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Bennie Moten
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Bennie Moten · Benjamin Moten was born in 1893 in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in the same city. As a pianist and bandleader he built up the Kansas City Orchestra, the leading regional blues orchestra of the Midwest in the 1920s. He made his first recordings on 23 September 1923 for OKeh. They still sounded like the New Orleans jazz of King Oliver and others, with the influence of ragtime and the stomping beat for which the band was known. In 1926 the orchestra signed with Victor.
Music and breakthrough
In 1929 Count Basie, the bassist Walter Page and the trumpeter Oran Hot Lips Page joined. Page's walking bass gave the music a completely new feel, unlike the tuba that had previously played the rhythm, and Basie's sparing, syncopated piano runs coloured the whole. The singer Jimmy Rushing also joined. At the last session on 13 December 1932, in Camden, New Jersey, Moten did not play himself. The arrangements were largely by Eddie Durham, and the recordings included numbers that became swing classics, among them Moten Swing.
Influence
Moten died in 1935 after a failed tonsillectomy. His orchestra helped to develop the riff style that later defined many big bands of the 1930s. In those last sessions something of what later became the Basie sound could already be heard, four years before Basie recorded under his own name.
Listening
Moten Swing · Bennie Moten, 1932
In School of Rock
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- After Hours: Session 1NL Reader
Mentioned in other articles
- Kansas City jazz Genre
Bennie Moten led the most important orchestra; after his death in 1935 the pianist Count Basie started a band of his own, with the tenor saxophonist Lester Young.