Joe Williams

The Count Basie Orchestra is a 16 to 18 piece big band, one of the most prominent jazz performing groups of the swing era, founded by the musician... known as Count Basie. The band survived the late 1940s decline in big band popularity. In the 1950s and 1960s, it produced notable collaborations with singers such as Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. The group has continued to perform and record since Basie's death in 1984. Count Basie arrived in Kansas City, Missouri in 1927, playing on the Theater Owners Bookers Association circuit. After playing with the Blue Devils, in 1929 he joined rival band leader Bennie Moten's band. Upon Moten's death in 1935, Basie left the group to start his own band, taking many of his colleagues from the Moten band with him. This nine-piece group consisted of Joe Keyes and Oran 'Hot Lips' Page on trumpet, Buster Smith and Jack Washington on alto saxophone, Lester Young on tenor saxophone, Dan Minor on trombone, and a rhythm section made up of Jo Jones on drums, Walter Page on bass and Basie on piano.
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RCA Records is one of the flagship labels of Sony Music Entertainment. The RCA initials stand for Radio Corporation of America , which was the parent corporation from 1929 to 1985 and a partner from 1985 to 1986. RCA's Canadian unit is Sony's oldest label in Canada, as it was only one of two... Canadian record companies to survive the Great Depression. RCA is the name of three different co-owned record labels. RCA Records is the Pop, Rock, Hip-Hop, R&B and Country music label. RCA Victor is the label for blues music, world music, jazz, musicals and other musical genres which do not fit the pop music mold. RCA Red Seal is the renowned classical music label with a reissue sub-label called RCA Gold Seal. Defunct labels include budget labels RCA Camden, RCA Victrola, RCA International, and RCA Italiana. Besides manufacturing records for themselves, RCA Victor also operated RCA Custom which was the leading record manufacturer for the independent labels.
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Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in black communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a... mix of African and European music traditions. Its black African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note. From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music. As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, soul jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, smooth jazz, jazz-funk, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, Indo jazz, M-Base, nu jazz, urban jazz and other ways of playing the music. In a 1988 interview, trombonist J.J. Johnson said, "Jazz is restless.
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