Making it count
Scotty Barnhart and Carmen Bradford with the Count Basie Orchestra
Scotty Barnhart, then a seventeen-year-old aspiring trumpet player, had just seen Count Basie and his orchestra perform at Atlanta’s Fox Theater. Barnhart was waiting across the street for his parents to pick him up when the orchestra’s band manager, trumpeter Sonny Cohn, walked by and said hello. Barnhart told the over-20-year veteran of Basie’s band that he too played trumpet. Cohn took an interest and invited the young musician to his hotel for dinner. “The next thing I know I’m in the hotel having a bite to eat with him,” Barnhart said on the phone from his home in Los Angeles, “and my parents are outside driving up and down the street looking for me.” Barnhart returned the next morning and met Basie himself. “I knew, right at that point, that I would be in the orchestra someday,” said Barnhart. “I didn’t worry about when. And less than nine years later, I was.”
In 2013, 20 years after joining the Basie organization, Barnhart was appointed director of the Count Basie Orchestra, the latest in a long line of distinguished directors that includes trumpeter Thad Jones, saxophonist Frank Foster, and trombonist Grover Mitchell, each of whom assumed the post after Basie’s death in 1984. Here’s another number: When the Basie Orchestra appears on Friday, July 24, as part of the New Mexico Jazz Festival, it will be celebrating its 80th year.
Growing up in Atlanta, Barnhart had an aunt who played him Basie’s music. His parents, he said, were more into Latin percussionist Willie Bobo. Barnhart’s family was active in the city’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. were pastors (Barnhart said he was christened by Dr. King Jr.). His mother was part of the choir there — “Still is,” Barnhart declared — and he sang bass in the church’s youth choir. Barnhart said it was easy to make the connection with Basie’s music and the music he heard at church. “The orchestra is a very sophisticated form of gospel choir. The different voices, the harmonics, the rhythm, the feel are all the same. The Basie Orchestra, as with most jazz orchestras, is a direct extension of the type of gospel music the M.L. King Choir performed. So when I heard Basie, I could identify with it immediately because it sounded just like that choir, only a more sophisticated version.”
Barnhart picked up the trumpet at age nine when his mother returned home with it instead of the violin for which he’d hoped. He wasn’t disappointed, and described his intro uction to the new instrument as something of an Excalibur moment: “She opened the case and there was this glint, the sun hit it, and there I was, nine years old, seeing something all nice and shiny and clean and realizing it was mine. I never thought about the violin again. It was never hard for me to play. I had friends who played different instruments whose parents had to make them practice. Nobody had to tell me to do that. All I wanted was to get consistently better, and
I still do.” The same year he met Cohn and Basie, he met another influential musician: Wynton Marsalis. “He was appearing with his first quintet at the famed London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, and I was on tour in Europe as a part of Jazz Abroad, an all-star type of collegiate jazz orchestra made up of the top high school graduates in the country. We’ve been close friends since then. We have recorded together, toured together, and we play together whenever we are in the same city.” Marsalis is heard on Barnhart’s 2009 recording, Say It Plain, as is the trumpeter’s father, Ellis Marsalis.
When he turned twenty, Barnhart’s trumpet studies were cut short by dental troubles that were discovered after his braces were removed. While enduring a dozen surgeries to stabilize his teeth, he took up piano. “Having the time to learn piano was really a blessing in disguise,” he explained. “I learned how to compose, arrange, everything right there at the piano. To me, it’s the most important instrument.” Barnhart said a valuable insight into the piano came from pianist Marcus Roberts. Barnhart spent time in Roberts’ touring group and is heard on the pianist’s 1989 recording, Deep in the Shed. “He said if you want to learn how to play piano and get your ear right, you have to learn [Thelonious] Monk. You have to learn how to be crazy like that. Learning Monk changed everything for me.”
Barnhart, something of a scholar, is an assistant professor of jazz studies at Florida State University and is the author of The World of Jazz Trumpet – A Comprehensive History and Practical Philosophy, published in 2005. Of all the arrangers that have penned music for the Basie Orchestra, Barnhart said his favorite is Frank Foster. “Thad Jones was extremely cerebral, but Frank was cerebral yet down-home and bluesy. He had the widest range, could do those pretty ballads, do blues without frills or decoration. But he could swing you to the ground. Overall, Frank Foster could do it all.”