Sweets Edison Discovers the Right Note

Trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, who joined the Basie band in 1937 when he was 19, was asked, “How much of the music played by the Basie band was written out?” “We didn’t have any music,” he replied. So the obvious question was - how did he learn what to play? “When I first joined the band, everybody had played with Bennie Moten’s band. They all had notes to play on tunes like One O’clock Jump, Swinging the Blues, and Out the Window. For these head arrangements, the brass section would get together and set a riff, and we’d all come back to the rehearsal hall.” Sweets became frustrated because not having been in the band at the creation of the heads, he had trouble when his colleagues played those numbers fast, “You’re trying to find a note [for you to play], and it’s past. They’re finished before you can find a note.” What he meant was that as the music whizzed by, Edison couldn’t find a note to fit the fleeing chord—and a note that Ed Lewis, sitting next to him in the trumpet section, didn’t have. “I really was disgusted,” Edison recalled and gave Basie his notice. “Why?” asked the Count. “You sound good.” “Well, all these arrangements you play every night, I can’t find a note,” to which Basie replied, “If you find a no
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Lew Shaw started writing about music as the publicist for the famous Berkshire Music Barn in the 1960s. He joined the West Coast Rag in 1989 and has been a guiding light to this paper through the two name changes since then as we grew to become The Syncopated Times.  47 of his profiles of today's top musicians are collected in Jazz Beat: Notes on Classic Jazz. Volume two, Jazz Beat Encore: More Notes on Classic Jazz contains 43 more! Lew taps his extensive network of connections and friends throughout the traditional jazz world to bring us his Jazz Jottings column every month.

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