MURRAY HORWITZ, American Film Institute: The worst part of doing the NPR Basic Jazz Record Library is having to fade out music like that. Hi, I'm Murray Horwitz, and that's one of the greatest ...

In 1935, pianist William "Count" Basie (born August 21, 1904), a fixture on the Kansas City jazz scene since the late 1920s, organized his own rocking, riffing, blues-based big band. The following ...

Bill Basie studied music with his mother as a child and played piano in early childhood. He picked up the basics of early ragtime from some of the great Harlem pianists and studied organ informally ...

Count Basie's band was the epitome of swing and his pioneering sound can still be heard in jazz orchestras all over the world. Basie, who was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, on August 21 1904, died 30 ...

From 1935 until his death in 1984, pianist and bandleader Count Basie led one of the most important jazz institutions of the 20th century, in the process forging a distinctive sound that changed the ...

Forecasting the paths that big-band jazz might travel is difficult now that another of its pacesetters has reached the end of his journey. In symbolic terms, the loss of Count Basie, who died last ...