Name: The Legendary Count Basie Orchestra
Start: 2026-06-27T20:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-06-27T21:30:00-04:00
Location: Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre

Tickets (including all fees) – Boxes: $86.74 | Orchestra Floor: $71.30 | Mezzanine & Loges: $61.01
This is a ticketed, reserved-seat Headliner Show. Not accessible with a Club Pass. A note that balcony seats are not on sale for this concert, because we are making them available at no charge to the hundreds of talented youth performing in the high school jazz bands and ensembles at this year’s festival.
In the history of Jazz music, there is only one band leader who has the distinction of having his orchestra still performing sold-out concerts all over the world, with members personally chosen by him, for over 40 years after his passing. Pianist and bandleader William James “Count” Basie was, and still is, an American institution who personifies the grandeur and excellence of Jazz.
The Count Basie Orchestra, today directed by Scotty Barnhart, has won every respected jazz poll in the world at least once, won 19 Grammy Awards, performed for Kings, Queens, and other world Royalty, appeared in several movies, television shows, at every major jazz festival and major concert hall in the world. The most recent honors are a 2026 Grammy nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble for Basie Rocks and a 2024 Grammy win for Best Large Jazz Ensemble for “Basie Swings the Blues”! Other honors include their 2022 Grammy Nomination for Live At Birdland, a 2018 Grammy Nomination for All About That Basie, which features special guests Stevie Wonder, Jon Faddis, and Take 6 among others, and the 2018 Downbeat Readers Poll Award as the #1 Jazz Orchestra in the world. Their critically acclaimed release in 2015 of A Very Swingin’ Basie Christmas! is the very first holiday album in the 80-year history of the orchestra. Released on Concord Music, it went to #1 on the Jazz charts and sold out on Amazon! Special guests include vocalists Johnny Mathis, Ledisi, our own Carmen Bradford, and pianist Ellis Marsalis. A BBC TV-produced documentary on Mr. Basie and the orchestra entitled Count Basie: Through His Own Eyes premiered on PBS in the US and UK in 2019, coinciding with the orchestra’s 85th Anniversary. It features interviews by Quincy Jones, Scotty Barnhart, Dee Askew, John Williams, and several other important members and associates of Mr. Basie and the orchestra.
Some of the greatest soloists, composers, arrangers, and vocalists in jazz history, such as Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Frank Foster, Thad Jones, Sonny Payne, Freddie Green, Snooky Young, Frank Wess, and Joe Williams, became international stars once they began working with the legendary Count Basie Orchestra. This great 18-member orchestra continues the excellent history started by Basie of stomping and shouting the blues, as well as refining those musical particulars that allow for the deepest and most moving swing.
William “Count” Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1904. He began his early playing days as a silent-movie pianist and organist and eventually worked with the Theater Owners Booking Agency (TOBA) circuit. In 1927, Basie, then touring with Gonzelle White and the Big Jazz Jamboree, found himself stranded in Kansas City, Missouri. It was here that he would begin to explore his deep love of the Blues and meet his future band mates, including bassist Walter Page.
Walter Page’s Blue Devils and Benny Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra caught Basie’s ear, and soon he was playing with both and serving as second pianist and arranger for Mr. Moten. In 1935, Bennie Moten died, and it was left to Basie to take some of the musicians from that orchestra and form his own, The Count Basie Orchestra, which is still alive and well today, some 86 years later. His orchestra epitomized Kansas City Swing, and along with the bands of Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Lunceford, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman, Basie’s orchestra would define the big band era.
While the media of the period crowned Benny Goodman the “King of Swing”, the real King of Swing was undoubtedly Count Basie. As the great Basie trumpeter Sweets Edison once said, “We used to tear all of the other bands up when it came to swing”. The Basie orchestra evolved into one of the most venerable and viable enterprises in American music, with a level of continued productivity rivaling that of any musical organization in history.
With the April In Paris recording in 1955, the orchestra set standards of musical achievement that have been emulated by every jazz orchestra since. One of the things that set Mr. Basie’s orchestra apart from all others and is one of the secrets to its longevity, is the fact the Basie allowed and actually encouraged his musicians to compose and arrange especially for the orchestra and its distinctive soloists such as Snooky Young, Thad Jones, Frank Foster, and Frank Wess on flute, who recorded the very first jazz flute solo in history. The orchestra also began to become the first choice for the top jazz vocalists of the day, including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, and, of course, Basie’s “Number One Son”, the great Joe Williams.
During the 1960s and throughout the 1970s and into the 80s, the orchestra’s sound, swing feel, general articulation and style began to become more laid back and even more relaxed. As 30-year veteran trumpeter Sonny Cohn once stated, “this is a laid…back…orchestra….a…laid…back…orchestra”. With very few personnel changes, the orchestra members blended into a single sound and a single way of phrasing that is now known as the “Basie way”.
Since Basie’s passing in 1984, Thad Jones, Frank Foster, Grover Mitchell, Bill Hughes, Dennis Mackrel, and, since September 2013, Scotty Barnhart, have led the Count Basie Orchestra and maintained it as one of the elite performing organizations in Jazz.
Current members include one musician hired by Basie himself: Trombonist Clarence Banks (1984). Long-time members include Doug Miller (1989, formerly w/Lionel Hampton), guitarist Will Matthews from Kansas City (1996), and members who have 15-25 years of service: trombonist Mark Williams, trumpeters Shawn Edmonds and Endre Rice, saxophonists Doug Lawrence (formerly w/Benny Goodman) and returning on lead alto, David Glasser. Newer members include bassist Trevor Ware, lead trumpeter Frank Greene III, and trumpeter Brandon Lee, pianist Reginald Thomas, lead trombonist Isrea Butler, bass trombonist Martin McCain, alto sax and flute Stantawn Kendrick, and the youngest members, drummer Robert Boone and baritone saxophonist Josh Lee.