New Addition to Yoity Tot List

Since becoming interested in jazz music, I've always been a big fan of the big band sound. Something about all those horns and winds and rhythm instruments, coming down different roads headed in different directions all arriving at the same location at the same time. I don't know if it is the virtuosity of the players, the cleverness of the arrangers, or the resulting sound that appeals to me - probably some mixture of all three. Which is why when I was given the chance to play in a big band, I jumped at it: All that is something I wanted to experience firsthand for myself.

Which is a round about introduction to how I arrived at my latest addition to the Yoity Tot list: The Complete Atomic Mr. Basie. Before we started working on our Valentine's concert tunes, we took a look at a tune called, Teddy the Toad, which is a Neil Hefti arrangement done for Count Basie's orchestra. I couldn't play it for crap, but it sounded vaguely familiar and I liked it's swing moves. Yesterday, our first post-concert practice, we got handed a bunch of new music, including another Hefti-for-Basie arrangement of a well-known swing tune called, Splanky. One of the trombone players in our big band had brought it in and mentioned it was on Basie's album "E=mc2". I seemed to remember that album being the backbone of TCAMB. Again, we beat our way around Splanky, but I couldn't do anything with it right out of the box, not knowing the tune very well on top of not being the world's most talented sight-reader. What a relief to find I had those two tunes on the CD, and listening to it at dinner, I sort of wondered to myself, why hadn't I been more intimate with these great tunes and arrangements.

When I looked at my Yoity Tot list, I was actually surprised that TCAMB was not on it. I can only describe that as some kind of oversight on my part. Oh sure, I've got some other big band stuff on there, like Duke Ellington (with what I call his "medium band"), the Grammy nominated Gordon Goodwin, and of course, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. And though I can't put it ahead of those overall, there is no doubt in my mind that TCAMB needs to be included in the Yoity Tot list, too. And now it is.

If you are a fan of big band and you don't have that CD, or at least an old LP of E=mc2, you need to go ahead and add it to your shopping cart on your favorite music site. It's one of the swingingest CD's around and killer cool!

AND, WHADDAYA KNOW? That's the 25th entry on the list, completely filling it out for the very first time. From here on out, I'll only be editing the list - taking out what I haven't listened to in a while, putting in what I am listening to - at least until I think the list could do with some growth. Which may be sooner than I think (I've bought ten new CD's in the last week. Who knows how I'll feel about the list after I've listened to them all...)