Eddie Jones, Bassist

[steve]

Eddie Jones, bassist in the Count Basie band for 10 years during the 50s
and 60s, died after a long illness at his home in Hartford Connecticut.
Always grinning, he was one of the nicest people you could meet.
Jones had a big, fat tone and an exquisite sense of time. The exposure
he got with Basie made him immediately in demand amongst the top-most
echelons of the music and he seemed to be seldom out of the recording
studios. He recorded with bandleaders including, amongst many others,
Ray Charles, Milt Jackson, Coleman Hawkins, Joe Newman, Thad Jones and
Ben Webster. But it was with what became known as the 'New Testament'
Basie band of the period (the original Kansas City band being the 'Old
Testament' one) that he made his most profound mark on jazz.
Jones's family home in Red Bank was two doors away from Basie's. As a
youngster he studied music education at the local Howard University
where he played jazz with future Basie-ites Frank Wess and Bill Hughes,
as well as the embryo jazz composer Benny Golson. Jones then worked as a
teacher for a year before he began graduate studies. At this time Frank
Wess joined the Basie band and, when bassist Milt Hinton decided to
leave, Wess told Basie about Jones. One day in 1953 Jones came home to
find that Wess had been waiting there for him for a couple of hours. He
took little persuading and joined Basie at once.
Jones finally left the band in 1963 because he felt he was
underpaid. The economics of a big band have always been controversial.
Duke Ellington ('But you'd be working with me, Sweetie'), Basie and
Woody Herman were all fundamentally adept at luring musicians to work
for them, touting musical satisfaction as being as much of a reward as
the scavenged money. But on this occasion Basie had unbalanced the
formula and around the time that Jones left he also lost trumpeters
Snooky Young and Joe Newman, singer Joe Williams and the two saxophone
players Frank Wess and Frank Foster. As a result he began paying better
wages.

--
Steve Voce

[P.C.Werth Ltd]

In article <RMoABDAV...@jazmusic.demon.co.uk>,
st...@jazmusic.demon.co.uk (steve) wrote:

> Eddie Jones, bassist in the Count Basie band for 10 years during the 50s
> and 60s, died after a long illness at his home in Hartford Connecticut.

I'm very sad to hear that.

I really think that Eddie Jones was the finest exponent of the walking
bass that I've ever heard. His playing on the Atomic album is so fantastic
that even though I'm nominally a sax player (or wind synthist, really)
whenever I hear that album it's always him I listen to.

Mark