Perdido
LP Jazz Society AA 526/527
As a youngster, I heard both Basie and Ellington performing live here in Malmö, Sweden. They and other visiting orchestras were a great inspiration, and as a result, we’ve had and still have a number of efficient big bands, and I’ve listened to a few. But, though I’m not an expert in the matter, it doesn’t come as a surprise if I say that I’ve never heard something like this.
The double LP is a great production of a live recording from 1954 in Stockholm, and Leif Anderson, who wrote the liner notes, tells us, among other things, about the excitement when it became known that Count Basie was to appear in the country:
”A generation of jazz fans had grown up on his music. For most of us, he was the epitome of swing. To see and to hear him could be nothing but a revelation.”
And he also says, “The Count Basie Band of the mid-Fifties was another one of those once-and-forever-but-never-again phenomena, like Duke in 1940, Lunceford in 1937, Henderson in 1934, Herman in 1945, or Basie himself in 1938.”
It was the Count’s first European visit.