Bennie Moten—”The Count” (1930)
In 1930, Kansas City, Missouri-born pianist Bennie Moten was under contract with the largest record company at the time, Victor. Between the Summer season at KC’s Fairyland Park and the Winter season touring Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, the bandleader was too busy to travel to their recording studios in Chicago or Camden, so the Victor recording engineers came to him. They set up their recording equipment in Lincoln Hall, Kansas City. It was there on five consecutive days -- October 27-31, 1930 -- that Victor recorded the orchestra. This is the final number of the second day, Thomas Gordon’s “The Count.”
Bennie Moten and his Kansas City Orchestra during this October 28, 1930 Victor recording sessions consisted of Bennie Moten directing: Orin “Hot Lips” Page-trumpet; Ed Lewis and Booker Washington-cornet; Thamon Hayes-trombone; Eddie Durham-trombone and guitar; Harlan Leonard-clarinet, alto and soprano sax; Jack Washington-clarinet, alto and baritone sax; Woody Walder-clarinet and tenor sax; Bill “Count” Basie-1st piano; Ira “Buster” Moten-accordeon and 2nd piano; Leroy Berry-banjo; Vernon Page-tuba; Willie McWashington-drums.
These KC-sessions -- which were also the first with Jimmy Rushing as Moten's vocalist -- were recorded on the top floor of the three story Lincoln Building on 18th & Vine. This building, with shops on the ground floor, was build in 1921 and catered to the local African-American community in the days of segregation, when white-owned businesses downtown refused to serve them. For them the building’s second floor hosted a professional office array, doctors and lawyers and dentists and such. The top floor housed quite the opposite of stuffy office space: Lincoln Hall, a hot spot for jazz musicians such as Bennie Moten.
Bennie Moten (1894-1935), son of a liquor house porter, first stretched his hands across a piano keyboard when he was four years old, taking lessons from his mother, who worked as a pianist. As a youngster Bennie also played trumpet and the tenor saxophone. He was one of the earliest known organizers of bands in the Midwest in the emergent years of jazz. His first oufit was formed in 1916 in Kansas City and eventually became a traveling orchestra under his own name in 1922. Since 1923 Bennie Moten and his Kansas City Orchestra made many phonograph records.
In 1927 Moten -- who was also a composer of several popular songs -- assembled a larger band which continued until his death in 1935. This band was considered the finest group to emerge from Kansas City and it produced some of the greatest jazz men of the 20th century, such as Count Basie, Hot Lips Page, Jack Washington, Eddie Durham, Vernon Page and Ben Webster. The band played a rough riding, stomping style arising out of ragtime in which Moten himself as a pianist had grown up, mixed with the kind of novelty numbers demanded by audiences of the period.
Bennie Moten became one of the country’s best known Negro orchestra leaders until he died of a heart attack at 38, following an operation for tonsillitis. Following his death in Kansas City on April 2, 1935, his brother Buster Moten led the orchestra for some months until he disbanded. Later in 1935, Moten's pianist Basie founded his own "Count Basie and the Barons of Rhythm," which soon had the best of Moten’s personnel working for him and Basie’s band would grow to be one of the finest jazz orchestras of our time.
The Encyclopedia Britannica regards Moten as “a figure of great importance in the development of the larger jazz orchestra, his achievement being verified when, after his death, the remnants of his group were taken up by his pianist, Count Basie, and fashioned into a new, far more streamlined orchestra destined to become one of the outstanding orchestras in jazz history.”
