons a distinctive sound.

In 1937, he moved them to the Woodside Hotel in Harlem, and conquered New York. As part of this process, they recorded "One O'Clock Jump." Basie based it on "head arrangements," where each section of the band makes up their part based on what other sections are playing, a precursor to the improvisational style that Miles Davis and John Coltrane would develop in the 1950s.

The song is notable for Basie's piano, the bass fiddle of Walter Page, the trumpet of Buck Clayton, and the saxophones of Herschel Evans and Lester Young. Young would go on to become one of the most beloved sax players in jazz.

After getting a poor revue at the famed Roseland Ballroom, the Basie band moved to the Savoy Ballroom, where they took on Billie Holiday as a singer. John Hammond of Columbia Records is credited with "discovering" both, and put them together onstage, although they never recorded together. 

It polished the band's sound, and, on January 16, 1938, a Battle of the Bands was set up for the Savoy, between the Basie Orchestra and the reigning champions of such things, the Chick Webb Orchestra. Webb, a dwarf drum wizard, had Ella Fitzgerald to sing for him, and they had defeated the all-white Benny Goodman Orchestra in such a contest a few months earlier, convincing Goodman to racially integrate his band. At the time, Webb's band was declared the winner, but for as long as those who were there lived, they disagreed about that call.

(There would be no more such contests, at least not with Webb: His health was already in decline, and he died of tuberculosis the next year.)

Holiday left Basie's band for Artie Shaw's, but Helen Humes was brought in, and the band continued to be one of the best in the business. Basie broke up the band after World War II, and kept things going by pretending to lead bands in films. He formed a new band in 1952, and in 1957, the year the live album Basie at Newport was released to great acclaim, the jazz magazine DownBeat wrote that Basie "has managed to assemble an ensemble that can thrill both the listener who remembers 1938 and the youngster who has never before heard a big band like this."

Count Basie continued to lead one band or another until he died on April 26, 1984, of cancer in the Miami suburb of Hollywood, Florida. He was 79. Shortly thereafter, the Carlton Theater in Red Bank was renamed the Count Basie Center for the Arts.

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July 7, 1937 was a Wednesday. Baseball held its All-Star Game that day, at Griffith Stadium in Washington. The American League beat the National League, 8-3. Dizzy Dean of the St. Louis Cardinals, pitching for the NL, took a comebacker off the bat of Earl Averill of the Cleveland Indians off his toe, breaking it. Favoring that injury, he ending up injuring his arm, and was never the same pitcher.

Since baseball was the only sport in season at the time, this was the only score on this historic day.