Count Basie recommendations?

"Atomic Basie" and "April in Paris" are essential for me. I also love the earlier stuff and even a lot of the later Pablo material. (I guess I just love Count Basie.)

Here's a plug for an album that doesn't get mentioned much: "Basie Straight Ahead." It's his first collaboration with Sammy Nestico and has a whole set of tunes that I learned when I played bass in my high school stage band: "Switch In Time," "Magic Flea," "Hay Burner," the title track, and more. I guess the tunes are too poppish for some ("pleasant but unremarkable," opines Scott Yanow at the All Music Guide), but for me they're great, swingin', melodic tracks with the Basie spirit front and center. The band really cooks, even though a lot of the great soloists were gone by then.

 

Spot on, jdw... all of the Roulette studio albums were released in a set by Mosaic, as well as a multidisc set of live Roulette material, some of which is on Breakfast Dance and Barbecue, and more on the Jazz masters compilations released by Blue Note some years back. A bunch of the Roulette studio albums have also recently been reissued in Japan...

I should also put in a plug for Count Basie and the Kansas City 7, on Impulse CD - from 1962, and a nice recording, and swings like crazy.

 

Follow up question: is there a single CD collection that provides a good sampling/overview of his 30's stuff?

 

I would go with the Ken Burns compilation. Not entirely from the 30's but maybe 85% is from that era. Very, very good as a one CD compilation. Besides, you get tracks from different labels (Columbia, DEcca, Verve..), something that is not a common thing to find...